Читать книгу Right Place, Wrong Time - Judith Arnold, Judith Arnold - Страница 9

WHEN GINA AND ALICIA returned to the condo, the country clubbers were gone. “Did they leave?” Alicia asked with what sounded like a combination of hope and dread.

Gina found several suitcases in the master bedroom, implying that the younger half of their group intended to stay at the condo with her and Alicia, as they’d said they would. They were probably gone only temporarily, moving the older half into a luxurious hotel room somewhere. “I think we’re stuck with them,” she told Alicia. “But we’ll just go ahead and have our vacation as if they weren’t here.”

She made Alicia shower to wash off all the sand that dusted her arms and legs and clogged the cracks between her toes, then took a quick shower, too. She hadn’t packed a bathrobe—she hadn’t expected to need one—but when she peeked out around the bathroom door, she saw and heard nothing to indicate that Ethan and the cheerleader had returned. Wrapping a bath towel around her, just in case, she darted across the hall to the bedroom she and Alicia were now sharing. She was used to living alone in her studio apartment in Chelsea, where as long as the shades were drawn shut she could move around her home wearing as much or as little as she wished. Of course, she would have been discreet even if she’d been sharing Carole’s condo only with Alicia. Seven-year-old nieces should never be flashed by their aunts. But wearing a large bath towel was as discreet as she needed to be for Alicia.

She slipped into a light cotton shift, rubbed some moisturizing lotion into her cheeks and her legs and grabbed her purse. “There’s a restaurant at the hotel just down the beach,” she informed Alicia. “You ready for dinner?”

Unlike their housemates, she and Alicia lacked wheels. Fortunately, the restaurant she had in mind was a short ways down a path that was part boardwalk and part brick, lined with beach grass, sand and palm trees. Since she didn’t have to drive home afterward, Gina happily indulged in a tall, frosty piña colada along with her grilled grouper and vegetables. Alicia wolfed down a burger, a basket of fries and a dish of vanilla ice cream with butterscotch sauce. However many cookies she’d devoured before they’d left for the beach, the snack hadn’t interfered with her appetite.

During the early days of Ramona’s marital crisis, Gina’s sister had confided that Alicia wasn’t eating much. The poor kid had lost a couple of pounds during the past spring, and she didn’t have any weight to spare. But her appetite seemed fine right now. Even the invasion of strangers into their condo hadn’t upset her enough to keep her from enjoying her dinner. Gina was grateful for that.

“I like the way it smells,” Alicia said as they strolled back along the boardwalk toward Palm Point. She held Gina’s hand and added a little skip to her step. “It smells hot.”

“It is hot,” Gina pointed out. “I think what you’re smelling is the ocean and all the plants and flowers.”

“This isn’t the ocean,” Alicia argued. “The ocean is gray.”

“Up north it is. Down here it’s turquoise. I guess this is actually a sea, anyway. The Caribbean Sea.”

“The Carrybeaner Sea,” Alicia said. Gina didn’t bother to correct her. “Can we do that thing with the tubes tomorrow? What’s it called? The thing with the masks and the tubes.”

“Snorkeling. Sure.” Gina pointed to a cabanalike building on the pool patio near the beach. “We can rent some equipment there.”

“Is it hard?” Alicia peered up at her bravely. “I want to do it anyway, but is it hard?”

“No. It’s really easy.” Gina had tried snorkeling a couple of years ago, when she and a couple of friends had spent a long weekend at a lakeside inn in the Poconos Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. The most interesting marine life they’d seen through their masks had been minnows flashing past them and underwater reeds that billowed and danced every time had Gina kicked her flippered feet. It had been fun—and very easy. Alicia knew how to swim; snorkeling would come naturally to her.

Alicia sighed. “I love it here. Can we stay forever?”

Gina might have argued that Alicia hadn’t been in St. Thomas long enough to fall in love. She suspected that what her niece loved was being far away from her feuding parents. “I wish we could stay here forever, too,” she admitted. “No more work, and no more school for you—” a prospect that roused a cheer from Alicia “—and every day at the beach. And dinner at a restaurant every night. I could get into that.”

“Then let’s stay!”

“But we’d run out of money,” Gina pointed out. “And after a while you’d miss your friends.” She didn’t dare suggest Alicia would miss her parents. “And you’d never learn algebra.”

“You can teach me. What’s algebra?”

“It’s a kind of math you have to learn in ninth grade.” And then never use again, Gina thought, although she actually did use math a fair amount in designing shoes. Not algebra specifically, but she supposed all those years she’d spent in high school, learning trig and history and the periodic table, did her as much good as the classes she’d taken in design and sculpture and color theory.

They had reached the Palm Point pool, which gave off a faint whiff of chlorine. The sky stretched salmon pink above them, and the tide carried a constant breeze in on the waves. If Gina hadn’t brought Alicia with her to St. Thomas, she’d probably be only just getting ready to go out now. She’d have located a club where she could stay until closing time, consuming fruity tropical drinks and dancing until she was sweaty and every muscle in her body ached. She loved dancing, especially with people who smiled, laughed and danced as enthusiastically as she did. She never went to clubs to pick up guys. She just wanted to enjoy the music with them.

But strolling through the humid tropical evening with Alicia had its own satisfactions, most of them at least as gratifying as dancing at a club would have been. Maybe she’d teach Alicia how to dance, and they could blast songs on the radio in the condo and dance around the living room.

No, they couldn’t. Not with Ethan and What’s-her-face sharing the unit.

Ethan and What’s-her-face were still gone when Gina let Alicia and herself into the condo. They’d unpacked their things in the master bedroom, though. Gina was going to hate spending her week so conscious of them, alert to their presence and their absence, wondering when they would arrive and when they would depart. Alicia seemed more relaxed about the arrangement, however. She flopped onto the sofa, turned on the TV and flipped through the channels until she found a Spanish-language station. A variety show was on—lots of showgirls in skimpy outfits with fluffy feathers attached in strategic places, everyone speaking machine-gun-rapid Spanish. Alicia giggled. “We get this channel at home,” she said.

“Good. Maybe you’ll learn some Spanish,” Gina suggested, crossing to the kitchen for a can of soda. Swinging open the fridge, she spotted a six-pack of beer that hadn’t been there before—a local brew with Bluebeard the pirate on the label—as well as a red-waxed sphere of Gouda and a jar of olives. Ethan and Blondie must have gone shopping. Their grocery list clearly differed from Gina’s, which had included such gourmet delicacies as cornflakes, milk, peanut butter, bread and bananas.

The beer tempted. What would those people do if Gina helped herself to a bottle? Would they bill her? Short-sheet her bed? Toss her over the balcony?

She’d had enough roommates in her life—starting with her sister, Ramona, and including fellow students at the Rhode Island School of Design, a couple of apartment mates boasting various levels of neatness, consideration and integrity, and six other people one summer when a friend had talked her into participating in a group rental in Southampton. Every Friday, she’d spent two hours on an overcrowded train to reach their overcrowded bungalow three miles from the beach, where she’d slept on a mattress on the floor and argued with a ditzy platinum-blond wanna-be actress who was always leaving her shoes in the middle of the kitchen floor and a junior stockbroker who had loud sex with a different woman every night, and a social-climbing gay couple who bickered incessantly about which parties to crash. She still remembered the scream fest that had erupted when the stockbroker had helped himself to the gay guys’ orange juice. World War Three would not be so cataclysmic.

No, Gina wouldn’t take a bottle of beer. The last thing she wanted Alicia to witness this week was a fight.

She popped open a can of her own Diet Coke, wandered back into the living room, settled on the sofa next to Alicia and kicked off her sandals. She didn’t want to watch Mexico’s answer to the Rockettes, so she flipped through the channels until she found a nature show on yaks.

“This looks good,” Alicia said, snuggling up to Gina.

Gina arched her arm around her precious niece and planted a kiss on Alicia’s silky black hair. “It looks great,” she said, settling back into the cushions and grinning.

ETHAN COULD COME UP with an extensive list of reasons for his insomnia: a strange bed, a strange room, a strange climate. Jet lag—although flying south and losing only one hour shouldn’t have thrown him off that badly. Irritation with Kim’s parents—that was a likely culprit. Irritation with Kim. Guilt over being in bed with her after implying to her parents that he would sleep on the couch. Guilt over being in bed with her and not wanting to make love.

Awareness of Gina Morante.

He felt guilt about that, too. Major guilt. Kim slept soundly on her half of the bed, the familiar scent of her face cream wafting into the air around him. But he picked up a different scent, faint, almost subliminal. Gina’s scent.

Kim hadn’t seemed upset when he’d gently rebuffed her attempt to seduce him. “I’m beat,” he’d explained, a perfectly reasonable excuse. He’d endured a long flight with a ninety-minute layover in Atlanta, the stress of driving on the wrong side of the road, the much greater stress of behaving courteously toward Kim’s overbearing parents, the hauling of luggage to the unit in Palm Point, the scaring up of a suitable hotel room at a resort down the road, more driving, stocking up on drinks and snacks, unpacking the groceries and the suitcases, dressing for dinner, enduring a three-hour meal with the Hamiltons, complete with aperitifs and a fifty-year-old bottle of wine, listening to Ross and Delia describe all the far superior resorts where they had vacationed over the years and bobbing and weaving through an interrogation concerning Ethan’s politics, which were located a good few miles to the left of Ross Hamilton’s. Ethan and Kim had dropped her parents off at their hotel and returned to Palm Point at around eleven. He hadn’t been lying to her when he’d said he was too tired to do anything more than brush his teeth and fall into bed.

Falling into bed was easy. Falling asleep proved a much greater challenge.

He pictured Gina in her narrow bed across the hall. He pictured her niece in the other bed. What kind of woman vacationed with her niece? Gina seemed too funky to be an aunt. Aunts didn’t wear toe rings, did they?

He tried to imagine Kim wearing a toe ring, then chastised himself for comparing her with Gina. They were two different women. Two very different women. Kim was a human resources executive at an insurance company in Hartford. Gina Morante looked like a chichi sales clerk at a SoHo boutique, or maybe a waitress at one of the trendier midtown restaurants. Kim wore tailored suits and dresses to work every day. The only kind of dress Ethan could imagine Gina wearing would be short, sheer or both. To hide those legs of hers would be a crime.

And he was a bastard for even thinking such a thing while his almost-fiancée slept beside him.

He drifted in and out of a slumber until sounds beyond the door alerted him that Gina and her niece had arisen. He remained in bed, thinking he might sleep more easily if they were in the kitchen, at the opposite end of the apartment. But when he closed his eyes, he was kept from sinking into dreamland by a memory of them as they’d looked from the balcony yesterday, digging in the sand, bowing their heads together and laughing.

Finally, unable to force himself to lie still any longer, he slid out of bed and moved silently to avoid rousing Kim. After donning a pair of khaki shorts and a polo shirt, he tiptoed out of the bedroom.

Their hushed voices rippled down the hall like a gentle current. The bathroom was empty, so he made use of it before heading to the kitchen.

The kid was seated at the small table, a heaping bowl of cold cereal before her. Gina stood leaning against the counter, holding a bowl of what appeared to be yogurt and sliced bananas. The room was filled with the soul-stirring aroma of freshly brewed coffee. He and Kim should have bought coffee yesterday when they’d stopped at a local convenience store to purchase beer, imported bottled water, macadamia nuts, cheese and other such necessities. Kim had insisted they wouldn’t need coffee, since they would be meeting her parents for breakfast every morning. But right now, inhaling the fragrance of Gina’s coffee, he realized that Kim had been wrong.

“Good morning,” Gina greeted him. From her, the word came out mawn-ing.

“Good morning,” he responded, rubbing his hand through his hair. He should have brushed it while he’d had access to the mirror above the bathroom sink, but he’d left his brush in the bedroom. Gina and her niece had monopolized the shelf space in the bathroom.

His eyes took a moment to adjust to the sunny brightness of the kitchen, and then went to work processing the sight of Gina, dressed today in a lime-green T-shirt and short white shorts. She was barefoot except for the silver ring circling one of her left toes. The sight of it jolted him in some way, and he lifted his gaze to her face. She’d pulled a hank of her hair back from her face and clasped it with a large barrette, the way a child might wear her hair. On her, it didn’t look childish.

“I hope we didn’t wake you up,” she said. “We were trying to keep quiet.”

“You were very quiet. Thank you.” He gestured toward the hallway. “Kim’s still dead to the world.”

“You want some coffee?”

Desperately, but he should decline. If he drank her coffee, it would represent an unseemly mingling of their vacations. Yet when he watched her reach for the large ceramic mug on the counter beside her, lift it to her lips and take a sip, he couldn’t resist. “I’d love some.”

“Help yourself. The cups are in that cabinet.” She gestured toward the cabinet above the coffeemaker. “I bought a pound of ground beans and there’s no way I’m going to finish it all by myself in one week. So really, help yourself whenever you want some. I found a stash of filters in the cabinet with the napkins and paper towels.”

“I’m too young for coffee,” the little girl announced as she patted the cereal flakes beneath the surface of the milk in her bowl. “We’re going snorkeling today.”

“Are you?” Okay. He could handle this—drinking Gina’s coffee and making small talk with her niece. Despite his lack of experience with children, he figured that discussing snorkeling with a spunky little girl couldn’t be any harder than discussing politics with Ross Hamilton.

“Aunt Gina says it’s easy.”

“Aunt Gina knows what she’s talking about,” he confirmed as he filled a mug with coffee for himself. The fragrance flooded him like an elixir, sparking inside him the notion that sharing the condo with Gina and the kid was actually a stroke of luck. If they hadn’t been there, he would be having his first conversation of the day with Kim’s father—after having spent the night on the couch.

“You could come snorkeling with us,” the girl said.

He glanced sharply at Gina, who shrugged noncommittally. “They rent gear at the cabana on the beach. There’s milk in the fridge, by the way. No sugar, though. I don’t use it, so I didn’t buy any.”

He sipped his coffee, then shook his head. “I drink it black. Thanks. It’s wonderful.”

“They have good water here,” she said. “Coffee tastes different depending on the water you brew it with. This—” she raised her mug toward him, as if proposing a toast “—is delicious. Must mean the water is good.”

He thought of the bottled water Kim had insisted on buying, even after he’d pointed out that St. Thomas was part of the United States and he was sure its water had passed U.S. health standards.

“So, you wanna go snorkeling with us?” the child insisted.

“Ali, he’s here on his own vacation,” Gina reminded her. “He’ll be doing things with the people he came with.”

“They could come, too. They could get snorkeling stuff at the casino.”

“Cabana.”

“Yeah.” The girl scooped a mound of cereal into her mouth, chewed and gave him a toothy grin. “Aunt Gina says we’ll see fish. I wanna see an octopus.”

“I don’t know how many fish come to this beach. There’s another beach about a mile up the coast that’s supposed to be incredible for snorkeling,” Ethan informed them.

Gina’s dark eyes widened with interest. “Really?”

He felt absurdly proud of his knowledge. “Paul—the friend who owns a share of this unit—mentioned a beach to me. Coki Beach, I think it’s called. There’s even better snorkeling on St. John, but you have to take the ferry to get there.”

“Coki Beach?”

She looked so interested, so grateful for his knowledge. His ego inflated a bit more. “Just a mile or so west of here.”

“Can we go?” The girl twisted in her seat and gazed eagerly at her aunt. “Can we go there?”

“I don’t know. We’d have to get a cab, I guess. Or there might be a public jitney.”

“What’s a jitney?”

“Kind of like a bus.”

“I could—” Ethan cut himself off before completing the sentence: I could drive you there. Maybe he could; maybe he couldn’t. He’d rented the car for the convenience of the Hamiltons, not a strange woman and her niece.

Of course, if he and Kim went snorkeling with Gina and the kid, they could all drive there together, and leave Kim’s parents to fend for themselves. Why not? The Hamiltons were residing at a luxurious hotel. They could get massages and drink Absolut vodka martinis while lounging by the pool. Or they could hit the links. Given a choice between snorkeling and golf, Ethan couldn’t imagine choosing golf—and he couldn’t imagine Ross Hamilton choosing snorkeling.

Maybe this whole time-share disaster would turn out to be a huge blessing. Ethan and Kim could do things with Gina and her niece and ignore Kim’s parents. The time he’d spent with them on the flight to St. Thomas and last night at dinner was enough to convince him that an in-law relationship with them would never be a close, loving bond. He really ought to withhold judgment until he’d spent more than one day in their company, but where people were concerned, his instincts were usually pretty accurate. He’d known, within minutes of glimpsing Kim, that they would wind up in bed together, and that the experience would be spectacular. They had, and it was. And here he was, having spent a grand total of less than an hour in Gina Morante’s company, and he knew…

He knew they would get along. Beyond that, he didn’t want to know what he knew.

So they’d go snorkeling together. He’d sacrifice his evenings to Ross and Delia Hamilton, but surely he didn’t have to sacrifice his days to them, too.

The sound of footsteps padding down the carpeted hall caused him to turn. Kim, clad in a tennis skirt and top, her hair pulled into a bouncy ponytail, materialized in the doorway.

“Good morning,” Gina greeted her in her distinctive New York accent.

Kim managed a cool smile, then turned to Ethan. “You aren’t eating breakfast, are you? We’re supposed to meet Mom and Dad at the hotel at nine.”

“Just a cup of coffee,” he said, then nodded toward Gina. “Gina generously offered me some.”

Gina glanced toward the coffeepot, which was nearly empty. “I could make some more,” she said.

“That won’t be necessary,” Kim assured her. “But thank you for offering.”

“He’s going snorkeling with us,” the kid announced.

One of Kim’s eyebrows ascended and the other dipped, enabling her to look simultaneously quizzical and skeptical. “Is he?” she asked, her elegant blue eyes boring into him.

“We were just talking about it,” he said, refusing to succumb to her potent stare. Others quaked and quailed in the icy potency of her disapproval, but he never did—which, he suspected, was one of his main attractions for her. “Paul mentioned a place called Coki Beach, where the snorkeling is supposed to be phenomenal.”

“We’re meeting Mom and Dad for breakfast,” she said.

“Breakfast isn’t going to take the whole day. We could go snorkeling after breakfast.”

“I was hoping we could go to Charlotte Amalie.”

“Kim, we’re not going to spend this entire week shopping.” His voice was gentle, but he hoped she’d heard the warning in it.

She pursed her lovely pink lips, indicating that she had. “I know that,” she said crisply. “I thought we could go downtown today and get a feel for the place. We don’t have to go snorkeling on these people’s schedule.” She waved her hand vaguely toward Gina and the kid.

Ethan knew she didn’t intend to be rude. But the strangers they’d been accidentally thrown together with were irrelevant to her. They might as well not even exist, as far as she was concerned.

They existed for Ethan, though. He felt their warmth in the air, he heard the clinks of their spoons against their bowls, and he knew they were assessing Kim and giving her very low marks. He didn’t blame them.

Yet, in a way she was right. Their schedule shouldn’t dictate his and Kim’s. He was under no obligation to drive them to Coki Beach or anywhere else. They could take the jitney.

And he’d be stuck with the Hamiltons.

It was enough to make him wish he were a jitney driver.

HE FINALLY MADE IT to the beach at a little past one-thirty. The sun was high and white, like an incandescent bulb in the sky. The beach smelled of coconut oil and sea salt, and the wind gusting off the water was warm.

Okay, so the Hamiltons wanted to shop. He didn’t want to shop, and there was no reason on earth that he should have to. If he and Kim wound up married, he wouldn’t be obligated to accompany her every time she went shopping. Why accompany her here?

After breakfast—another long, profusely caloric meal, this time lubricated by mimosas and spiced with a contentious debate on the current administration’s environmental policies—he’d driven Kim and her parents into Charlotte Amalie and arranged to meet them at five o’clock at a shaded kiosk by the wharf where all the cruise ships docked. During their initial excursion—“This is reconnaissance, not serious shopping,” Kim had explained—they would scout out some interesting eateries, and when Ethan met up with them they’d choose a restaurant for dinner.

He’d agreed to everything Kim said. As long as he didn’t have to do reconnaissance with her, he’d go along with whatever dinner plans her family wanted.

He did intend to do a little shopping at some point that week—not so much that preliminary recon was called for, though. If watches were as inexpensive as the guidebooks said, he might pick one up for his father. Maybe one for himself, too. But he couldn’t imagine spending more than one day roaming the streets, alleys and arcades of Charlotte Amalie in search of bargains. It wasn’t as if he and his father needed watches. And how could a person prefer shopping to lounging on the sand with a cold beer and a good book? Or snorkeling at Coki Beach.

He wondered if Gina and Ali had made it over to Coki Beach. If they hadn’t found their own transportation there, it was probably too late for him to offer them a lift now.

He touched the cold surface of his beer bottle to his forehead and scanned the beach—looking for a spot to settle in the shade of a palm, not looking for a leggy, dark-haired tourist from New York. When he didn’t spot her, he convinced himself he wasn’t disappointed.

And when he did spot her niece, he convinced himself he wasn’t elated.

Ali the Alley Cat knelt in the sand, molding and sculpting it with her hands. He watched from the walkway bordering the beach as she labored over what appeared to be a sand castle of some sort. She peered toward the water, then grinned and waved. Following the line of her gaze, he saw Gina striding across the sand, carrying a beach pail so full of water it splattered droplets with her every step.

Her bikini was as revealing as the one she’d worn yesterday. Today’s was turquoise, the same color as the sea. The bottom was cut high and the top was cut low.

Kim is beautiful, he reminded himself, but that truth didn’t seem particularly germane at the moment.

He ambled over the hot sand, figuring he’d just say hello and then find another location to settle. But when Alicia saw him, she eagerly waved him over. “Hey, come see what I’m making!” she hollered.

He reached Alicia the same time Gina did. She lowered her bucket to the sand carefully, and he tried not to stare at her bosom as she bent over. God, she looked great in a bikini. Ethan had never met a woman who didn’t—any size, any shape, he happened to think women’s bodies were wonderful—but Gina was definitely one of the most satisfying sights on the beach today.

“What are you making?” he asked. Up close, Alicia’s efforts didn’t resemble much of anything.

“The Brooklyn Bridge,” she told him.

“That’s a pretty ambitious project,” he said, shooting a grin at Gina as she straightened up.

She grinned back. “You’re standing in Staten Island, in case you were wondering.”

“You can help,” Alicia told him, her tone firm enough to convey that this was an order.

“Alicia, he came down to the beach to read,” Gina chided the kid. “See? He’s got a book. Let him be.”

“No, I don’t mind,” he said, although he wanted to build the Brooklyn Bridge on a beach about as much as he wanted to shop for discounted liquor in Charlotte Amalie. He tossed down his book beside a pile of what he guessed was Gina’s gear, propped against the base of a palm: the colorful canvas tote he’d seen her carrying yesterday, and mesh drawstring bags filled with snorkeling masks, tubes and flippers. Then he hunkered down next to Alicia. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“We have to dig,” she said, pointing to a narrow trench she’d already carved into the sand. “This is the East River or New York Harbor. I forget. Aunt Gina says if we dig deep enough, the water won’t disappear.”

“You want me to dredge the harbor,” he said, shooting Gina another look. She towered above him, her lanky body casting a long shadow across him.

“You don’t have to do this,” she called down to him.

Viewing her from his ground-level perspective, he couldn’t imagine choosing his book over a few minutes with her—even if he had to pay for those minutes by digging in the sand with her niece. “I’ll see how it goes,” he said, refusing to commit to more than that.

“I’m dumping the water so Aunt Gina can get more,” Alicia announced before emptying the bucket of water into the trench.

“Maybe you should get the water and let your aunt sit for a minute,” he suggested, hoping Alicia and Gina wouldn’t interpret his words as anything other than an attempt to earn a fellow adult a few minute’s rest.

Alicia sprang to her feet. “Okay! You guys dig and I’ll get the water!” Before Gina could object, the kid had grabbed the bucket and was racing down to the sea.

Gina lowered herself onto the sand, not too close to Ethan. Her gaze remained on her niece. “She spills half the water,” she told Ethan. “That’s why we thought it would be better if I got it.”

“This doesn’t look anything like the Brooklyn Bridge,” he commented, scrutinizing the span constructed of damp, packed sand above the trench.

Gina chuckled but refused to shift her attention from the little girl at the water’s edge. “You’ve seen the Brooklyn Bridge?”

“I’m from Connecticut,” he told her. “And you’re from…Brooklyn?”

Still smiling, she shook her head. “Manhattan. I grew up in the Bronx.”

He knew midtown Manhattan, where all the Broadway theaters and famous restaurants and office towers were, and the downtown business district. The Bronx was just a borough he passed through—and the punch line of jokes.

“I live down in Chelsea now,” she told him. “You know the city?”

“Sort of.” He smiled sheepishly and hoped she wouldn’t quiz him. “I live in Arlington. That’s in the northwest corner of Connecticut.”

“Yeah. I know it.” She used the plastic shovel to dig the trench deeper. A murky puddle of water lingered at the bottom. “So where’s the rest of your group?”

“Shopping. I thought I’d come back and enjoy a little beach time.” He glanced toward the snorkeling gear by the palm tree. “Did you visit Coki Beach?”

“Not today. We just snorkeled around here. They rent equipment for the whole week. The guy at the cabana said we should try to get over to St. John. There’s this underwater snorkeling trail there. I can’t imagine snorkeling along an underwater trail.”

“It’s supposed to be amazing.” He wondered whether he’d be able to separate Kim from her Visa card long enough to take her snorkeling at Trunk Bay on St. John. Paul had told him he had to go there. He’d hate to go alone, though.

And he couldn’t go with Gina. Not when she looked the way she did in a swimsuit.

“I’m figuring we’ll try Coki Beach tomorrow. We saw some fish here. Not a lot, but Alicia was pretty excited.”

Ethan did a little desultory one-handed digging while he sipped his beer. “You want some?” he asked, extending the bottle to her.

She flickered a glance toward the bottle, then zeroed in on Alicia again. “Thanks,” she said, letting him place the bottle into her hand so she wouldn’t have to look away from her niece. “It’s hot out here. We brought some sodas down to the beach, but we finished them a while ago.”

“Beer is better,” he said. She smiled her agreement.

Down by the water, Alicia straightened up, clutching the rim of the bucket. Gina handed the bottle back to Ethan and watched her niece pick a path across the beach, sloshing water with each step. By the time she reached them, she looked upset. “I spilled too much of it,” she said, a sob making her voice wobbly.

“That’s okay, sweetie. Pour it in and I’ll get the next one.”

Ethan wanted to argue. He’d barely begun talking to her; he wasn’t ready for her to run off. And he definitely wasn’t ready to shoot the breeze with a little girl. But who would be the water carrier wasn’t his decision to make. Gina rose, lifted the pail from Alicia’s hands as soon as she’d emptied it into the trench, and stalked across the beach, her hips swaying as her heels sank into the sand.

Alicia threw herself back into the labor of digging. Ethan took another sip of beer and observed her. “We snorkeled today,” Alicia told him as she flung sand to one side.

“Your aunt told me. She said you saw some fish.”

“They were white. Kind of silvery. The color of angels,” Alicia told him. “I wanted to snorkel forever, but I swallowed some water and started coughing, and Aunt Gina said we had to take a break.”

“You’ve got a whole week,” Ethan pointed out. “You can go snorkeling again tomorrow.”

“Where’s the lady?” Alicia asked.

He assumed she meant Kim. “She’s in Charlotte Amalie. That’s the big town on the other side of the island.”

“Do they have snorkeling there?”

“No. What they have there is shopping.”

Alicia wrinkled her nose. She obviously didn’t think much of shopping. “Is she your girlfriend?”

“Yes,” Ethan said, feeling noble and virtuous for having gotten that established, even if he hadn’t established it with Gina. She’d surely figured it out. And now the kid knew, too.

“My daddy has a girlfriend,” Alicia said, bringing him up short.

“Does he?” Perhaps her mother was dead, or her parents were divorced.

Or perhaps they weren’t. “It makes my mommy very mad,” Alicia said.

“I would imagine,” he agreed faintly.

“I don’t think she’s as pretty as your girlfriend,” Alicia continued matter-of-factly. “I haven’t seen her, but the way my mommy talks about her…Sometimes my mommy uses bad words. I hate that.”

“I remember.” Ethan recalled Alicia’s howls yesterday when anyone uttered a damn or a hell. He toyed with the label on his bottle and searched the water for Gina, eager for her to return. Compared with this conversation, his political debates with Ross Hamilton had been a piece of cake.

“Aunt Gina is my mommy’s sister,” Alicia went on. “That’s what an aunt is—your mother’s sister. Or your father’s sister. Do you have any aunts?”

“Yes.” He spotted Gina straightening up, clutching the replenished bucket. Good. In less than a minute, she’d be back to rescue him.

“Are they as nice as Aunt Gina?”

“No. Aunt Gina seems extra nice.” Every step that carried her toward him made her seem even nicer.

“She is. Extra extra nice. Extra extra extra.” She greeted Gina’s arrival with a big smile. When Gina emptied the water into the trench, Alicia let out a whoop. “Look, Aunt Gina! It’s staying. We dug deep enough! The water isn’t all soaking in!”

Ethan rose onto his knees and peered into the trench. A nice pool of water stretched below the bridge. “Hey,” he said admiringly.

“All right!” Gina slapped Alicia’s hand in congratulations, then slapped Ethan’s, too. Her touch startled him. Her palm was slick and cool with water, her fingers slender, her wrist graceful. She wore a ring on her thumb, braided strands of silver in a pattern identical to the ring on her toe.

The brief contact obviously meant nothing. She was just celebrating their engineering feat. Because Ethan was there, she included him in the celebration. That was all.

Yet the cool texture of her skin and the exuberance behind her gesture stayed with him, long after she and Alicia had moved on to bolstering the bridge, decorating it with shells and strands of grass, analyzing the feasibility of importing some of those angel-colored fish to swim in their tiny version of New York Harbor.

Sipping his beer and listening to their bubbly chatter, Ethan felt the impact of Gina’s hand against his and contemplated the tide as it tugged the sand, shaped the shoreline and left beach reconfigured, rearranged—almost unrecognizable. Tides could be dangerous, he thought. Extra extra extra dangerous. He’d better be careful.

Yet he closed his hand, as if he could hold Gina’s touch inside it forever.