Saying Yes To The Dress!

“If the wind is strong enough to blow out the candles, we could have other problems with it, too.”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Tablecloths flying off tables. Women’s dresses blowing up over their heads. Napkins catching fire. Flower arrangements being smashed. There’s really a whole lot of things people should think about before planning their wedding on a remote island in the tropics.”

Becky glared at him. “You know what? I barely know you and I hate you already.”

He nodded. “I have that effect on a lot of people.”

He watched the plane taxi toward them and grind to a halt in front of them.

“I’m sure you do,” she said snippily.

“Does this mean our date under the palm frond is off?”

“It was never on!”

“You should think about it—the building collapsed, the tablecloths on fire, women’s dresses blowing over their heads as they run shrieking...”

“Please stop.”

But he couldn’t. He could tell he very nearly had her where he wanted her. Why did he feel so driven to make little Miss Becky English angry? But also to make her laugh?

“And you and me under a palm frond, licking wedding cake off each other’s fingers.”

At first she looked appalled. But then a smile tickled her lips. And then she giggled. And then she was laughing. In a split second, every single thing about her seemed transformed. She went from plain to pretty.

Very pretty.

This was exactly what he had wanted: to glimpse what the cool Miss English would look like if she let go of control.

It was more dangerous than Drew had anticipated. It made him want to take it a step further, to make her laugh harder or to take those little lips underneath his and...

He reminded himself she was not the type of girl he usually invited out to play. Despite the fact she was being relied on to put on a very sophisticated event, there didn’t seem to be any sophistication about her.

He had already figured out there was a heartbreak in her past. That was the only reason a girl as apple pie as her claimed to be jaundiced about romance. He could tell it wasn’t just dealing with people’s wedding insanity that had made her want to be cynical, even as it was all too evident she was not. He had seen the truth in the dreamy look when she had started talking about how she wanted it all to go.

He could tell by looking at her exactly what she needed, and it wasn’t a job putting together other people’s fantasies.

It was a husband who adored her. And three children. And a little house where she could sew curtains for the windows and tuck bright annuals into the flower beds every year.

It was whatever the perfect life in Moose Run, Michigan, looked like.

Drew knew he could never give her those things. Never. He’d experienced too much loss and too much responsibility in his life.

Still, there was one thing a guy as jaundiced as him did not want or need. To be stuck on a deserted island with a female whose laughter could turn her from a plain old garden-variety girl next door into a goddess in the blink of an eye.

He turned from her quickly and watched as the door of the plane opened. The crew got off, opened the cargo hold and began unloading stuff beside the runway.

He frowned. No Joe.

He took his phone out of his pocket and stabbed in a text message. He pushed Send, but the island did not have great service in all places. The message to his brother did not go through.

Becky was searching his face, which he carefully schooled not to show his disappointment.

“I guess we’ll have to find that spot ourselves. Joe will probably come on the afternoon flight. Let’s see what we can find this way.”

Instead of following the lawn to where it dropped down to the beach, he followed it north to a line of palm trees. A nice wide trail dipped into them, and he took it.

“It’s like jungle in here,” she said.

“Think of the possibilities. Joe could swing down from a vine. In a loincloth. Allie could be waiting for him in a tree house, right here.”

“No, no and especially no,” she said.

He glanced behind him. She had stopped to look at a bright red hibiscus. She plucked it off and tucked it behind her ear.

“In the tropics,” he told her, “when you wear a flower behind your ear like that, it means you are available. You wouldn’t want the cook getting the wrong idea.”

She glared at him, plucked the flower out and put it behind her other ear.

“Now it means you’re married.”

“There’s no winning, is there?” she asked lightly.

No, there wasn’t. The flower looked very exotic in her hair. It made him very aware, again, of the enchantment of tropical islands. He turned quickly from her and made his way down the path.

After about five minutes in the deep shade of the jungle, they came out to another beach. It was exposed to the wind, which played in the petals of the flower above her ear, lifted her bangs from her face and pressed her shirt to her.

“Oh,” she called, “it’s beautiful.”

She had to shout because unlike the beach the castle overlooked, this one was not in a protected cove.

It was a beautiful beach. A surfer would probably love it, but it would have to be a good surfer. There were rocky outcrops stretching into the water that looked like they would be painful to hit and hard to avoid.

“It’s too loud,” he said over the crashing of the waves. “They’d be shouting their vows.”

He turned and went back into the shaded jungle. For some reason, he thought she would just follow him, and it took him a few minutes to realize he was alone.

He turned and looked. The delectable Miss Becky English was nowhere to be seen. He went back along the path, annoyed. Hadn’t he made it perfectly clear they had time constraints?

When he got back out to the beach, his heart went into his throat. She had climbed up onto one of the rocky outcrops. She was standing there, bright as the sun in that yellow shirt, as a wave smashed on the rock just beneath her. Her hands were held out and her face lifted to the spray of white foam it created. With the flower in her hair, she looked more like a goddess than ever, performing some ritual to the sea.

Did she know nothing of the ocean? Of course she didn’t. They had already established that. That, coming from Moose Run, there were things she could not know about.

“Get down from there,” he shouted. “Becky, get down right now.”

He could see the second wave building, bigger than the first that had hit the rock. The waves would come in sets. And the last wave in the set would be the biggest.

The wind swallowed his voice, though she turned and looked at him. She smiled and waved. He could see the surf rising behind her alarmingly. The second wave hit the rock. She turned away from him, and hugged herself in delight as the spray fell like thick mist all around her.

“Get away from there,” he shouted. She turned and gave him a puzzled look. He started to run.

Becky had her back to the third wave when it hit. It hit the backs of her legs. Drew saw her mouth form a surprised O, and then her arms were flailing as she tried to regain her balance. The wave began pulling back, with at least as much force as it had come in with. It yanked her off the rock as if she were a rag doll.

CHAPTER FIVE

BECKY FELT THE shocked helplessness as her feet were jerked out from under her and she was swept off the rock. The water closed over her head and filled her mouth and nose. She popped back up like a cork, but her swimming skills were rudimentary, and she was not sure they would have helped her against the fury of the sea. She was being pulled out into what seemed to be an endless abyss. She tried frantically to swim back in toward shore. In seconds she was as exhausted as she had ever been.

I’m going to drown, she thought, stunned, choking on water and fear. How had this happened? One moment life had seemed so pleasant and beautiful and then...it was over.

Her life was going to be over. She waited, helplessly, for it to flash before her eyes. Instead, she found herself thinking that Drew had been right. It hadn’t been a heartbreak. It had been a romantic disappointment. Ridiculous to think that right now, but on the other hand, right now seemed as good a time as any to be acutely and sadly aware of things she had missed.

“Hey!” His voice carried over the crashing of the sea. “Hang on.”

Becky caught a glimpse of the rock she had fallen off. Drew was up there. And then she went under the water again.

When she surfaced, Drew was in the water, slashing through the roll of the waves toward her. “Don’t panic,” he called over the roar of the water pounding the rock outcropping.

She wanted to tell him it was too late for that. She was already panicked.

“Tread,” he yelled. “Don’t try to swim. Not yet. Look at my face. Nowhere else. Look at me.”

Her eyes fastened on his face. There was strength and calm in his features, as if he did this every day. He was close to her now.

“I’m going to come to you,” he shouted, “but you have to be calm first. If you panic, you will kill us both.”

It seemed his words, and the utter strength and determination in his face, poured a honey of calm over her, despite the fact she was still bobbing like a cork in a ravaged sea. He seemed to see or sense the moment she stopped panicking, and he moved in close.

She nearly sobbed with relief when Drew reached out and touched her, then folded his arms around her and pulled her in tight to him. He was strong in the water—she suspected, abstractly, he was strong everywhere in his life—and she rested into his embrace, surrendering to his warmth. She could feel the power of him in his arms and where she was pressed into the wet slickness of his chest.

“Just let it carry you,” he said. “Don’t fight it anymore”

It seemed as if he could be talking about way more than water. It could be a message about life.

It seemed the water carried them out forever, but eventually it dumped them in a calmer place, just beyond where the waves began to crest. Becky could feel the water lose its grip on her, even as he refused to.

She never took her eyes off his face. Her mind seemed to grow calmer and calmer, even amused. If this was the last thing she would see, it told her, that wasn’t so bad.

“Okay,” he said, “can you swim?”

“Dog paddle.” The water was not cold, but her voice was shaking.

“That will do. Swim that way. Do your best. I’ve got you if you get tired.” He released her.

That way was not directly to the shore. He was asking her to swim parallel to the shore instead of in. But she tried to do as he asked. She was soon floundering, so tired she could not lift her arms.

“Roll over on your back,” he said, and she did so willingly. His hand cupped her chin and she was being pulled through the water. He was an enormously strong swimmer.

“Okay, this is a good spot.” He released her again and she came upright and treaded water. “Go toward shore. I’ve got you, I’m right with you.”

She was scared to go back into the waves. It was too much. She was exhausted. But she glanced at his face once more and found her own courage there.

“Get on your tummy, flat as a board, watch for the next wave and ride it in. Watch for those rocks on the side.”

She did as she was told. She knew she had no choice. She had to trust him completely. She felt the wave lift her up and drive her toward the shore at a stunning speed. And then it spit her out. She was lying in shallow water, but she could already feel the wave pulling at her, trying to drag her back in. She used what little strength she had left to scramble to her knees and crawl through the sugar pebbles of the sand.

Drew came and scooped her out of the water, lifted her to his chest and struggled out of the surf.

On the beach, above the foaming line of the ocean, he set her down on her back in the sun-warmed sand. For a moment she looked at the clear and endless blue of the sky. It was the very same sky it had been twenty minutes ago, but everything felt changed, some awareness sharp as glass within her. She rolled over onto her stomach and rested her head on her forearms. He flung himself onto the sand beside her, breathing hard.

“Did you just save my life?” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse. Her throat hurt from swallowing salt water. She felt drowsy and extraordinarily peaceful.

“You’ll want to make sure this beach is posted before guests start arriving,” he finally said, when he spoke.

“You didn’t answer the question,” she said, taking a peek at him over her folded arm. “Is that a habit with you?”

Drew didn’t answer. She looked at him, feeling as if she was drinking him in, as if she could never get enough of looking at him. It was probably natural to feel that way after someone had just saved your life, and she did not try to make herself stop.

She was in a state of altered awareness. She could see the water beading on his eyelashes, and the sun streaming through his wet hair. She could see through his soaked shirt where it was plastered to his body.

“Did you just save my life?” she asked again.

“I think you Michigan girls should stay away from the ocean.”

“Do you ever just answer a question, Drew Jordan? Did you save my life?”

He was silent again.

“You did,” she finally answered for him.

She could not believe the gratitude she felt. To be alive. It was as if the life force was zinging inside her, making her every cell quiver.

“You risked yourself for me. I’m nearly a complete stranger.”

“No, you’re not. Winning the headache competition, by the way.”

“By a country mile?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“That was incredibly heroic.” She was not going let him brush it off, though he was determined to.

“Don’t make it something it wasn’t. I’m nobody’s hero.”

Just like he had insisted earlier he was nobody’s prince.

“Well,” she insisted, “you’re mine.”

He snorted, that sexy, cynical sound he made that was all his own and she found, right now, lying here in the sand, alive, so aware of herself and him, that she liked that sound very much, despite herself.

“I’ve been around the ocean my whole life,” he told her grimly. “I grew up surfing some pretty rough water. I knew what I was doing. Unlike you. That was incredibly stupid.”

In her altered state, she was aware that he thought he could break the bond that had been cementing itself into place between them since the moment he had entered the water to rescue her.

“Life can change in a blink,” he said sternly. “It can be over in a blink.”

He was lecturing her. She suddenly needed him to know she could not let him brush it off like that. She needed him to know that the life force was flowing through her. She had an incredible sense of being alive.

“You were right,” she said, softly.

There was that snort again. “Of course I’m right. You don’t go climbing up on rocks when the surf is that high.”

“Not about that. I mean, okay, about that, too, but I wasn’t talking about that.”

“What were you talking about?”

“It wasn’t a heartbreak,” Becky said. “It was a romantic disappointment.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what I thought of when I went into the water. I thought my whole life would flash before my eyes, but instead I thought of Jerry.”

“Look, you’re obviously in shock and we need to—”

“He was my high school sweetheart. We’d been together since I was seventeen. I’d always assumed we were going to get married. Everybody in the whole town thought we would get married. They called us Salt and Pepper.”

“You know what? This will keep. I have to—”

“It won’t keep. It’s important. I have to say it before I forget it. Before this moment passes.”

“Oh, sheesh,” he said, his tone indicating he wanted nothing more than for this moment to pass.

“I wanted that. I wanted to be Salt and Pepper, forever. My parents had split up the year before. It was awful. My dad owned a hardware store. One of his clerks. And him.”

“Look, Becky, you are obviously rattled. You don’t have to tell me this.”

She could no more have stopped herself from telling him than she could have stopped those waves from pounding on the shore.

“They had a baby together. Suddenly, they were the family we had always been. That we were supposed to be. It was horrible, seeing them all over town, looking at each other. Pushing a baby carriage. I wanted it back. I wanted that feeling of being part of something back. Of belonging.”

“Aw, Becky,” he said softly. “That sucks. Really it does, but—”

But she had to tell all of it, was compelled to. “Jerry went away to school. My mom didn’t have the money for college, and it seemed my dad had new priorities.

“I could see what the community needed, so I started my event company.”

“Happily-Ever-After,” he said. “Even though you had plenty of evidence of the exact opposite.”

“It was way more successful than I had thought it could be. It was way more successful than Jerry thought it could be, too. The more successful I became, the less he liked me.”

“Okay. Well. Some guys are like that.”

“He broke up with me.”

“Yeah, sorry, but now is not the time—”

“This is the reason it’s important for me to say it right now. I understand something I didn’t understand before. I thought my heart was broken. It is a terrible thing to suffer the humiliation of being ditched in a small town. It was a double humiliation for me. First my dad, and then this. But out there in the water, I felt glad. I felt if I had married him, I would have missed something. Something essential.”

“Okay, um—”

“A grand passion.”

He said a word under his breath that they disapproved of in Moose Run, Michigan.

“Salt and pepper?” She did a pretty good imitation of his snort. “Why settle for boring old salt and pepper when the world is full of so many glorious flavors?”

“Look, I think you’ve had a pretty bad shake-up. I don’t have a clue what you are talking about, so—”

She knew she was making Drew Jordan wildly uncomfortable, but she didn’t care. She planned to make him more uncomfortable yet. She leaned toward him. He stopped talking and watched her warily.

She needed to know if the life force was as intense in him right now as it was in her. She needed to take advantage of this second chance to be alive, to really live.

She touched Drew’s back through the wetness of his shirt, and felt the sinewy strength there. The strength that had saved her.

She leaned closer yet. She touched her forehead to his, as if she could make him feel what was going on inside her, since words could not express it. He had a chance to move away from her. He did not. He was as caught in what was unfolding as she had been in the wave.

And then, she touched her lips to his, delicately, needing the connection to intensify.

His lips tasted of salt and strength and something more powerful and more timeless than the ocean. That desire that people had within them, not just to live, but to go on.

For a moment, Drew was clearly stunned to find her lips on his. But then, he seemed to get whatever she was trying to tell him, in this primal language that seemed the only thing that could express the celebration of all that lived within her.

His lips answered hers. His tongue chased the ridges of her teeth, and then probed, gently, ever so gently...

It was Becky’s turn to be stunned. It was everything she had hoped for. It was everything she had missed.

No, it was more than what she had hoped for, and more than what she could have ever imagined. A kiss was not simply a brushing of lips. No! It was a journey, it was a ride on pure energy, it was a connection, it was a discovery, it was an intertwining of the deepest parts of two people, of their souls.

Drew stopped kissing her with such abruptness that she felt forlorn, like a blanket had been jerked from her on a freezing night. He said Moose Run’s most disapproved-of word again.

She liked the way he said that word, all naughty and nasty.

He found his feet and leaped up, staring down at her. He raked a hand through his hair, and water droplets scattered off his crumpled hair, sparkling like diamonds in the tropical heat. His shirt, crusted in golden sand, was clinging to his chest.

“Geez,” he said. “What was that about?”

“I don’t know,” she said honestly. But I liked it.

“A girl like you does not kiss a guy like me!”

She could ask what he meant by a girl like her, but she already knew that he thought she was small town and naive and hopelessly out of her depth, and not just in the ocean, either. What she wanted to know was what the last half of that sentence meant.

“What do you mean a guy like you?” she asked. Her voice was husky from the salt and from something else. Desire. Desire was burning like a white-hot coal in her belly. It was brand-new, it was embarrassing and it was wonderful.

“Look, Becky, I’m the kind of guy your mother used to warn you about.”

Woo-hoo, she thought, but she didn’t dare say it. Instead, she said, “The kind who would jump in the water without a thought for his own safety to save someone else?”

“Not that kind!”

She could point out to him that he obviously was that kind, and that the facts spoke for themselves, but she probed the deeper part of what was going on.

“What kind of guy then?” she asked, gently curious.

“Self-centered. Commitment-phobic. Good-time Charlie. Confirmed bachelor. They write whole articles about guys like me in your bridal magazines. And not about how to catch me, either. How to give a guy like me a wide berth.”

“Just in case you didn’t listen to your mother’s warnings,” she clarified.

He glanced at her. She bit her lip and his gaze rested there, hot with memory, until he seemed to make himself look away.

“I wouldn’t have pictured you as any kind of expert about the content of bridal magazines,” she said.

“That is not the point!”

“It was just a kiss,” she pointed out mildly, “not a posting of the banns.”

“You’re in shock,” he said.

If she was, she hoped she could experience it again, and soon!