Читать книгу Life Is A Beach: Life Is A Beach / A Real-Thing Fling - Pamela Browning, Pamela Browning - Страница 11

SLADE SETTLED BACK in a deck chair, popped the top off a Guinness, and resigned himself to listening to intermittent jabber and Cuban music wafting over from D Dock. He was trying his best to impersonate a yachtsman, but even after two days in residence on Toy Boat, he felt like an interloper. The habitues of the Sunchaser Marina were a tight-knit group. They didn’t so much ignore him as act as if he didn’t exist.

Well, his clothes might have had something to do with it, but whenever he shucked the jeans and boots for one of Mack’s designer swimsuit outfits, he felt like a complete idiot. Silver reflecting sunglasses and a cabana shirt thrown open at the throat weren’t his style.

Still, he might have gotten along with his companions better last night if he’d been dressed in Miami Beach mode. The two guys he’d met at the beach had taken one look at his boots and hat and mistaken him for a rube. They’d invited him along on a little bar-hopping jaunt, set him up with a sumptuous redhead at a party, and tried to steal his money in a back alley. Bad mistake. The guys were nursing aching heads today, no doubt, and not as a result of hangovers. As for the redhead, she’d split, yelling at the top of her lungs. Good riddance.

He was by nature soft-spoken and quiet, and he was well aware that it gave him an advantage to be seen as naive. He’d never thought it necessary to advertise the fact that he’d graduated from the University of Florida and been a star on the rodeo circuit for a couple of years afterward.

Slade Braddock had seen enough of the world to appreciate who he was and where he’d come from, which was why he knew he wanted to live in Okeechobee City for the rest of his life. Here in Miami Beach, he felt misplaced. Like a fish out of water, so to speak. He didn’t belong here, he didn’t really want to be here. He’d made progress today, though. He was on the way to finding himself a wife.

The marina was bustling with activity as boats came back from fishing trips, people returned to their houseboats from their day’s activities, and fishermen weighed in their catch. The breeze felt good after this typically stifling September day; it wafted with it the scent of the ocean. Across Biscayne Bay, an orange sun cast the skyline of Miami into golden relief, and Slade was momentarily homesick. To his way of thinking, sunset in the Glades was a much more inspiring sight.

He allowed himself to daydream as he thought about the wife he had come here to find, heard her soft voice whispering in his ear. It would be good to have a wife at last, good to have a sweet little cutie to laugh with in bed at night, to cuddle happily for a few quiet moments in the morning before he rode out to check the fences and the herd.

He pictured the Diamond B Ranch in his mind—brilliant blue sky, acres and acres of green grass punctuated by palmetto hummocks, and in the distance, Everglades saw grass shimmering green and yellow in the bright sunshine. It was a special place, that ranch, carved out of the Glades by Slade’s grandfather, built to its present greatness by his father, and he wanted a special woman to share it with him.

Slade spotted Karma O’Connor as she rounded the curve from the parking lot on her bike. Now speaking of women, there was an interesting one, he thought. But quirky. Karma didn’t at all resemble the wife he intended to find—she was too tall by far, and not fragile. Definitely not fragile. The word he would choose to describe her would be robust. He did have to admit that her hair was much the same color as what he had in mind. It wasn’t straight though, and he had a thing for fragile-looking women with long straight blond hair—Southern-belle type, if possible. On the other hand, on Karma that bouncy mop of curls looked good.

He stood up to get a better look at her, and to his surprise, she didn’t stop pedaling when she reached the grassy strip dividing the parking lot from the dock, nor did she stop on the narrow band of asphalt that passed for a sidewalk. She rode her fool bike right onto C Dock.

He treated himself to another swig of beer as she bent her head down in determination and kept pedaling past the line-up of houseboats, a big Amazon of a woman. The boards of the dock creaked under her bike wheels. That fluttering purple thing she wore scared a lazy pelican off one of the weathered pilings, and the bike’s back wheel clipped a bait box, but still she pedaled on.

Slade couldn’t figure for the life of him what kind of garment Karma was wearing. You could see through part of it, but not any part that mattered—the sleeves and at least the bottom part of the legs were transparent like a nightie. He remembered her legs. He’d gotten a pretty good gander at them when she was walking up the stairs to her office this morning. And her hips, ditto. They’d looked like a couple of melons in a croker sack. Very firm melons.

Then: disaster. Slade saw what was going to happen before Karma did. An elderly guy named Phifer in C-22 was making repairs to his boat, puttering around on deck as he had all afternoon. Phifer must not have seen Karma because he tossed a line toward the dock. The line seemed to hover for a moment before it descended, a kind of slow motion free-fall, and as the rope looped toward her through the air, Slade yelled, “Look out!”

Karma looked up. The trouble was that she looked up at Slade all the way down in Slip 41, not at the line, which fell neatly over her foot, snagging both it and the bike pedal in a kind of a bungee hang-up. Karma went flying. So did the bike—both of them right into the drink with a huge splash.

Slade was up and off Toy Boat in a flash. But by the time he reached the space where Karma had gone in, all that was to be seen of either her or the bike was a circle of purple chiffon floating on the top of the water.

She surfaced right away, sputtering and flinging a tangle of hair out of her eyes.

“I’ll throw you a life ring,” Slade hollered, grabbing one from a hook on one of the pilings and tossing it at her.

She yelled back, “I can swim,” but when the life ring landed beside her, she latched on to it anyway and began kicking in the direction of the dock. By this time, bystanders had gathered. “What happened?” asked the old guy who’d thrown the line.

“She was riding a bike. Lost control of it,” Slade said, not wanting to get into a conversation with Phifer. At present he was much more interested in Karma, who was now treading water directly below him. “Swim over to the piling, I’ll lean down and give you a hand up.”

She looked wary. “I can’t do that. I don’t have on anything but my underwear. That’s my sari,” and she pointed at the purple chiffon, which was being borne away by the outgoing tide.

“What’d she say?” asked Phifer.

“I believe she said she’s sorry,” Slade told him.

“I should think she’s sorry,” huffed Phifer. “Riding a bike on the dock.”

The other onlookers agreed with him, and one by one they wandered off to their barbecuing or their beer on ice or whatever it was that they’d planned to do. “Me, I’ve got fish to clean,” Phifer said grumpily before slapping off down the dock in his worn old boat shoes.

No one else came over to see what was going on, which told Slade something about how these Miami Beach people lived. Sure, Miami Beach folks lived a laid-back lifestyle, but in his opinion, they should have more concern for their neighbors. In Okeechobee City, this situation would have drawn a bunch of spectators, all of whom would feel inclined to give advice and, probably, help. But then, Okeechobee City was a small town. Miami Beach was not.

He turned his attention back to the woman in the water. She was floating amid the flotsam, including but not restricted to a tangle of dirty fishing line, and assorted fish parts. “Um, ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“Did you really say that you don’t have on anything but your underwear?” he asked.

“Do we have to keep talking about it?” she said.

He was sure that this was a rhetorical question, so he decided to change his tack. “You can’t stay in there forever.”

“Wait and see,” Karma said, and he thought she looked kind of comical in her determination. The key parts of her anatomy that he could see under the surface of the water looked nicely shaped and tan. Why they were tan, he could only speculate. Maybe she did a lot of topless sunbathing, like some of the models he and his companions of the night before had seen on South Beach yesterday. He tried not to think about Karma with no top on, but the image stuck in his mind.

As if she could read his thoughts, Karma hugged the life ring to her chest, covering up what was interesting him. “I’ll come out when it gets dark. I’ll slink away into the night. Look, why don’t you forget you ever met me? I’m sure you can find another matchmaker in this town.”

Slade had no interest in shambling through the whole dating service sign-up process again. It was embarrassing enough to have to enlist help to find a wife in the first place. Besides, at the moment he was fascinated by Karma O’Connor, though he couldn’t quite figure out why. Mascara was running down her cheeks in rivulets, and she’d lost an earring. But with her hair plastered to her head like that so that he wasn’t distracted by her wealth of curls, he could better assess her beauty. And Karma was beautiful. Her complexion was pink-and-white and flawlessly textured; her nose was aristocratically narrow. She also had very white and very straight teeth. As a connoisseur of horseflesh, he knew you could tell a lot about an animal by its teeth.

This, however, was a woman. A woman in distress. He said as comfortingly as he could, “Don’t go anywhere. I’m going to get a robe and throw it down to you.”

Karma opened her mouth, then shut it abruptly just prior to being sloshed by the backwash from the propeller of a passing outboard. Before she took it into her head to object, Slade took off at a trot back toward Toy Boat, passing Phifer on the way.

“Fool woman. Had no business riding a bike on the dock,” grumbled Phifer, who by this time was tossing fish heads to a circling flock of gulls.

When Slade returned with one of Mack’s monogrammed white terry cloth robes, Karma had moved to the piling and had commenced clinging to a metal ring affixed to the post.

Slade bundled the robe into a neat ball. “I’m going to throw this down, and you can put it on. Then you can come out of the water,” Slade said.

Karma said something like “Hmmpf,” and he tossed the robe down. He tactfully turned his back as she put it on, but he heard her splashing around and it seemed to take her an overly long time to get into the robe. “Everything all right?” he called over his shoulder.

“You must realize,” she said, “that this thing has soaked up a ton of water. Yes, I’ve got my arms through the sleeves, if that’s what you want to know, but I think it’s going to pull me under. Like an anchor.”

Slade turned around. She was suitably swathed, but she was now riding slightly lower in the water and her expression was anything but pleasant.

He knelt down on the dock, held his hand out to her. She grabbed it.

He supposed that it was some peculiar flight of fancy that tied in with his earlier fantasy about finding the right woman for him, but all the same, he could have sworn that a bolt of electricity flashed through their connected hands. It was so strong that he almost let go.

But he didn’t let go. He hung on for dear life even as he tried to sort this thing out. He concluded as he gave a mighty heave and yanked her up onto the dock that he had been mistaken. He couldn’t possibly have felt anything. He was out of his mind for thinking so. He wasn’t at all attracted to this woman. She wasn’t his type.

And yet when she stood dripping in front of him, her eyes searching his face, he did feel something, an emotion that he finally identified as relief. No harm had come to her and he was glad. That was all.

“I guess I can say goodbye to that bike,” Karma said ruefully.

“Well, maybe not. I’ll see if the marina manager can do anything about it,” he told her.

Karma shrugged, sending a veritable Niagara sluicing over his bare feet. “Come on,” he said, shaking his feet to rid them of water. “I reckon we can find you something warm and dry to wear.”

She walked glumly and wetly beside him back to Toy Boat. “I brought some things,” she said. “They’re at the bottom of the bay along with my bike.”

He stepped down onto the boat first, handed her onto the deck. “What things did you bring?”

“Crackers. Spicy tofu-cilantro garlic spread. Things like that.”

Slade had never heard of spicy tofu-cilantro garlic spread, but it sounded downright unappetizing. He hadn’t thought this was a social call. Wasn’t it supposed to be business? To videotape him so she’d have something to show her female clients as a kind of sales pitch? He narrowed his eyes at her. She was now dripping all over the teak deck.

“Maybe you could, uh, wring yourself out,” he ventured.

She eyed the yards and yards of wet white terry cloth doubtfully. She made as if to wring out one side of the robe, but he quickly directed her toward the side of the boat. “Over the side,” he said helpfully. “If you don’t mind. These teak decks take a heap of maintenance, according to Mack.”

“Who’s Mack?”

“The cousin who belongs to this boat.”

“And where is he?”

“I dunno. He made it rich selling off his share of the family land, used the money to buy this boat and a lot of other things. I expect he and Renee are flying around in his Lear jet.”

“A Lear jet,” Karma repeated.

“Yeah, well, Renee hates flying in it.”

“That’s why it’s important to find the right wife,” she said. “That’s why you came to Rent-a-Yenta. So that you wouldn’t find someone who isn’t suited to you, that is.” She reached up and fluffed her hair, which was already drying in the breeze off the bay.

Slade thought it was cute that even now, sodden and miserable and annoyed about losing her bike and the tofu whatever, this woman could still inject a plug for her business into the conversation.

“Let’s go into the master stateroom. Mack’s wife’s clothes are there. Maybe some will fit you.” He realized when she shot him a skeptical look out from under her eyelashes that this might sound like a come-on. “You can go in there alone. I’ll stay right here on deck like a gentleman.”

She looked heartened by this statement. “No funny business?” she asked.

“No funny business. I’ll even leave the boat, walk over to the marina office and see if I can rustle up the head honcho around here, ask him about your bike.”

“That might be a good idea,” she allowed, and so as she made her way through the salon, scattering a narrow path of water droplets on the woven-to-order rug, Slade went to find the marina manager, who might know what you had to do to salvage sunken bicycles.

WOW, KARMA THOUGHT AS HER eyes popped at the sumptuous master stateroom. Slade Braddock certainly wasn’t slumming. The boat looked like a picture right out of an upscale travel magazine, the kind of publication she’d read maybe once in her whole life. There was teak everywhere, and cove lighting, and some kind of pale shimmery fabric draping the portholes. The bed was huge and covered with a subtly patterned spread. The bouquet on the built-in dresser was composed of fresh flowers and hothouse variety at that.

She walked across the cushy seafoam-green carpet to the closet and flung the door open. Inside was a whole wardrobe of clothes arrayed on matching padded hangers. She pulled out a dress and a pair of slacks; they looked as if they’d been made for a midget. Slade’s cousin’s wife was apparently a nutritionally challenged size two.

All right, so she couldn’t wear these clothes. She threw open the next closet and found more promising duds; the trouble was, these were Slade’s.

She yanked a worn denim shirt out of the few hanging there and held it up for inspection. It was the typical Western-style shirt with two pockets in front and a yoke in back. It snapped instead of buttoned. The best part about it was that it would fit her.

Well, almost, anyway. After a longing look at the shower in the adjoining bathroom and mindful that Slade hadn’t said she could make use of it, she shrugged out of the wet robe and into the denim shirt. It came down to the middle of her thighs.

A glance into the full length mirror on the inside of the closet door reassured her that the shirt covered all the important points. She bent over experimentally and realized that she’d have to find something to wear underneath it. She kept looking and settled on a pair of stretchy black exercise tights that tumbled off the closet shelf. They probably belonged to the petite Renee, but they stretched to cover Karma’s long legs.

She decided that there was nothing to be done about shoes, since her own sandals were swimming with the fishes at the bottom of the bay and none of the ones here fit. But she could do something about her bedraggled hair, and that was to dry it with the use of a hair dryer that was conveniently mounted next to the sink in the bathroom, which she supposed, since it was on a boat, would properly be called the head.

The only head she was prepared to worry about at the moment was her own. She wore her hair shoulder length, and when wet it tended to frizz. The dryer had one speed—hot. That frizzed her hair even more, and when she was finished, she looked as if she’d just unplugged herself from an electrical socket.

Never mind, she told herself. You’ve already blown any chance you might have had with Slade Braddock. She cast one last resigned look into the mirror and went outside to wrap this up.

When she emerged from the salon onto the deck, Slade looked up appreciatively from the magazine he was reading.

“This belongs to you,” she said apologetically, lifting the edge of the shirt.

“I never filled that shirt out so well,” he said.

“What did you find out about my bike?” She was worried now about how she would get home. She didn’t have cab fare, and it was a long walk back to the Blue Moon.

“The manager’s son is a certified scuba diver, and he’ll go down to look for it tomorrow morning. No problem. You’ll get it back. Come and sit down, you might as well relax. Care for a beer?”

“No, thanks. I want to videotape while we’ve still got good light.”

“There’s the camera. I set it up on the tripod.”

The camera stood on one corner of the deck. Karma went over to inspect it, surreptitiously looking Slade Braddock over as she pretended to note all the buttons and knobs on the camera. He wore only jeans and a white T-shirt, and instead of the boots, he wore deck shoes.

Under that T-shirt, his chest muscles rippled as he stood up to stretch. He was tall, even without his boots. Taller than she was, which was really saying something.

“Need any help in figuring it out?”

“This is different from mine,” she managed to say although her mouth had gone dry.

“I’ve used this camera a few times before, so let me show you how it works.” He closed the gap between them in a few steps, a maneuver that somehow mysteriously caused her heart to speed up. This attraction to a client, she knew, was wildly inappropriate. She shouldn’t be breathing hard and heavy merely because he was standing close to her. It was unprofessional, it was unlike her—and it was a great way to be feeling after a long time without a special man in her life.

“This is the way you adjust it,” Slade said, stepping behind the camera to demonstrate, “and this is the button you press to make it start.”

While he was concentrating on the camera, her gaze lingered for a moment on the cleft in his chin, drifted slightly higher and came to rest on his lips. She did not want to concentrate on his lips. Or any of the rest of him. Which was why she didn’t think she could go through with this.

“Do you still want to do this videotaping, or would you rather stop by my office and do it another time?” she said on a note of desperation. Using her work to advance her own personal agenda with this man had been a mistake. She needed to go home and calm herself with some deep breathing exercises, maybe on the beach so the salt air could become a type of inhalation therapy. She needed a soothing cup of herbal tea. Maybe she even needed to have her chakras read.

“The camera is ready to roll,” Slade pointed out with a twinkle. “You gonna deprive me of my first, last and only chance to be a star of my own video?”

“Um…no.” Because she didn’t know what else to do, she edged around the back of the camera and fiddled with the lens.

“Hey, didn’t I explain it right?” Slade asked. “I’ve already focused it on that chair over there. What do you say I sit down and we get on with it?”

She punched a button by mistake, and the camera made a frenzied whirring sound. “What’s that?” she said in alarm.

“Easy there,” Slade said. He slid around behind her. The heat of his body sizzled right through the denim shirt she wore.

“I—I—” she stammered, forgetting what she had been about to say.

“Let me check to make sure it’s still in focus,” he said, and he bent and fit his eye to the camera. Karma was treated to a view of how his hair curved along his nape.

“Now,” Slade said as he straightened. “Wait till I’m seated, and then push the red button.” His body brushed against hers as he edged past her and out of the tight corner. As he passed, she was assailed by pure, clean masculine odor. Not fragrance, as in aftershave or cologne, but a natural male scent of musk and a couple of other unidentifiables. This disconcerted her almost as much as his touch. She’d expected him to smell good. But not great.

He smiled in that engaging way of his, one eyebrow cocked, one corner of his mouth higher than the other. She had noticed his smile before; why did it seem so appealing now?

She made herself concentrate. Peer through the lens, focus, and next all she had to do was push the little red button. It was when she looked up that she realized with astonishment that Slade had gone all remote. His face was immobile, his eyes glazed over. He looked like a clone of Mount Rushmore.

It had happened before: Freeze-up. Some people might be affable and congenial as all get-out before you switched on the camera, but as soon as they realized they were being taped, they were afflicted with the inability to move their tongues and lips in any semblance of casual conversation. They became so self-conscious in front of that lens that nothing, but nothing, could make them snap out of it.

This was all she needed. At the moment she wanted to get this taping over with and scurry home to the Blue Moon, which seemed like a safe haven after this debacle.

“Slade,” she said, because she’d learned in some psychology course eons ago that using a person’s name gave you an edge, made him really pay attention to you, “we’re just going to chat normally.”

He nodded, but stiffly.

“So,” she said as she pulled a chair over to one side of the deck out of camera range. “How about stating your full name first?” This was usually easy for clients who were wary of the camera. People always were able to say their own names with a minimum of stage fright.

“I thought we already did that.” His tone was flat, his voice expressionless.

“Excuse me?”

“On the form you filled out today. I gave you my name.”

“This is for the tape.”

“Uh.”

“So go ahead and tell me your name.” She smiled her encouragement.

“My name’s Slade Braddock. Do I need to spell it?”

This was proving to be even more difficult than she had anticipated. “No, that won’t be necessary.” She could edit out the comments that didn’t need to stay in. She’d had to edit like crazy for Jennifer and Mandi, especially Jennifer, who had given a very realistic imitation of an orgasm on tape. Or maybe it wasn’t an imitation—who knew?

“Now, Slade, we’d like to know what you do for a living.”

He stared at her for a moment. Not that she minded. She liked it when he looked at her. But they weren’t getting anywhere with this video.

“Slade?”

He licked his lips. “I guess you know I don’t like this much.”

“That’s okay. Just answer the questions the best you can.”

“You wanted to know what I do for a living?”

“Yes.”

“I run a herd of cattle up Okeechobee way.”

It was like pulling teeth to get the man to talk. If she hadn’t known he was perfectly capable of conversation, she’d be willing to quit. Some part of her was exultant at this development, though. The worse he looked on the video, the less appealing he’d be to the likes of Jennifer and Mandi. Still, it was her duty as the matchmaker to display him at his best.

Maybe if he talked about his work in more detail, he’d forget his self-consciousness.

“And what kind of cattle are they?”

“Why, they’re Braford cattle, most of ’em.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of that breed of cattle.”

“That means they’re part Brahma, part Hereford. Braford.”

He’d warmed up a little, but not much. “And how big is the herd?”

“Oh, it’s plenty big.”

“Perhaps you could describe the ranch,” Karma said encouragingly.

He smiled genuinely for the first time since the interview had started. “Well, there’s a big old house. Not real old, mind you. My daddy built it in fifty-eight, so it’s got what they call mod cons. It overlooks a pond where you can see ibises and great blue herons and sometimes a little ‘gator that we call Abner. Cute little guy. ‘Course, Abner could be a girl. Hard to tell. There’s a barn beyond the live oak trees, and you can just barely see it through the Spanish moss. That’s where the horses stay, and once we had some goats. They sure were fun to raise. And—”

He went on about the chickens that his mother had kept and how he liked to gun his pickup through the ditches, and all Karma could think of was that now that she’d gotten him started, he was going to be hard to shut up. His face was lit up, alive, and he was so sexy when he talked about something that was clearly near and dear to his heart. She couldn’t imagine why this man hadn’t been scooped up by some girl, someplace, some time ago.

“And I guess that’s about all you’ll be wanting to hear about the Diamond B Ranch.” He looked slightly embarrassed.

“Our clients might like to know more about Okeechobee City,” she prodded gently.

“Well, Florida is a major beef producer in this country. Lots of grass up Okeechobee way, and it grows lush and green all year ’round. Why, the western states have nothing on us, since we had our own range wars, rustling, and fence-cutting to worry about back in the late 1800s. Life on the north side of the lake has calmed down a tad now, but it’s still cow country. And how do I fit in? Admirably. Right now, I’m just one lonesome cowboy lookin’ for a wife,” he said.

“Your hobbies? The things you like to do in your spare time?”

“I don’t know if you want to hear about that.” He gazed down at his feet.

“Of course we do. Our clients like to get an idea of what they might be talking about on a date if they choose to follow up on you.”

“Oh, okay, then I might as well tell you. I like to watch birds. That’s my hobby.”

She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d said he liked to practice bull riding or steer roping or even sky diving, but bird watching? There was no way she would have guessed that this big rawboned cowboy was interested in birds, of all things. She had to admit that she was fascinated.

“I like to get up in the morning, walk out into the sunrise when it’s just skimming a bit of gold light over the pond. That’s when I see the best ones. I saw a rare roseate spoonbill a couple of weeks ago. They’re about as fanciful as a bird gets. You ever seen a picture of one?”

Karma shook her head, entranced.

“They’re bright pink in color, kind of like a flamingo. Prettiest thing you ever saw, but a roseate spoonbill has got a funny clown face. Almost makes you laugh when you see it.”

“I see,” said Karma. What she saw was a man who felt passionately about something that was important to him. If she had thought that Slade Braddock was shallow, and she conceded that maybe she had, she knew better now.

“But I’m sure you don’t want to hear anything more about that,” he said, lapsing into silence.

“Oh, no, I was interested. It’s just that—that we don’t like to let our videos get too long. A short interview usually lets our clients know enough to make a choice.” She got up and stopped the camera, removing the cassette. “I’ll take this back to the office and edit it. I should be able to offer this for my female clients to view next week.”

“Next week! What do you mean, next week?”

“I have to process your application. I need to check out references, edit the videotape—”

“You need to find me a wife,” he interrupted.

Her chin shot up. “That’s exactly what I’m planning to do. And if you’ll stop by the office tomorrow, I should have my psychological profile forms back from the printer. You’ll need to fill one out.”

“Psychological profile?”

“I’m a psychologist by training. The profile is something new that I’ve added to Rent-a-Yenta for the betterment of our services.”

“All right, all right. I’ll fill out the form. But what am I supposed to do between now and the time you set up my first date?”

Karma looked at him. She looked at the water and the sunset and the boats out on the bay. She looked back at Slade and said the first thing that popped into her head.

“You could have your chakras read,” she said.