Tattered Innocence
Chapter 1
Rachel hot-footed it across the glittering sand of the Dolphin View Restaurant lot, too-new sandals clenched in her hand. The denim of her skirt caught above her knees and shortened her stride. She slowed her breath. Hyperventilating wouldn’t help her ace this interview, and crewing on The Smyrna Queen was her only way out.
Worn work boots appeared on the dirty sand in front of her. “Rachel?”
Her gaze panned upward over faded jeans, carpenter’s belt, paint-splattered T-shirt, and stopped at toffee eyes trained on her. Her breath hitched. She’d been prepared for an old-salt captain, not a Diet Coke commercial. Hot sand scorched the soles of her feet, and she burrowed one foot toward cooler sand and balanced the other on a big toe.
She held out her hand, squinting at him. “Rachel Martin.” Her heart hammered like it had when she interviewed for her first and only job—high school athletic secretary—five years ago. But she only had to convince him she could sail, not manage details for nineteen sports.
He glanced at her hand but didn’t take it. A muscle tensed in his jaw. “Jake Murray.”
Palm fronds rustled in the May breeze.
She dropped her hand, swallowing his slight, and dug deeper in the dirty sand with her toes. First mate was the only job listed in the News and Observer classifieds she qualified for, and she needed this job to untangle herself from Bret. Did she expect doing the right thing to be easy?
His pale curls moved in a puff of hot breeze as he frowned at her bare feet. “I’m starved. Let’s go inside.” A halo of chin stubble sparkled in the sun. He shoved his hands into his pockets and strode toward the restaurant, his shoulders hunched.
The screen door banged behind him. A weather-beaten, Best Fried Seafood on the Florida Atlantic Coast creaked on a sign overhead.
Rachel marched toward the smells of grease and fish. She dropped her sandals on the Dolphin-shaped mat, slid gritty feet into them, and pushed through the fingerprint-smeared door. At three, the place was empty, except for a woman peeling shrimp in front of the fan, her support hose rolled into knee-highs.
Jake moved from the counter and through the back door without casting a glance in her direction.
The counter guy scratched the grouper tattoo on his bicep and yelled, “One super-deluxe combo basket, two sweet teas.”
At least he ordered something I like. And paid for it. She stepped onto the deck and spotted Jake facing the seawall where a beater fishing boat was moored.
His fingers drummed on the picnic table, his eyes slits above an anchor-hard jaw.
Rachel slid onto the wooden bench across from him.
He coughed and glowered at her as if it were her fault she’d caught him brooding.
Okay, so there were worse things than an emo boss.
Jake pierced her with his eyes. “Sail?”
Everything rode on this answer. She took a deep breath. “My dad taught me and my brother to sail. I was the one who caught the bug. I have a Sunfish stowed on a friend’s lawn on the Indian River. Sail every chance I get. I’ve sailed a Catalina 27 a couple times.” If he was looking for big boat experience, she was screwed. “When you learn on a small boat, you have to grasp wind dynamics to stay out of the drink. It makes you a better sailor.” Her voice went up at the end as if she doubted her own theory.
The grouper-tattooed guy plunked a heaping basket of seafood in the middle of the table with one hand and set down Styrofoam cups with the other. He wiped thick fingers on his starched apron. “Enjoy.”
The aroma made her mouth water.
Jake bit into a piece of fish and cast his eyes toward the awning shading them. A moan of pleasure escaped as he chewed.
She twisted curls up off her neck to let the breeze off the Intercoastal dry the sweat as she popped a scallop into her mouth. She sat back to savor the Dolphin’s magic.
Jake sprinkled the basket, and salt danced on the grease paper. “Why do you want to crew on The Smyrna Queen?”
Rachel gazed at tiny whitecaps the wind kicked up on the water. “I want to taste the salt spray on a long tack. I want to live the ocean’s moods—summer squalls, flat as glass without a breath of wind, even the big blows. I want water between me and—New Smyrna Beach.” She wished she could bite back the words. Jake didn’t need to know she was running.
Jake cocked a brow.
Don’t ask.
He shrugged and leaned his elbows on the rough wood of the table. “The Smyrna Queen is a sixty-eight-foot ketch. She was built thirty-one years ago, according to her plumbing fittings.”
Rachel stared at the pale hair curling on Jake’s forearms, willing him not to notice how desperate she was. “How big is your crew?”
Jake stretched his lips into something like a grin. “Two. Captain, first mate.”
“Two people can sail a sixty-eight-foot boat?”
“I billed the cruises as ‘hands-on,’ so we’ll get help from the guests. Besides, I rigged her to be sailed by two people when necessary.” Jake wiped his mouth and tossed his napkin onto the table. “The Queen’s booked through the end of the year, mostly five-day vacation cruises starting two weeks from today.”
“You filled your cruises in this sleepy little town? Amazing.”
“I majored in marketing.”
“I majored in boredom.” “The defense mechanism to hide her dyslexia and lack of college kicked in before she realized she’d spoken, and she cringed.
Jake’s fingers drummed again on the planks of the table. “Does crewing bore you?”
“I haven’t been this wowed since an accordion player marched up the center aisle at church.” Had she come down with Tourette’s? If she didn’t put a lid on her sarcasm, she’d sabotage the interview.
Jake’s eyes iced over. “Another church girl.”
She lifted one shoulder. Her stomach quivered with panic. After all her lip, would she lose the job because she’d grown up in church? That was almost laughable. If anyone was a poster-girl for bad choices, she was.
Jake stared at her as if she were a rotting fantailed mullet.
She squirmed on her bench, feeling like he could see inside her. Why had she let her innocence go so easily? Could she ever recover the five-and-a-half-year-old who pressed her gooey, newborn brother in chubby arms against her Cinderella T-shirt?
He blew out a breath. “Fifteen wannabes bailed when they heard cooking was part of the job. What about you?”
“I have a shoe box full of yellow ribbons from 4-H cooking competitions.”
“Yellow?”
Take it or leave it. She was trying to shove her way out of something she shouldn’t have flirted with in the first place. But if Jake wouldn’t be shoved….
He shifted on his bench. His eyes darted around the deck and the tiki bar. The door banged behind a man with a white ponytail and an earring hooked through the brown leather of his ear.
“All the bunks are rented out except for my cabin.”
Rachel’s gaze snapped to Jake’s. “So, if I want this job—” Across the deck two teens she recognized from the high school plunked down. Rachel lowered her voice to a whisper. “I have to sleep with you? I thought I’d heard all the lines from B―”
His eyes darkened to granite. “I’m talking about a job—nothing more.” His look said she’d sprouted cystic acne and two hundred pounds. “You’d have to share a small cabin with me, but you would have your own sleeping area and as much privacy as possible. Do you want the job or not?”
Well, okay, then, as long as we understand each other. But he’d made her mad. “I told you on the phone I wanted the job.” She forced the hard edge out of her voice. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
He let out his breath. “If I hire you, you’ll need to plan the week’s menu, grocery shop―”
“I think I know all the steps in cooking.” What was with her passive-aggressive mouth? This job would give her a clean start. But part of her clawed for Bret.
He eyed her. “I’ll let you know about the job.” He stood, tossed bills on the table, and walked away.
She watched his back lumber around the corner of the building, a wrestler leaving the mat. All the air released from her lungs. Who had pinned whom?
Chapter 2
Rigging thrummed against each mast in the steady wind. Rachel glanced over her shoulder and down the pier. Did the sun catch on the bumper of a moving car? Her hand went to the silver heart on a chain around her neck. She shaded her eyes and squinted through the bobbing boats out to the blacktop.
No. Bret probably didn’t even know she’d quit at the high school. Why would he come after her? She swallowed the disappointment stuck in her throat and continued out the graying boards of the dock. Beyond, clouds raced across the Intercoastal.
She scanned the boats lining the pier for The Smyrna Queen. There. Her eyes stopped at the bold black letters on a freshly painted aqua hull four slips ahead. She took a step closer. Then two. Was she really going to do this? Her duffel’s cord dug into her shoulder. She shifted the bag.
Her gaze flicked up the mismatched aluminum and wood masts and down over The Smyrna Queen’s wide middle and boxy cabins to the chipping rust-red paint beneath her waterline—a biker-chick dressed for the prom. A quiver of excitement fluttered under Rachel’s ribs. In some weird way, the boat’s less than pristine condition reminded her of herself.
Rachel squared her shoulders and stepped aboard, half expecting the Queen to belch motor oil and hemp. But there was only the sway of the deck under Rachel’s feet—and a cradling of sorts, as though the Queen, too, recognized their kinship.
Voices drifted from the cockpit in the center of the boat. Rachel stopped beside the aft cabin, not wanting to interrupt. Jake leaned against the main cabin ten feet from her. His corkscrew blond curls didn’t fit his brooding expression, the same one he’d worn for her interview. A faded O’Neil T-shirt with a hole ripped in one sleeve hugged him as if he’d been wearing it since high school. It wasn’t a bad look, but she couldn’t drum up any appreciation for a guy who’d been rude every time she’d spoken to him.
Under the cockpit tarp, a vein pulsed in Jake’s neck as he spoke in low tones to a young woman whose henna hair Clairol would pay thousands to reproduce. “But I thought you showed up today, on what was supposed to be our wedding day, because you reconsidered and wanted to go through with it after all.”
Thin brows knitted in the girl’s heart-shaped face. She wrung milky, manicured hands, then ran a knuckle under the mascara of her lashes. Her pink earrings—the exact shade of her silk blouse—bounced when she moved. She reminded Rachel of a perfect porcelain doll swathed in layers of pink petticoats.
Rachel shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Should she clear her throat to let them know she’d come aboard? Across the finger pier, a Willie Nelson lookalike stood in his companionway shoving an inner tube into a bike tire.
Jake’s gaze bore into the woman. He ran the back of his hand across her cheek. “I love you, Gabrielle.”
The anguish in Jake’s voice yanked Rachel out of her pain and into his for the space of a breath. She edged toward the stern, wanting to be anywhere but listening to this conversation. Rachel stood inches from the aft cabin hatch, but if she slid it open, she’d call attention to herself.
Part of her brain registered Gabrielle’s silence. If Gabrielle loved Jake, she’d say it now. The seconds ticked by. Rachel bent over her duffle bag and stuck one hand through the opening as if digging for something vital. Jake had only hired her four days ago. Would his drama jeopardize her job?
The corner of the greeting card she’d tucked in her duffle at the last minute poked her knuckle. A teaspoon of relief eased through her. At least she didn’t have to give up her memories.
She wouldn’t let Ms. Hot Rollers elbow her out. God, I need this job. It wasn’t really a prayer, but she knew, as surely as her name was Rachel Luann Martin, God wanted her far away from New Smyrna Beach this summer and far away from the high school in the fall.
“Tell me you’ll reconsider.”
Rachel cringed at the desperation in Jake’s voice.
“We’re finished.” Gabrielle’s words sounded brittle like the thin edge of an icemaker cube.
“But—”
“Is it closure you need?” Gabrielle’s voice rose at the end with hysteria. Gabrielle gripped Jake by the arms and kissed him. Jake’s hands came up to grab hold of her, but Gabrielle jerked away. “Goodbye, Jake. I’m leaving for Arizona. Now.” The heels of her sandals clicked across the deck and down the finger pier. She marched, stiff shouldered, down the dock.
“Stow your gear in the aft cabin.”
Jake’s terse voice veered Rachel’s gaze to his.
He glared at her and mashed his ball cap further down till it shielded his eyes from her. He moved through the fore cabin companionway, a red bandana trailing from the pocket of his faded jeans.
“So, I still have the job?”
“Congratulations.” Jake disappeared into the main cabin. Sarcasm hung in the air like the sulfur smell of mangrove.
Humid air puffed at her as a speedboat barreled by. She did the tiniest two-step before the lump lodged back in her throat. She heaved open the wooden hatch of the small cabin at the stern of the boat. The smell of fresh paint hung in the gloom, and she felt for a light switch. An energy-saver bulb slowly warmed the cabin with light.
To port a full-sized bed tapered toward the stern with the shape of the boat. She tugged open the bins under the bed and found them full of neatly folded clothes, shoes, towels and linens.
Under the starboard chart table that had been converted into a bunk, she discovered an empty bin. She up-ended her duffle. A privacy curtain had been strung between deck and bunk.
She peeked into the shower and head on the port side. Like Jake’s bins, everything was orderly, clean. At least the guy wasn’t a slob.
She popped open the closet opposite the head. Suits. Nice suits. She slipped a finger under a lapel and read Hugo Boss on the inside breast pocket. Why would a ship’s captain have a closet full of suits?
She eyed the three-foot walkway separating their bunks. Between Jake’s angst and her own, nothing would threaten her black and blue virtue.
She found Jake in the dining nook with his head in his hands.
“I’ve got the menu planned, and I’m going to Winn Dixie. I need money.”
Jake didn’t move.
Okay, so he needed to chill. She sure didn’t want to see the guy full-on bawl.
Her gaze swung to the Queen’s U-shaped galley opposite the dining nook. Beside a porthole, wire baskets of onions and apples swayed in sync with the gleaming stainless gimbaled stove and the rock of the boat. Her eyes flitted over the double sink corroding around the faucet, gold refrigerator, and green dishwasher. She opened the cupboards and took mental note of the supplies on hand.
She turned back to Jake. Beside him on the table lay an envelope and a pink card with a flower on it. Jake’s shoulders moved as he sighed, but he didn’t look up.
Rachel wandered toward the bow glancing at the bunks built into the hull—each sported privacy curtains like the one around her bed. Benches lined the cabin below the bunks. Beyond them, she found the head and shower on either side of the cabin, followed by staterooms. She pushed open a door. A double-wide bunk was tucked under the deck, graced by white eyelet shams and sunflowers splashed on forest green fabric. A breeze wafted through the porthole. Nice.
She combed fingers through her mass of wind-blown ringlets, an attempt to fit into the tidiness she saw everywhere on this boat. The excitement she’d shoved down when she first laid eyes on The Smyrna Queen popped to the surface.
She stood at Jake’s elbow. “So, do you need anything from the grocery?”
Bloodshot eyes looked up at her. “Beef jerk-y.” He pulled a debit card from his wallet, and handed it to her. “Two, six, four, one.”
#
Jake stared at the pink flap on the envelope Gabrielle had given him as the dregs of his hope died. If there was one thing he’d learned about Gabs, she had a will stronger than epoxy. She’d climbed into her Beemer and was probably halfway to the panhandle by now.
She hadn’t said it, but he knew the real reason she broke up with him. She was too good for him. Too rich. He’d been an idiot for thinking he’d break through the six-foot thick Plexiglas wall between blue collar and white collar he’d been banging his head against all his life.
Pain had encapsulated in him like he’d swallowed a plastic prize bubble from the arcade. Today’s closure lanced open the bubble. Anger oozed into his body, propelling him out of the dining nook and onto his feet. He yanked the companionway steps up and wrenched the engine room door open.
Was that Gabrielle’s scent? He inhaled deeply and realized it was the candle in a glass jar she’d given him for his birthday. He’d never burned it. Fire hazard.
He grabbed the candle from the catchall nailed to the bulkhead, tossed it in one hand, and hurled it as hard as he could through the engine room door. It skimmed the engine and shattered against the planking over his workbench, spraying glass in all directions.
He ducked through the doorway as the candle galumphed to the edge of the bench and fell to the floor. He slammed the wax glob against the bulkhead with his boot. The cloying smell of flowers filled the cabin.
#
Rachel jostled the paper grocery bags on the finger pier in front of The Smyrna Queen to get a better grip.
Jake swabbed the teakwood deck, his chest slicked with sweat. He glanced up and narrowed his eyes.
He was surly―and better looking than a guy had a right to be. She tapped her foot on the finger pier, balancing the two bulging grocery bags. “Didn’t your mama teach you anything?”
“What?”
“Be a gentleman.”
Jake blew out his breath and dried his hands with the T-shirt hanging from his waistband. He crossed the gangplank and grabbed the bags out of her arms.
“The meat and fish are in these. They need to go into the freezer.”
Silence.
“Jake,” she said to his back.
He stopped halfway across the cockpit, but didn’t turn back.
“Because Gabrielle ditched you doesn’t mean you’re a jerk.”
Jake glared across the Queen’s deck at her. “You don’t know squat.”
She whipped the slim package of beef jerky out of her back pocket and fired it at his head. “Be a jerk, then.”
Jake’s eyes widened before the missile beaned him on the head and ricocheted to the galley below. He stared at her for a full second. A smile tugged at one corner of his mouth, the first she’d seen since she met him.
She lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t mess with me. I’ve got a brother just like you.”
She pivoted and walked up the finger pier, thoughts of Hall stinging her like man-of-war tentacles. When had she last seen her brother? Even though he was a senior at the high school, they hadn’t spoken in months.
“My baby,” she’d called Hall as she clutched him to her after Mama delivered him on the kitchen floor. With Mama and Daddy at work all day and Granny too tired in her seventies to chase a little boy, Rachel had relished mothering Hall. Until things had heated up with Bret.
#
Jake swiped the mop across the Queen’s weathered teak deck, shaking his head at Rachel as she disappeared into the conglomeration of sun-baked hoods along Riverside Drive. She’d actually distracted him from Gabs for thirty seconds.
He glanced at Leaf under a makeshift awning on the next boat and almost called him Gramps, like he had a hundred times. But the only things Leaf had in common with Gramps were his age and a penchant for saving electricity.
Leaf’s ponytailed head bobbed. “I like your new girl.”
Jake smiled in spite of himself. “You would.”
Leaf pulled an orange out of a dirty plastic Winn Dixie bag and tossed it to Jake. “Found these this morning on my rounds.” The guy cruised the neighborhoods on his rattletrap Schwinn looking for free food nearly every day.
“Hang on.” Jake jogged down the companionway and back up. “Catch.” He tossed the beef jerky into Leaf’s bony hand. “Trade you.”
Leaf squinted at the ingredients. “Stuff’s poison.”
“Stuff’s protein. Eat it.”
Rachel walked toward them, her arms loaded with grocery bags. He should tell her about the cart at the end of the dock she could use to carry supplies. Naw. More interesting to see what she’d say when she found out. He grinned as he watched her stride up the pier.
Details he hadn’t intentionally recorded paraded through his mind as he sloshed the mop back into the bucket. Rachel spoke an octave lower than Gabrielle. Sitting across from her at the Dolphin View, he’d noticed her eyes, like her hair, were brown flecked with gold. She came across confident, but freckles dusted the tops of her cheeks and nose with vulnerability.
She’d convinced him that she loved sailing. But she wanted out of New Smyrna Beach, too. He glanced up at Rachel’s angular frame and riotous curls as she pushed through the gate at the end of the pier. He shrugged. The girl was Gabs’ polar opposite. Good.
Leaf motioned his head toward Rachel as she headed up the dock with another load of groceries. “You should be grateful to have her.”
“Yeah. But I’m not.”
Chapter 3
Jake barked orders for the three days since Rachel had started working for him. She should be ticked. Instead, she wanted to thank him for chasing away a thousand thoughts she didn’t want to think. Since sunup, they pinged around the boat doing last minute chores. The menu had been posted, bunks made, the electric and water lines disconnected.
Rachel stuffed the last sail cover into a nylon bag and tossed it into the bin under the port cockpit bench, her last task completed. She wiped sweat from her forehead with the back of her arm. Sadness crawled back into her chest.
The old man on the sloop in the next slip pared a mango with his pocket knife and flipped peels into the water one at a time.
I don’t have to be happy about doing the right thing. But at least I’m one step closer to the sister Hall used to be proud of. She blinked, and for a moment, she was sprinting beside a kindergarten Hall, helping him balance on his two-wheeler for his first solo after the training wheels came off. Sprinting away from Bret was one last thing she could do to launch Hall into life.
In the wait for their guests’ arrival, like the pause between an orchestra’s tuning and the first note of a symphony, Rachel peered over her clipboard at Jake. He rubbed a smudge off the stainless steel ship’s wheel with the hem of his T-shirt, grief and determination welded on his face. For a moment his pain dislodged hers.
A speeding Boston Whaler buzzed past the Queen’s stern, belching exhaust. Its wake jostled the Queen and clanged rigging against the masts. Rachel glanced toward the pier. A boy, maybe a second grader, climbed over a dock box, then shimmied up a light pole. His tow-headed little sister plunked somebody’s clam shell collection into the Intercoastal with her toe. Her laugh rattled the longing for a child inside Rachel like a noisy sheet of aluminum foil.
Rachel’s gaze followed the children on their Family Circle exploration of the pier. Behind them, a man with a white buzz cut, who might have played college basketball forty years ago, strode up the dock with an olive-skinned woman in a poodle skirt. She pushed up oversized, red plastic glasses on her nose and squinted at the Queen’s name.
The man turned up the finger pier. “Whoa kids. Hold up. This is where we get off.”
The woman followed him, keeping her gaze laser-beamed on the kids.
The man stepped aboard, and Jake held out his hand. “Welcome aboard The Smyrna Queen.”
“Lyle and Angela Rosebrock.” He shook Jake’s hand and tossed a grin toward the children. “And miscellaneous progeny.”
“Jake Murray.”
Rachel nudged an elbow into Jake’s ribs.
“And first mate, Rachel Martin.”
Rachel waved at the children who stood on the finger pier. “You must be Katie and Cole.” She’d read the twelve names on the passenger list so many times she had them memorized.
Katie nodded shyly. “Mamaw, will you hold my hand so I can get on the big boat?”
Her grandmother laughed. “After skating up and down these docks like a hellion, now you’re scared?”
Cole lay on his stomach and hung his head and ankles off either side of the finger pier as if he wanted to examine the barnacles growing on the pilings under the dock.
Rachel held her hand out toward the little girl.
Katie bunny-hopped across the gangplank, all fear gone.
Rachel didn’t want much, a couple of kids like these. Or three or four. She swallowed hard. “Come on, Cole, I’ll show you the engine.”
Cole’s legs stopped kicking up and down, but his chin still hooked over the edge of the pier.
Rachel talked to the crown of his head. “You’ll want to make sure the Queen is seaworthy for her first cruise. We’ll have to flip the steps up to get to the engine room. Not my favorite job.” When Cole peeked up, she shrugged. “You can flip the steps if you want.”
Cole scooted his legs under him and popped up in one motion.
Can I keep these two? Rachel tamped down the longing in her chest. At twenty-three, she had decades left for having babies. Never mind the years she’d already waited since tucking in Hall.
“What?”
Rachel’s head popped up at the unfamiliar voice.
A brown ball of a man lumbered up the finger pier. “I’m on the maiden voyage?” His mock horror dissolved into a gale of laughter. He took the hand Jake offered. “George is the name.”
“You don’t have to worry about the Queen’s seaworthiness. She used to run drugs. Bought her at auction. She’s a tough old bird.”
George wiped sweat from his bald head and face with a wilting handkerchief. “So, all I have to worry about is the captain’s skill on his maiden voyage, eh?” He squinted at Jake.
“That’s right—second mate.” Jake slapped George on the back. “Always need somebody aboard who knows enough to worry.”
George’s chuckle floated toward Rachel as she took the children below. Okay, so Jake wasn’t always surly.
Jake’s voice filtered through the open hatch. “Check out my certification tacked to the bulkhead. I had to put in seven hundred and twenty sailing days and take seven exams to get licensed by the Coast Guard.”
In the engine room, her gaze settled on Jake’s desk. Rows of books anchored with elastic shock cords lined the hull—how-to-sail, sailboat repair and maintenance, and marketing textbooks. Her eyes caught on a dog-eared Bible. A bizarre book for a guy who nearly pulled her job for mentioning church.
Katie’s arms circled around her and squeezed. “I like you.”
Rachel smashed the mommy-ache into a tiny foil ball. Bret sure wasn’t going to daddy-up for the job.
#
An hour later, Rachel could almost feel Bret ripping from her like a scab as the Queen sliced through the ocean, the mouth of the Intercoastal shrinking behind them. She clung to a forestay, the salty wind stinging her wound.
Jake came up behind her. “I need a crewman, not a figurehead.”
“Excuse me for taking a two-minute break for the first time all day.”
“Take down the jib.”
“You’re not paying me enough to put up with your lip.”
Jake’s eyes clamped on hers. “My lip?”
Breath moved in and out of her lungs too quickly, making her lightheaded. She’d get herself fired before the first cruise ended.
His jaw clenched. He turned and stalked back to the helm.
She wasn’t angry with Jake, only provoked enough to zing him. Sparring with Jake was her personal World of Warcraft--good entertainment when you could get it. She loosed the jib halyard and brought down the sail. Sailing and the kids had already rubbed salve into her rending from Bret. If she were on speaking terms with God, she would have thanked Him.
#
Two days later, Rachel sprawled on the deck, playing “I Spy” with Katie, who was nearly swallowed up in an orange lifejacket. Cole, his hair sticking out in tufts from under his ball cap, kibitzed nearby.
“Rachel!” Jake shouted against the wind.
“What?” she yelled back.
“Check the depth. The pole is on the starboard foredeck. We draw six feet, but I want eight to ten with all this seaweed.”
Not taking time to pull a T-shirt over her Speedo swimsuit, Rachel scrambled over the top of the cabin to snatch the pole. She sounded for the bottom with quick jabs of Jake’s world’s-longest-mop-handle.
They sailed at four knots, she calculated. She called out the measurements notched into the wood, “Seven feet… seven and a half… seven and a half―”
The pole stuck fast in the mud. In a split-second reflex, Rachel clung to the stick and The Smyrna Queen sailed out from under her feet.
“Hey, wait! Jacob Murray, don’t you dare leave me here! You come back and get me this minute!” She slid toward the water.
Katie jumped up and down on the deck screeching, “Grandpa, Grandpa, Rachel lost the boat!” Rachel caught a fleeting glimpse of Cole’s white face as her feet touched water
“This water is freezing!” she yelled at the Queen’s transom. “It’s your fault, Jake. Your fault. Why didn’t you tell me there was mud down here?” Cold fingers of water climbed her ribs as she inched down the pole.
In up to her neck and treading water with one hand, her foot kicked against slimy kelp fronds. No one could hear her now. I hate seaweed. Jaws could be hiding in here.
Water lapped into her mouth and she spit out the salty taste. A chill crawled up her scalp as her hair slurped seawater, morphing into a thousand soggy ringlets.
She peered over her shoulder at the shoreline. She could swim that far if she had to. In the distance, she saw the Queen’s sails drop. The anchor would be next. At least Jake wasn’t going to leave her. But she knew he wouldn’t start the motor in this shallow water and risk getting seaweed tangled in the propellers. Did he expect her to swim for the Queen?
Several minutes later she watched him drop into the dinghy and row toward her. “Hurry up, I’m freezing!” she yelled when he rowed into earshot. She counted five seconds, watching the muscles flex across his back and arms as he stroked, until he glanced over his shoulder at her. Eons later, he coasted up beside her.
He grabbed her forearms and hauled her into the boat, his lips zipped into a white line. Rachel landed in a lump on the bottom of the dinghy. Jake braced his legs and yanked the pole from the ocean in one heave. The pole clattered where he dropped it—one end under his seat, the other oozing mud into the water behind the dinghy.
Rachel wrapped herself into a ball and narrowed her eyes at Jake as he skimmed an oar through the water with powerful strokes, spinning the bow back toward the Queen.
Before the thought fully formed in her mind, she threw herself at Jake, soaking him with her sodden hair, suit, and skin.
He fell back off the seat and caught himself before hitting his head on the bow of the boat. “What the―?”
“There. See how you like being a cryogenics experiment in this wind.”
Jake pulled himself back onto the seat, squinting at Rachel. She lifted her chin and stared over his shoulder toward the horizon.
Jake peeled off his T-shirt and flung it at her. He jerked his head. “Come here.” He slid to one side of the bench.
Rachel pulled Jake’s damp shirt over her head, poked her arms through the sleeves, and crawled onto the plank.
Jake rubbed her arms as if he were trying to sand off her gooseflesh with his callused hands. “This will warm you up.” He slapped an oar into her hands. “Stroke… stroke… stroke… stroke….”
Rachel gritted her chattering teeth and rowed. He acted like such an oaf. But maybe she’d warmed a tenth of a degree.
Applause ruffled across the afterdeck as they approached the Queen.
“You’ve got a feisty one there, Cap’n. Yes sir.” George heckled. “I wouldn’t get into a fight with her if I were you. Bet she keeps you in line.”
The others laughed with George while Katie clung to her grandpa’s hand, staring at Rachel as though she’d come back from the dead. Cole flashed his dimples at her.
Holding fast to the Queen with one hand, Jake propelled Rachel up the ladder with an iron grip under her armpit.
“Would it have killed you to join this century and spring for an electronic depth sounder?” she muttered. She kicked at him, wishing for a better angle as her toes barely connected with his ribs. The brute. A collection of bruises would appear by tomorrow.
Tremors of embarrassment or chill―she couldn’t tell which―shook her body forcing her lip between her teeth as she bumbled up the ladder and ducked into the nearby after-cabin.
Later, Jake climbed down the ladder into the cabin.
She ran the brush through her wet hair, temper cooled, chagrin settling in. “Jake?”
He grunted through the clean T-shirt he pulled over his face.
“Sorry about all the drama.”
He sat on the edge of his bunk and pulled on a sock. “Evidently, our guests find hysteria entertaining.” He finished tying his shoe and stood to leave.
Rachel studied him. She was close enough in the tiny cabin to see flecks of black in the brown of his eyes. “Gabrielle wouldn’t have put on a show?”
He climbed up the ladder. “Gabrielle’s not here.”
#
After cleaning up the galley from supper, Rachel dangled her legs over the gunwale, swinging her feet back and forth over the orange-tinted water rippling against the hull.
Jake’s voice drifted toward her. “Story from the captain tonight, kids?”
Maybe Jake would roll out another facet to his taciturn personality, one she wanted a front row seat to watch. The anchor chain creaked as she stood. The last day of their first cruise sizzled into the Atlantic as she followed Jake’s green and gold University of South Florida Sailing Team T-shirt through the open hatch.
Jake flicked the label that curled under Cole’s chin. Cole’s inside-out, backward pajama shirt reminded her of Hall at seven.
“Move over, you heffalumps.”
The kids scooted down the bunk, and Jake sat beside them.
Rachel slid between Jake and the bulkhead. Invited or not, she wasn’t missing this. Her bare arm pressed against his. Her eyes darted to his face, but he launched into a story without glancing her way.
“One day Gramps was hunting in the woods…”
Rachel leaned forward, breaking contact with Jake, to peer at the kids. Cole’s eyes sparkled, and he looked like he was holding his breath. Katie curled up inside her pink, polka-dotted nightie, wide-eyed, chewing on her fingers.
The four of them stuffed into the tiny cabin felt like a family. But they weren’t. Rachel blinked back tears, feeling silly, while Jake’s voice filled the cabin with the frantic howls of a man running from a grizzly.
Jake glanced at her. “What do you think my Gramps did, Rachel?” He shot her a what’s-wrong-with-you look.
Rachel couldn’t push any words past the tightness in her throat.
Jake shook his head as if she were a nut case and went on with the story.
She wouldn’t be so eager for the next stage of life if she didn’t miss mothering Hall. Even if she hadn’t been MIA from Hall’s life for the last several months, at eighteen, he was long over mothering.
Jake paused dramatically and finished the story. “He held the bear’s paws around the tree―until the bear starved to death.”
Katie clapped her hands. “Yay!”
“Tell us another one,” Cole said.
“Not tonight, champ.” Jake rumpled Cole’s hair. “Wrestle you for the top bunk?”
“Cool.” Cole threw himself on Jake while Katie and Rachel cleared out.
Rachel hoisted Katie to her hip in the doorway and watched Jake and Cole roll around on the bunk. Before Cole could protest, Jake had him snugly tucked into the top bunk, still smiling.
“And you, squirt.” Jake turned to Katie. “Are you going to let your big brother be the only one tucked in by the captain?”
Katie’s eyes popped open wide. She slipped out of Rachel’s arms, clambered onto the bunk, and flopped onto her pillow.
Jake pulled the sheet up to her chin and whispered something in her ear. Cole’s hair got rumpled one last time.
Rachel felt Jake’s breath on her cheek as he brushed past her in the narrow passageway. A smile played on his lips as he moved into the main salon.
“Jacob Murray, you would make a good daddy,” Rachel murmured, surprised she’d said it aloud.
His eyes darkened, and his thick, wheat-colored brows flinched together. “I used to think so.”
She sat down on the salon bench with a thud and watched him climb up the ladder and out of the cabin. Yeah, I used to think I’d make a good mom, too.
#
Rachel took the suitcase George handed up through the hatch. She didn’t want to say goodbye to George or any of their guests. She hadn’t expected to get so attached in five days.
Cole flew into Rachel’s arms where she stood in the cockpit, displacing the lump of sadness from her breastbone. Rachel peered over his shoulder at Katie and pried herself loose. “You’re hugging the stuffing out of me.”
Cole clambered onto the cabin. “I had to give you a grizzly bear hug so you’d remember me.”
“I promise I’ll never forget you, even if I live to be as old as your grandpa.” She winked at Lyle.
Cole leaped down onto the deck. “Wow!”
Katie tried to smile, but her lower lip quivered. “Will you remember me, too?” Her blond ponytail bobbed behind her.
Rachel scooped Katie up and spun her around. “I’ll remember you every time I look in the mirror because we both have the same freckles on our noses.” She set Katie down in front of her, nose-to-nose.
“I love you,” Katie said.
“I love you, too.”
Rachel blinked away tears as she watched the children ricochet down the dock after their grandparents. No matter how many books she struggled through, reading never got easier, but loving kids had never been a challenge. And they loved her back.
“You’ll make a good mom,” Jake said from where he sprawled in the corner of the cockpit.
Rachel spun toward him, warmth dousing her.
Jake mashed his captain’s hat over his eyes and half his curls.
She lay down on her stomach on the cockpit bench and rested her cheek on the cool seat cushion. “If I admit that motherhood is my preferred career choice, people look at me like I should get in line for welfare for my lack of ambition.” She scrunched her eyes shut. When would she learn to keep her mouth shut?
“If no one wanted to reproduce, humanity would end with our generation,” Jake said around the broom straw in his mouth.
She glanced at him, but he hadn’t moved. Jake wasn’t such a bad boss if you overlooked his sour disposition. A workaholic, he always seemed to show up when she needed an extra hand to get a meal on the table or was swamped in dirty pots.
What kind of man lived under the hurt?
Rachel’s arm dangled over the edge of the seat. The Queen gently bobbed. I’m glad we met, old gal.
She yawned. If you needed a friend to keep you away from the wrong guy, a biker chick boat was a good choice. Maybe she could get through these two days in port without calling Bret.
#
Jake slit open his eyes and peered at the damp lashes resting on Rachel’s face, the thick curls fanning across the cockpit cushion. Gramps would call Rachel a godsend.
He spit the tip of the broom straw he’d been chewing overboard. The first cruise had been good. Very good. Even the hole Gabs had gouged out of him felt fuzzy around the edges like an artsy photograph.
A church girl. Had God sent Rachel? With that mouth? Not a chance. He spit another piece of straw overboard.
At night in the dark, pain packed the silence between them. His pain. Hers. He didn’t know what it was, but he’d bet the Queen, Rachel had a story to tell.
