Никки Логан – First Love, Second Chance: Friends to Forever / Second Chance with the Rebel / It Started with a Crush... (страница 8)

Beth’s discomfort at being so debased only birthed a raw, shining affection deep in his gut—a feeling he hadn’t allowed for a long, long time. He laughed to dislodge the glow deep within, to sever the golden filaments that threatened to re-establish between them.

He laughed to save himself from himself.

Then he locked his jaw and forced his attention back onto the only female out here who deserved his sympathy.

The ocean was full of water. What were a few drops more? And Beth was incredibly overheated. The idea of taking a quick swim before. Well, it wasn’t the worst idea in the world.

She waded out into the deeper water, waist height, and peeled off Marc’s oversized fleecy sweatshirt before bundling it high above her head to keep it dry. Then she slowly lowered her body up to her neck in the cold Southern Ocean. The frigid kiss of liquid on parched skin made her shiver. Cool ocean water rinsed away dried sweat. She tipped her head all the way back until cold water washed around her ears.

Bliss.

‘Turn around!’ she shouted back to Marc, onshore. Yes, it was pointless but it felt very necessary. He complied, busying himself with the whale, but she was sure his whole body was lurching with laughter.

Sure, laugh at the spectacle. Nice. Her humiliation was probably a gift to him.

She swapped the sweater into a raised hand, carefully unfastened her jeans with the other and tugged them down single-handed, muttering the whole time. There was no way she was going to repeat Marc’s wetsuit trick. She may have done some low things in her life but there were some barrel bottoms even she wouldn’t scrape.

Getting her jeans down single-handed was one thing but getting them back on when she was finished, wet and underwater.

‘Oh, no.’ Beth looked urgently between Marc and the great expanse of nothing around them and realised there was no way—nowhere—she was going to be able to get out of this water with dignity.

‘Come on, Beth. I’m doing all the work here,’ Marc complained from his side of the whale.

For crying out loud! She wriggled left and then right and eventually stepped free of her adhesive jeans, trapping them on the ocean floor between her feet and standing fully up. Then she slid Marc’s enormous hoodie back on over her cotton blouse. Its thickness cut out some of the sun’s glare and pressed her wet blouse more tightly to her, cooling her even more. With one hand, she held the sweater high of the waterline and then she hooked her jeans up out of the water with a foot, into her free hand.

Then she started wading back to shore, barelegged. Her underwear was no worse than a bikini bottom, after all. Just because it was flouncy …

Just because it was Marc.

Her heart fluttered wildly, imagining his reaction to her stick-thin legs. The last decade and the abuses she’d put her body through really hadn’t done her any favours. She stiffened her spine and trod ashore as though this had been her plan all along, letting his sweater slip back down to mid-thigh, and then laid her wrecked jeans out to dry on the sand high above the tide mark next to their bag of supplies. Her eyes instinctively fell on it, knowing what lay within, pulsing like a dark heart. And what lay within what lay within.

Walk away.

The thickness of the sand hid the unsteadiness of her gait. Not that Marc would have noticed; he was looking everywhere but at her long bare legs. The whale. The horizon. The sky. The extra delay probably irritated him if he couldn’t even meet her eyes.

That didn’t help her mood any. ‘Okay. I’m back. What was so urgent?’

He waited until she got behind the whale before letting his eyes rest back on her. Then he cleared his throat. ‘I’m going to try and dig a trench around her,’ he said, indicating the now dangerously still whale. ‘If I can get my snatch-strap around her, maybe we can drag her out a bit further.’

‘Will it hold?’

‘It pulls my Land Cruiser; it should tow a small whale.’

Beth frowned. ‘Is digging under her safe?’

‘I’ll trench in front, then we’ll try and saw the strap through the sand beneath her.’ His hands mimicked the action, the cords in his wrists and forearms flexing with the motion. It briefly flitted through her mind that those bulging muscles could probably tow the whale to sea all by themselves.

Beth shook her head. ‘No way. She must weigh half a ton. That sand will be too compressed.’

For a tiny moment he looked at her with a hint of admiration. Pleasing him had always pleased her. Even now. The slightest of glows leached out from somewhere deep inside her. But then he dropped heavy lids down over his eyes and the connection was lost.

‘I’ve been thinking about that. If we can time it with the suck of the wash back out to sea it might loosen the sand just enough. It’s worth a try. But we need to be ready for high tide.’

‘What happens then?’

‘We try and refloat her.’

‘By ourselves?’ Her voice sounded like a squeak, even to her.

‘If we get lucky, the cavalry will arrive with a boat to tow her back out.’

‘And if we don’t?’

Steady eyes regarded her. ‘If we don’t, I hope you’re stronger than you look.’

CHAPTER THREE

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.