Читать книгу First Love, Second Chance - Cara Colter - Страница 11

SHE wasn’t. Not nearly. But she was getting better.

It had been a long, uphill road recovering from being Mrs Damien McKinley, but she’d found the strength to try. And it appeared that strength begat more strength, because she’d found extra to come here today. To face Marc. Even though ninety per cent of her whispered not to bother. Not to risk it. The ten per cent of her that disagreed was noisy and shovey and refused to be ignored. It remembered Marc. It trusted him.

Looked as if it had just learned a powerful lesson.

Marc Duncannon was not the man she remembered. He’d grown up in so many ways and while his physical changes were an unarguable enhancement, she couldn’t say the same for his personality. Then again, after the decade she’d endured, she was no prize either. Maybe losing his father so young had damaged him irreparably. So close to losing his best friend. And apparently then his mother.

She frowned. ‘So, you didn’t tell me what happened with your mum. You two were so close.’ Each was all the other had left. Even if Beth had really struggled to like Janice by the end.

Marc’s whole body straightened and turned to stone, halting his digging. His mouth set. His eyes darkened dangerously. ‘Did you imagine I’d still be living at home with my mother at this age?’

Scorn like that would have hurt a lot more once, before she calloused up at Damien’s hands. Still, the fact that it still managed to slice down into her gut said a lot about how she still felt about Marc. She took a controlling breath. ‘Obviously I expected you to have moved out of home but I never expected you to have moved out of her life.’

The blizzard in his eyes reached out and lashed at her. ‘You still like to research before you travel, obviously.’

The one trip they’d taken together, when Marc had got his driving licence at the start of their final year in school, had been an exercise in military precision, thanks to Beth’s aptitude for planning. Anything to take her mind off the fact that she and Marc were going to be camping. Out in the sticks. Alone. Right about then, her awareness of him as anything other than her best mate had crashed headlong into adolescent awareness of him as a mate. As in biological. That had been an awkward, confusing feeling that had never quite diminished.

‘I had to start somewhere to find you. Your neighbour remembered me.’ The woman had been very kind and given Beth the information she needed to track Marc down. Albeit with a slight lift to one eyebrow. She tried again. ‘I thought. because Janice was all you had …’

Marc resumed his powerful digging, the chop and slide of his body adding emphasis to his curt words. ‘I hope you’re not trying to convince me that you had warm feelings for my mother. I remember how fast you used to like to get in and out of my house.’

Beth flushed. She hadn’t realised how poorly she’d been covering her dislike of Marc’s mum back then. It hadn’t always been that way. It was just that as Marc grew older, Mrs Duncannon seemed to grow more hostile. Almost jealous. Until that last day.

Marc stood in his trench and eyed her. ‘After school I spent some time up north on the trawlers. When I got back, I thought it was time to get my own space,’ he said. ‘She liked the city, I wanted the country. It’s as simple as that.’

Right. And this whale was made of Jell-O. But if he didn’t want to talk about it.

On a non-committal uh-huh, she let her focus drop back to where her hands continued to slosh the whale with a T-shirt that was now mostly shredded fabric. Ten years was a long time. One-third of their lives. What else could have injured him in that time? A woman? He didn’t have a ring—not even a tan mark; she’d checked that out while he was choking the life out of his steering wheel earlier. But there was no doubt he was harbouring some wounds.

The thought brought her a physical pain that somehow rose above the ache in her lower back. That anyone would have hurt him like that. Bad enough what she’d done.

She dragged a deep breath in and concentrated on what her hands were doing. But silence wasn’t an option either. ‘Ask me a question.’

‘About what?’

‘Anything other than Damien or that day at school.’ Or what I’ve been doing for the past ten years.

He waved his whale-washer in the air and then complied, plucking a question from nowhere. ‘Favourite colour?’

‘Still green. Moss-green, nothing too limey. My whole studio is painted that colour.’

‘You have a studio?’

‘Sounds more glamorous than it is. It’s a partially restored old warehouse belonging to my father. I suspect I’m not supposed to be living in it. Council rules.’

‘What do you do there?’

‘I paint. Oils. My work is all around me.’ For better or worse. The images from her abyss period were dark and dismal. But powerful. Lately, new brighter themes had started emerging. ‘When I changed to B-stream it gave me an art double and I discovered I loved it. And I’m good at it.’

Two confused lines folded across his brow. ‘That’s good. I’d like to—’

… see them? The way he cut himself off made her wonder. They fell to silence. ‘Ask me about my first car,’ she eventually said.

Cars. The great equaliser. He smiled slightly and shook his head. ‘What was your first car, Beth?’

‘Toyota. Right after school. God, I loved that beat-up piece of junk. First thing I bought and paid for myself.’ Until she’d stopped driving it because of the drinking.

‘First kiss?’

She shook her head. ‘Nope. Not talking about that day.’

Marc’s eyes flared. ‘Hold on, sidebar for just one second. That was your first kiss?’

She stared at him. ‘You were my best friend. You don’t think I would have told you the second someone kissed me?’

His eyebrows rose in apparent disbelief. ‘No one ever tried?’

Beth shrugged; the hurts that had meant so much when she was younger were insignificant in the light of everything that had happened since. ‘Guess I wasn’t all that sought-after in school.’

He opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it and then changed tack. ‘Until McKinley.’

‘Right. But that topic’s off-limits too.’ Then something occurred to her. ‘Wait—it wasn’t your first kiss?’ Marc dropped thick lashes down between them. Her mouth fell open. ‘Seriously? Who was it?’

He had to know she was going to keep nagging until he told her.

‘Tasmin Major.’

‘Olympic Tasmin?’ Her voice rose an octave.

‘She was only state level then.’

But a twice Olympic freestyle diver since then. Tasmin was one of the classmates Beth thought of when she was counting her own many failings. Pretty. Gentle. Athletic. Olympic. And now she’d been Marc’s first kiss, too. Maybe more? That thought bit deep down inside. Right down deep where she always considered their kiss behind the library to be special. Even if it had led to the end of their friendship.

Her throat tightened up. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ More importantly, how could she have not noticed? She’d been so attuned to Marc’s every breath.

He sidestepped her outrage. ‘Why would I tell you? It was just a kiss.’ Beth gave him her most penetrating stare, straight out of childhood. ‘Okay, a bunch of kisses, but it’s not like we were dating or anything.’

‘I hope not, because that would mean I really was oblivious to everything going on around me.’ Curiosity got the better of her. ‘Why were you kissing Tasmin if you weren’t dating?’

Marc dragged his eyes off to the horizon. Back to the whale. Anywhere but on hers.

‘Marc?’

He hissed and tossed his hands up. ‘She volunteered.’

Beth blinked. Several times. ‘Tasmin Major volunteered to kiss you? Did I miss some kind of recruitment process?’

Cautious eyes met hers briefly. ‘Actually, we volunteered with each other.’

Beth’s stomach compressed into a hard ball. An insane jealousy surged through her as she realised what that meant. They wouldn’t have been the first kids in school to do it. ‘You went to her for kissing practice? Why?’

The look he gave her took her back a decade, too.

‘Okay, other than practice, obviously. I can’t believe you went to Tasmin. I mean she’s nice and all, but … What was wrong with me?’ And why on earth was this hurting so much?

That brought his head up instantly. Hazel eyes blazed sincerity. ‘Nothing was wrong with you, Beth. But we were friends.’

She thought of all the girls at school who turned their snooty noses up at Marc because of the way he lived and dressed. As if they would ever find a finer person. Her estimation of Tasmin rose a notch because she wasn’t one of them, even if it also meant that she’d spent half their childhood with Marc’s tongue down her Olympic throat.

Then something else hit her. ‘Who were you practising for?’

He tipped his face back down to the whale, sloshed harder. Resolutely ignored the question. Beth waited. Silently. Her heart pounded. How far had she truly come if she was this frightened of finding out?

‘It’s old news, Beth. Hardly important now.’

Her frown threatened to leave permanent grooves between her eyes, encrusted in the salt. ‘I thought I knew everything about you back then, Marc. It’s thrown me.’

He waved his shredded towel. ‘I just wanted to get the whole first kiss thing out of the way, Beth. Can we just leave it at that?’

She looked at the tightness of his lips, the shadow in his gaze. She softened her tone. ‘That library kiss was pretty accomplished. You guys must have practised a lot.’

The corner of his mouth lifted. ‘Good times.’ Then he looked back up at Beth, his eyes guarded. ‘Anyway, I thought that day was off-limits. Moving on …’

Right. Moving forward. The past was in the past. ‘Next question.’

It took Marc nearly two hours to hand-dig a deep enough trench a metre on-shore of the whale and reinforce it with driftwood to hold back the collapsing sand. In that time, the blazing afternoon sun dipped its toes into the ocean on the horizon and the most magnificent orange light coated everything around them. Her artist’s eye memorised the colour for future use. Beth sighed as much as the whale did as the scorching heat suddenly eased.

In the dying light of dusk, Marc laid the strap out and then asked Beth to take one eyeleted end. She mimicked his bent stance, her prune-skin hands pressed down to the shallow ocean floor and her back screaming its protest. Then they started sawing the strap under the sand, towards the whale.

Push. pull. Push. pull. A slow, agonising rhythm.

Beth felt the moment they got close to her because, exactly as she’d suspected, the sand compressed into a rock-hard mass under the whale’s weight. But Marc’s idea worked, though slowly. With every wave that ran in, the suck of the water rushing back out between every one of a million grains of sand loosened it just a tiny bit and they were able to saw the strap, inch by agonising inch, beneath the giant mammal. The tide had crept in so much and they bent over so far that Beth’s lowered face was practically touching the rising water. Her muscles trembled with exhaustion, screamed with frustration, but she wasn’t about to complain to Marc, even though every part of her felt as if she’d been hit by a truck.

Her back. Her skin. Her feet. Her arms. Even her head thumped worse than any hangover she’d ever earned.

Marc grunted as loud as she did. The whale did nothing but blow the occasional protest out of its parched blowhole. Finally, just when tears of utter exhaustion pricked, he called a halt.

Standing upright nearly crippled Beth after the abuses of the day and she cried out as her muscles went into full cramp, stumbling back onto her knees in the rising water, wetting the bottom half of Marc’s fleecy sweatshirt. It galled her to go down in front of him, but how much did he expect she could take? She caught herself before she sank completely down onto her bottom but she was incapable of getting back up. She froze in an odd kind of rigor where she was. Her hands shook as if they were palsied. Her head drooped.

Marc was with her in seconds, his strong arms sliding around her middle to keep her up out of the water. ‘Beth, grab on to me …’

Tears came then. Angry. Embarrassed. Relieved. It had been so long since she’d last felt any part of Marc against her and it felt so right now. Safe and strong. Welcome and long-missed. Where she was bone and long hollow muscles, he was solid and smooth and rooted to the earth. Even in the water.

And he was her friend. At least he had been. Once.

He might have been stronger but he was just as tired as she was, it seemed. He needed her cooperation to get her back on her feet. Hours ago, he could have lifted her single-handed. ‘Come on, Beth, pull yourself up,’ he said, low against her ear.

If she turned her head just a bit she could breathe in his intoxicating scent. ‘I’m sorry …’ Her vision blurred.

His strong fingers tucked around her waist, burned there.

‘Don’t be. You did well. We got the strap around her.’ His voice was tight as he steadied her back onto her feet but she let herself lean into him until the last possible second. He smelled of salt and sweat; an erotic, earthy kind of scent that elicited all kinds of tingling in her. Nothing like the over-applied, cheap colognes Damien liked to mask himself with.

She turned her face more closely into Marc and breathed in deep.

He pulled her out of the water, supported her long enough that they got up on the beach to where the supplies were. She collapsed down onto the sand, knowing she might never get back up but knowing she couldn’t keep standing.

Even for him.

‘Take a break, Beth. We’ve been at this for seven hours. No wonder you’re exhausted.’

He didn’t join her on the sand. Instead, he snagged up the supply bag and fished around in it until he retrieved two muesli bars, a chocolate bar, a banana and an unfamiliar packet of powdered mix. He offered her a choice. As hungry and tired as she was, the thought of putting food in her stomach did not appeal. There was only one thing in that supply kit that had her name on it. And she wasn’t letting herself have that, either. She pushed his hand away.

‘You have to pick one, Beth.’

She shook her head.

‘Fine.’ He tossed the chocolate bar at her. ‘This will give you immediate energy and potassium for the cramping, but in one hour I want you to have this.’ He waved the pouch of powder.

‘What is it?’

‘Sports mix. Endurance athletes use it. Just mix it with water. You need the fats and carbs if you’re going to last.’

Was that a comment about her weight? ‘I thought men liked women skinny?’

He looked at her, appalled.

Mortification soaked through her. Oh, God, Beth. Don’t speak. Clearly, she was too tired to think straight. She shook her head again, incapable of an apology that wouldn’t make things worse. Her mind’s eye slipped to what was left in the supply bag. How had she dealt with this sort of moment before? She couldn’t remember. Excruciating comments didn’t feel so bad when you were blind drunk and so was everyone around you. You sure had less to regret that way.

Had she forgotten even how to feel shame?

‘The powder’s slow release energy, Beth. It’ll get you through the next few hours.’

If she could just get through the next few minutes she’d be happy.

Marc crammed a muesli bar into his mouth on a healthy bite. Where Beth nibbled, he practically inhaled. Then he took one of the endurance pouches and filled it with water, shook and consumed it in a drawn-out swallow. Beth was too tired to drag her eyes off the long length of his tanned throat. How could even a throat be manly? But here she was, ogling it for the second time today.

She forced her eyes down to the half-melted bar in her hands. Chocolate was one of those foods she tried to avoid. Something she liked a little bit too much. Something that challenged her hard won willpower. But Marc was ordering her to eat it, and she was feeling so weak, so. what to do …?

She took a small bite.

She forced herself to go slow, not to wolf it down, although her blood and her brain screamed at her to. It was part of her process. If she gave in on something small, then what chance did she have over something big?

This was where the downward slide began. Her eyes went to the pack of supplies.

‘Okay, come on.’ Marc stretched out his hand to her, mumbling around the last crumbs of his muesli bar. ‘If you don’t get up again, you’ll seize up and be here all night.’

The thought of rising was horrible. She groaned and stared at his extended hand. ‘I can’t …’

‘She needs us, Beth.’ His gentle words pushed every guilt button she had. Beth looked over to the dark mass half-submerged in the even darker waters of dusk. It may be cooler now that the sun had set—significantly cooler—but the whale wasn’t in a position to wet her own skin. Or drag herself back out to sea.

And maybe taking a break was actually the start of the slide—insidiously disguised?

Beth forced herself over onto her side and then pushed painfully to her knees. It was the least elegant thing she could remember doing. Marc took her hand in his callused, strong one and pulled her the rest of the way to her feet. She stumbled against his neoprene hardness before steadying herself and pointlessly shaking the worst of the beach sand off her soggy sweatshirt.

His hands were high on her bare thighs, brushing more sand off before either of them realised what he was doing.

A rush of heat raged up her skin where his fingers touched and she leapt back with a speed she couldn’t have found if he’d begged her. Marc stiffened and a pink flush showed itself above the collar of his wetsuit. God, that was one hundred per cent habit from the good old days. The days before gender was an issue. Now, having his hot hands on her icy skin was absolutely an issue. For both of them.

It had to be.

‘Okay,’ he said, clearing his throat and straightening to his full height. ‘Back in the water.’

Beth willed her legs to follow him back down to the surf. How many hours had passed since she’d stumbled down the dunes this morning? As bad as she felt—and she couldn’t remember a time she’d felt worse, even in the depths of her withdrawal—they’d achieved a lot. The whale was still alive, its skin was in reasonable shape, and they had implemented the first part of Marc’s plan to refloat her.

Sure, tensions were high between them and, yes, maybe she’d rather be curled up by an open fire right now watching reruns of Pride and Prejudice, but she was hanging in there. She felt vaguely hydrated now that the scorching sun had eased off and the chocolate was doing its job and feeding energy directly into her cells. Their conditions could be much, much worse. That thought gave Beth’s spine the tiniest of reinforcement.

And then the sun set.