Meet Me in Tahiti

Chapter Twenty-One

At. Last.

For all of her imaginings back in Hawke’s Cove of Finn with those other, bolder, hotter girls, Zoe had not anticipated what his kiss would do to her.

The absolute scorch of it. The claim of it: you’re mine. The tingling of her skin, the thrumming in her veins, the deliriously excruciating tightening of her nipples, as though she’d woken from a hundred Sleeping Beauty years, suddenly, vibrantly, brilliantly alive. And if she’d thought he’d given her the shivers before? Well...just well! She was a mess. A wonderful, glorious, lick-me-all-over-immediately mess.

He’d do it, too. Lick her all over. His eyes, so slumberously hot and hooded, told her he wanted to—and that he’d know how to make her beg for more.

How about a little reciprocity? You’re not the only one who’s been waiting, you know. She wanted to laugh at the primness of those words. What she’d really wanted to say was, Touch every inch of me, with your hands and your mouth and your tongue, come inside me because you were always meant to be there, a part of me, and I want you with everything I have, everything I am, everything I ever want to be.

“Actually, Finlay, I do know what we should do,” she said, at the exact moment her phone pinged with an incoming email.

The screen, face up and glowing on the table, told her—told them both because Finn was looking at it too—that an email had arrived from [email protected] and she wanted to bang her head on it. Not! Now!

Finn blew out a long breath as he blinked and blinked, as though he were waking from the same hundred-year sleep that had held her in its thrall. And then he smiled at her. The slow, diffident, crooked smile of old that had made the chip in his tooth endearing even though everyone knew he’d got it in a fight in which he’d knocked two of the other guy’s teeth right out.

She wanted to touch his mouth, feel that chip in his tooth with her fingers the way she just had with her tongue, the way that had delighted her because it meant this was no fairy tale, it was real, he was real, this was happening.

“Better get that, huh,” he said with a dip of his head that was almost shy. “I’ll check in with Aiata about whether the boat can...maybe...come back for us?” He shrugged, delectably uncertain. “I mean, if you want to stay here a while.”

“Yes, I’d like to stay for a while,” she said, sounding way too eager but so what. If there was a time to be eager, it was now, here, tonight.

“Zoe, just to be absolutely clear...” Another of those uncertain shrugs. “I’m twelve years past being in the friend zone.”

Twelve years past. So Malie had been right after all? The enigmatic, dangerous, hot-and-cold, sweet-and-angry, push-pull Finn Doherty could have been hers, hers, and she’d missed the signs. She wanted to weep. Wanted to shout with joy. Wanted tomelt and laugh and...and exult, wallow, rejoice, sing. Wanted everything.

“You understand what I’m saying?” he said, so serious.

“Yes,” she whispered, and then repeated, “Yes,” stronger and louder to make sure he heard, he knew.

A searing moment. A glowing look, a wordless promise of more.

And then he smiled, and nodded, and strode off.

Zoe sighed giddily as she snatched up her phone and read the message from her parents. Then reread it. Read it again.

A tingle at the back of her neck, a hint of soap in the air, told her Finn had returned, but she nevertheless started when he said, “Trouble?” because she felt guilty reading an email from her parents with him standing there.

“Just an email from...” she hesitated, but Finn had already seen who it was from so, “my parents.”

“Let me guess. Use sunblock during the day, wrap up warmly at night, be careful crossing the street, eat your greens, don’t hang around with that Finn Doherty because everyone knows he’s only interested in one thing.”

She laughed. “Are you only interested in one thing?”

There was the smile, the glow, the heat, that promise. “Depends how you classify one thing.”

One thing. The one thing was her. She laughed again, at the absolute wonder of it. “There’s nothing in there about sunblock, crossing the street, wrapping up at night, or eating my greens.”

“Uh-oh! Armageddon must be on approach!”

“Maybe, if they dare to read them!” she said, and realized that of course he had no idea what she was talking about. “My journals. They found some of them under the loose floorboard in my bedroom.”

“Under the floorboard? Were they looking for buried treasure?”

“Got it in one. My journals are the treasure. I hid them because...well, because they were... Actually, there were two years’ worth under the floorboards from that summer until...until the accident.” Oh. The memory. There. Floating. Waiting. Taunting. Writing that last entry. About the summer ball, her plan to live a new life, the grand deflowering scheme that hadn’t happened.

“Zoe?” Finn, crouching beside her chair, holding out his hand. She wanted to take that hand, wanted to press it to her heart, but another memory crowded into her head. Finn, holding out his hand, no, both hands, in her hospital room, pleading with her, pleading. And she was shouting, shouting for the parents who didn’t want him anywhere near her, and they were racing in to save her, save her from Finn.

No! Not now, when things were so perfect! Go away.

“They’re remodeling the house,” she said, trying desperately to bring herself back to the present, make the email inconsequential because that was what it was. “Making a wing for me. Wheelchair-friendly, my own entrance, the works.” Inconsequential...and yet his smile faded, his outstretched hand dropped.

“How about you tell me what your parents said about me in that email, Zoe,” he said quietly.

And of course he’d think they’d said something, something bad, something to pull her away from him. How to fix it? How? “Nothing. Nothing, really, they were too busy extolling the virtues of their floor plan to mention anything else.” The truth. The absolute truth. And because it was the truth, they were losing this moment. It was dying before her eyes, because he believed her.

“Nothing,” he repeated, and his face blanked, closing her out.

He gestured to Little Micky. “Time for you to board.”

“But aren’t we...? I mean, don’t you want to...? That is, isn’t the boat going to...?” She covered her face with her hands, groaned into them, came up trying to laugh because of course that was what she did when she got muddled up, but she didn’t quite make it.

“No, yes, no,” he said, interpreting as expertly as always, but coolly, without apparent interest. “The skipper has to clock off after this trip and Aiata needs me to stay until all the food trucks are locked up.”

No, yes, no. Zoe tried to assign them in her head so they would mean what she wanted them to mean. No, they weren’t staying. Yes, he wanted to stay with her. No, the boat wasn’t coming back. Oh God, what should she do?

“But how will you get back to Poerava if the boat isn’t returning?”

“I make my own way, Zoe.” Did she imagine that slight emphasis on the I? An emphasis that had those words You’re lost, Zoe, and you don’t even know it ringing in her ears. “I’d offer to push you—these ramps aren’t as steady as the ones at Poerava—but I see Cristina is disembarking.” His lips twisted in that cynical excuse for a smile, the one she’d hadn’t seen since her first night on Tiare Island, at the cocktail party. “She came back for you, which I guess was always the plan. The cavalry arriving. Playing it safe after all.”

And as Zoe wheeled herself forlornly toward the boat, she thought about truth and lies, and why she hadn’t told anyone from back home about him, and why she hadn’t googled him the way he’d googled her, and she remembered what Finn had said on Motu Marama.

I did want to know if you were engaged or married or living with someone. And I absolutely searched for the answers on Google.

So you lied.

Yeah. I do that sometimes.

“As it happens, Finn, so do I,” she said softly, echoing what she’d told him then. And then, still more softly, “I lie to myself, every single day.”

Her own wing. In her parents’ mansion. In Hawke’s Cove.

Finn let those facts settle in his head and came up with the only possible conclusion: she was going home.

Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if the touch she’d decided on had been something simple like a brush of her hand against his arm. She could have chosen to live in Hawke’s Cove, or Sydney, the Congo, Finland, wherever, and he liked to think he would have got over it, over her.

But she’d kissed him, she’d chosen to kiss him...and in that miraculous moment everything had changed.

At least he’d thought it had. He’d seen not the past but the future, he’d forgotten about achieving closure in favor of seizing an opening he hadn’t dared to believe was possible. And so he’d gone to Aiata to talk about boat transfers. Aiata’s knowing smile hadn’t bothered him. He hadn’t cared that he was so transparent. He was going to stay with Zoe under the stars and talk and laugh and dream and make love for as long as she wanted.

And then the crash, falling from the stars to earth.

One email from her parents, that was all it took, and she hadn’t even been able to take his hand. He swore Noel and Selena Tayler were his nemeses.

He paced restlessly across the sand, telling himself to let it go, because it was not fate, that it had never been fate that she’d moved to Sydney, that she’d turned up here. It wasn’t fate, otherwise how could he have decided to buy a property in bloody Scotland when he could have bought a property a stone’s throw from Hawke’s Cove, where Zoe was about to live.

Not. Fate.

Let. Go.

And yet...the lovely, subtle scent of her was in the air, and he craved it.

He closed his eyes, relived the kiss, felt her hands on his face, saw the glow in her eyes. For him. Felt the shiver tremble through her. For him.

He opened his eyes. He hadn’t imagined those things. They were real. Not a fairy tale. And he’d be damned if he let her parents drag him away this time.

He threw back his head and gazed at the sky, at the stars. Remembered that night on the beach, when they’d found the white pearl. Spinning tales about mermaids. Lovesick Mathey throwing himself off a cliff.

Dammit, why not throw himself off a cliff?

And just like that he was back in the long war. He was going into battle for Zoe. And if anyone knew about fighting battles it was him. Every day of his whole life had felt like a battle to the death. Literally, in his mother’s case. Well, he’d lost that battle, but he wasn’t going to lose this one. He’d take on anything, anyone, anywhere, to have Zoe. If he had to win over her parents, he’d do it. If he had to become best friends with those girlfriends of hers, he’d do it. If he had to move back to Hawke’s Cove, well, he’d do that too.

Time to go home.

He pulled out his phone, called Gina, waited impatiently for her to pick up.

She sounded sleepy as she said his name, “Finn?”

“Yes, listen, Gina—”

“Wait a minute, let me get up.”

“Get up? But it’s nine o’clock!”

“Yes, oh,” she said wryly.

She covered the mouthpiece, said something. He heard a deep rumble in response, tested the concept of Gina being with someone else, found he was glad that she was moving on.

Moving on. Not looking back. What he had to do. No more talk of time traveling to the past.

A rustle, the click of a door closing, then she was back. “OK, what’s the problem? Aside from the obvious fact that—again—you’re not on your way to the UK.”

“I’m sorry, Gina, if I’d known you were with someone—”

“Just tell me what the problem is so I can get back to him.”

“Not a problem, just a decision.”

“A decision?”

“Buy the property in Devon.”

“But you said Scotland!”

“And I’m changing my mind.”

“You’re a pain in the—”

“Yeah, I know I am. But come on, you know it’s the one you want to buy.”

“Fine. Fine! But don’t make plans for tomorrow, I’m sending you a bunch of legal documents. And don’t bother telling me you’re flying out in the morning. Talk about the boy who cried wolf!”