Chapter Nine
Zoe positioned herself in front of her bedroom mirror, checking her makeup and pondering whether Finn expected her to come to dinner on her own or with Cristina.
She should have asked him.
No, she shouldn’t have had to ask.
If it was work—and it was: seriously, his last words to her on the boat had been to bring her notepad—her default position was to go alone.
Work. Definitely. The dinner angle was nothing but a time management byproduct. He’d hopped into a dinghy and zoomed away at their second snorkeling spot to deal with an emergency, apparently, plus he was flying out in the morning, so it made sense for him to combine dinner (he had to eat, right?) with business. Ergo, how embarrassing if she turned up with Cristina only to find the table set for two, not three.
She peered at her reflection, noted the potential mixed message attached to wearing six extravagantly embellished hair clips to an interview, and ripped all the clips out. Time to be as restrained, as self-controlled, as Finn. Seeing her last night had to have been as much a shock to him as it was to her, but he’d kept it together masterfully compared to her unhinged babble-a-thon—which she’d compounded by treating him to a second babble-a-thon on the boat today.
She really hoped she didn’t babble over dinner, but she had to admit the possibility was there because the idea of being alone with all-grown-up Finn Doherty was unnerving. As unnerving as the sense of urgency racing through her veins, an urgency telling her that time was running out, that part of her was missing and if she didn’t find it fast she never would, and she needed that part or she’d never be whole.
The memory of that night in the hospital, perhaps...
No, it was more than that.
She’d felt the same despairing urgency before the accident. She’d felt it every time she’d seen Finn in the village after that summer, every time she’d gone across to him tripping over her words in that way that had made him laugh in the Crab Shack days but no longer did. Every time he’d waited her out with barely veiled impatience, the formidable bad boy who was too cool to associate with her now she was back at school.
The first time—a week after she’d stopped working at the Crab Shack—she’d dragged a reluctant Brad with her, only belatedly noticing that Finn’s hands were all over Shona Tucker. But there’d been no turning back—no reason to turn back, despite the sickening swoosh in her stomach. She’d introduced them, and Finn had looked at Brad over Shona’s head, then looked at Zoe, and with a jolt Zoe had realized Finn had moved on, that he had other pursuits, adult pursuits, that she was barred from.
That should have been the end, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself from going over every time she saw him. She’d been through Ava and Dora and Jen and Sally and Maeve and so many other girls. And as Finn had scrupulously, insolently, introduced her to them she’d seesawed between hope and anguish, certain she could salvage something from their old relationship even as she felt the connection between them fraying...fraying...fraying.
Until that last time, when she didn’t go over to him.
A Saturday night. She’d just got back from Ibiza and was out with her mother. They’d been planning “The Great Surprise 50th Birthday Bash of Noel Tayler” over dinner. They’d talked about the guest list and Zoe had found the intestinal fortitude to ask that Mrs. Doherty be invited. Her mother had agreed because Margaret Doherty, just home from another stint in hospital, could do with some cheering up. She only hoped the “dreadful son” wouldn’t have to accompany her—although he was so busy “gallivanting around the village with one girl after another” there was little chance of that. What a trial that boy was to his poor mother!
Finn wasn’t a trial to her, Zoe had piped up, he was a comfort to her. He was working at least three jobs because his mother couldn’t work and he wanted her to have everything she needed.
And how did Zoe know what he was doing? She hadn’t been seeing him, surely?
She’d heard it from Lily. Lily’s mother spent a lot of time with Mrs. Doherty.
Mothers often saw their children through rose-colored glasses, had been Selena Tayler’s response. Zoe had almost rolled her eyes because what color glasses did her mother think she herself was wearing?
But she hadn’t felt like rolling her eyes as they’d exited the restaurant and seen Finn standing on the opposite side of the street with his back to the wall and a girl—Jess Trewes; beautiful, smart and kind—plastered against his chest. What she’d felt like doing was scouring her eyes out of her head before scurrying away in the opposite direction because why would he want to talk to any other girl when he was with Jess Trewes? Especially a girl who was out on date night with her own mother.
Finn had caught Zoe’s eye and moved his hands to cup Jess’s bottom. Zoe had shivered just like she was doing now, and it was like a veil lifting—she knew what he’d be doing with Jess later, knew it was the same thing he’d done with all those girls only she hadn’t allowed herself to imagine it.
Her mother had said, with stinging irony, that yes, Finn Doherty was clearly a great comfort to his mother, and smoothly segued to a comparison with the far more admirable Brad Ellersley.
The thought of having sex with Brad hadn’t ever entered Zoe’s head but she’d decided on the spot that she’d lose her virginity to Brad the night of the summer ball—the night she’d already chosen to mark her liberation. Not because it was time, not because she even wanted to, but as an act of mutiny. She was going to prove to Finn, even if he’d never know what she’d done, that she was every bit the adult he was, so he could stop giving her those sneering you’re-just-a-little-girl looks.
But she hadn’t had sex with Brad.
She’d given up her virginity in an unmemorable one-night stand four years later, during which she hadn’t thought about Brad at all; all she’d thought about was how she wanted it to be over.
Would she have wanted it to be over if the man had been Finn?
Stop! Stop!
She should not be staring into a mirror like some lifeless store mannequin remembering things it was too late to change and worrying about hair clips.
Back to the here and now, if she took Finn at face value dinner tonight was just business.
If she took him at face value...
“Why shouldn’t you take him at face value?” she asked her reflection.
But almost before the question was out she had the answer: because he’d told his version of the mermaid story, with the mermaid chasing the mortal, and he’d told her about his lonely vigil on that private beach, the one he’d once called their beach.
Her heart started to pound, the shivering taking over as every receptive nerve in her body zinged with an almost unbearable intensity. And oh God, just look at her chest! She covered her breasts with her hands but her nipples stabbed her palms and she didn’t know what to do except put on a coat so he couldn’t see what he did to her when he looked at her the way he’d looked at her last night, the way he’d looked at...
The way he’d looked at all those other girls.
Slowly she dropped her hands. Stared hard at herself. Recalled the almost insolent way his eyes had traveled over her last night...
And that sense of urgency, of time running out, was swooping, swirling inside her, goading her, daring her. Finn was flying to the UK tomorrow, and tonight would be the last time she saw him. And she didn’t care if the way he looked at her was insolent as long as he looked at her, looked at her and saw she wasn’t a child.
There would be no coat. But by God there would be hair clips. She shoved back in all the glittery hairpins she’d removed and then opened the clip case she brought on every trip, removed an eye-popping blue and purple hair clip in the shape of a seashell and shoved that sucker in as well.
One night was all she had.
She was going to chase Finn off the cliff.
Finn opened the door at eight o’clock, letting room service out as Zoe arrived.
He murmured a welcome and took a lightning-fast inventory as she wheeled herself over the threshold. Ankle-length dress in sky blue; crystal-studded silver sandals on her slender feet; a profusion of spangled clips in the tousle of her hair that made her look like a sea princess...and that mutinously jutting chin, which gave him a premonition of disaster. She’d always been at her most adorable when she looked mutinous and he’d be damned if he was going to adore her again.
He led her out to the poolside deck where he’d had the table set for dinner, reminding himself that he was no longer that twenty-year-old Sir Galahad idiot who’d barged into her hospital room begging her to need him. He could manage this...this thing between them—whatever it was—for a single night.
Surprise flitted across her face as she took in the three place settings, the two chairs waiting to be occupied in addition to the space for her wheelchair.
“I thought you’d bring Cristina,” he explained.
Her chin rejutted. “Did you?”
Ah, so that was the battle. He’d tossed a dare at Zoe on Pearl Finder when he said Cristina could attend the briefing if Zoe needed her, so no way was Zoe going to “need” Cristina’s protection tonight. So there, Finn Doherty!
Finn shrugged, take-it-or-leave-it, nothing to see here. “It’s not an accusation, Zoe.”
“She’s having dinner with Captain Joe, if you must know,” she replied, clearly wanting to underscore the point she was making.
“Good for her,” Finn said, calmly retrieving a bottle from the ice bucket in its stand beside the table. “Wine?”
“I’d love a glass of wine,” Zoe said, still in obvious point-making mode.
Finn poured her a glass, then took his seat and poured his own.
“How long has Cristina been with you?” he asked, as Zoe served herself from the selection of canapés on the table.
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘with’ me, but five years.”
Finn picked up a set of tongs and concentrated on transferring food. “She’s a nurse, right?” he said, just because he had to say something and that was the most innocuous thing he could think of off the top of his head. “I developed a huge respect for nurses when I was in hospital a couple of years ago.”
“Oh, you...you were in hospital? I didn’t know.”
“No reason you should,” Finn said. “No life-threatening injuries. Nothing like what you went through.”
She drew in an audible breath, like she had on the boat when he’d raised the subject of her accident; a prawn she’d impaled on her fork stopped halfway to her mouth. A moment only, and then she shoved the prawn in her mouth, chewed it furiously but without any obvious pleasure in the taste.
“Mine was a motorbike accident,” he said.
She swallowed. “I remember you always wanted a motorbike. When you were...were...”
“Eighteen? Yeah, well, I wanted a lot of things I shouldn’t have when I was eighteen.” Pause. “I gave the bike up after the accident. I learn from my mistakes, especially the painful ones.” He wondered if she understood the inference.
Apparently not, because with an air of preoccupation she speared another prawn and ate it.
Fair enough. How could she possibly understand what he was saying? She’d always been oblivious to his ridiculous crush on her.
“So Cristina travels with you everywhere?” he asked. If he wanted to know more about Zoe’s drastically altered life that seemed a safe place to start; she clearly wasn’t going to volunteer anything herself.
He got a prickly “No,” for his trouble, and then: “But since you’re so interested I can tell you she’s twenty-nine, single, and she likes fishing and cooking and watching sunrises.”
He laughed, couldn’t help himself. “I don’t want to date her, Zoe.”
“She also loves to travel but she didn’t come with me to...to Hawaii, for example, in February.” Now that was definitely a so there, Finn Doherty!
Another apparently tasteless prawn went the way of the first two, and Finn laughed again, imagining the look on Gaspard’s face should he see Zoe shoveling down his delicacies.
“What’s so funny?” Zoe asked, still in prickle mode.
“The way you’re holding your fork, like you’re going to skewer me. I was just making conversation, not trying to reenact the Spanish Inquisition.”
She looked at her fork, closed tightly in her fisted hand. “Oh.”
“How about you tell me what you’d like to talk about, Zoe?”
She laid down her fork, swallowed despite having no food in her mouth, took a deep breath as though gearing up to make an important announcement as the bright pink of a savage blush burned across her cheeks...and then the doorbell rang.
She closed her eyes and let the breath out, her shoulders slumping.
Dammit.
Finn got to his feet. “That’ll be room service to set up for the main course,” he said.
How about you tell me what you’d like to talk about, Zoe?
I’ll tell you what I want to talk about, Finn. Sex. With you. Tonight.
Maybe it was just as well they’d been interrupted. He seemed to be more interested in Cristina than in her.
Getting brutal about it, all she had to go on for making such an outrageous sexual proposition was an old story about a mermaid and a throwaway line from Malie about how Finn used to look at her. And really what would Malie know? Malie was confident, bold, daring, and even she’d been in awe of Finn Doherty. The baddest, hottest guy in the village, who could have had any girl he wanted—and he’d certainly given the having of them a red hot go!
But not her. She was good enough to have lunch with when they were working in the same place, good enough to have tag along like a little sister on an occasional adventure, but not the type of girl to ask out on a date or even to see once she left the Crab Shack job.
Had she really thought she could waltz in here tonight and Finn Doherty—Finn Doherty!—all grown up and a hundred times more potent than he used to be—would say, Sure, Zoe, I’m your man, how do you want it?
She covered her breasts with her hands, ordering her nipples to deflate...and a new truth hit home. He’d checked her out as she’d entered the bungalow so he’d no doubt seen the state she was in, but after that he hadn’t let his eyes stray from her face. He had to be the most sexually experienced man on the planet; he would have known exactly what she wanted, he would have known he could have her, but clearly he did not want her that way. He never had, never would.
But if she’d got up the nerve to ask him he probably would have said yes. “Yes” had always been his default setting when it came to sex, from what she’d heard. It wouldn’t have been lust driving him in her case, though, it would have been pity, or kindness—or whatever it was that had propelled him into her hospital room ten years ago trying to make up for the fact that her boyfriend had dumped her because she was in a wheelchair.
Zoe reached for her wine, took a large sip, then rolled the cool glass against one hot cheek. She was such an idiot. She had to stop thinking about what Malie had said, forget about sex, get through dinner, do the interview, and leave.
“Out on the deck,” she heard Finn say. She smoothed her dress across her thighs despite her dress being perfectly smooth already. The only thing about her that wasn’t smooth was the inside of her head.
Silence reigned as the server cleared and reset the table, now for two people, and laid out an array of dishes. A silence so impenetrable all she could do was stare at her plate.
“Well?” Finn asked, once the server had left.
“Well?” she repeated, forcing herself to look him in the eye.
He gave one of those careless one-shoulder shrugs she decided she hated. “Well, what do you want to talk about?”
And didn’t it say everything about their relationship—or lack thereof—that he’d picked up their conversation seamlessly while she’d had no idea where they were up to?
“The food,” she said because it was there in front of her and she couldn’t think of anything else except sex and that was not going to happen, so get over it, Zoe. “I want to talk about food.”
“Food,” he repeated slowly.
“Yes.” She placed her table napkin across her lap. “It looks delicious!”
“It is delicious. But I don’t think that’s what you were going to say.”
And oh God, his eyes were dipping, eyebrows rising, and she had to say something, get his eyes up, up.“I...you... I was thinking...that is...tonight I was...gah!” Up came her hands, covering her face, and whew her elbows covered her breasts in this position.
“For once I don’t know what you mean,” Finn said. “So how about you tell me?”
She shook her head, keeping her hands firmly in place.
Long moment, and then she heard Finn sigh. Heard the sound of more wine being poured. “Food it is, then,” he said. “I ordered French Polynesian specialities. Scallops soaked in lime juice. Mahi-mahi served with vanilla sauce. Fafaru—marinated parrotfish with crushed shrimps and crab. Pouletfafa, which is chicken and taro leaves.” Pause. “Just one thing—sorry, but there’s no mackerel.”
What the...? Oh! She snorted out a laugh and dropped her hands. He was regarding her with his old crooked Crab Shack smile and the tension drained out of her as if by magic. “I can’t believe you remembered.”
“That you hate it? Yes. That you used to pretend to love it because that’s what the awesome foursome cooked on the Hawkesbury beach? Yes. I remember a lot of things.” Again the one-shoulder shrug. “That night, for example. If it’s about that night, what you were going to say when the doorbell rang, my advice is to get it out so we can clear the air.” Another shrug. “Tonight is a little like the end of that summer at the Shack. Lives diverging. There won’t be another chance.”
Time running out. Oh God. How could she grab it, hold on? And suddenly the words were there, not an inarticulate babble. “Did we ever have one, Finn? A chance?”
In the air-crackling pause that followed those questions she was intensely conscious of Finn’s stillness, the scent of his soap reaching her like a bittersweet memory of what she’d wanted but never had. “I don’t know how to answer that, Zoe,” he said at last, so serious. “I thought we did, or at least we could have had, but that night... Well, you know what happened that night.”
She swallowed against an unexpected lump in her throat. “But that’s just it. I don’t. I...I barely remember that night.”
He blinked at her in disbelief, his mouth tightening. “That’s the way you want to play it?”
“I’m not playing.”
“That’s the way you want to keep it, then? Because if you really can’t remember and you want to, I’ll help you locate the memory. You’re not the only one who could do with some closure.”
“I don’t... I mean... I can’t... It’s just...”
“Do not!” he said. “Do not cover your face. You look at me and tell me you want to forget that night happened. That’s all you need to do.”
“You don’t...don’t understand.”
“I think you’ll find I do, Zoe. I was there.”
She shook her head. “I mean I don’t want it told to me. I don’t want any of it told to me. Not the accident, not anything t-to d-do with the accident. I want the memories to already be in my head because they’re meant to be there.” She raised one hand, rubbed the palm across her forehead. “But all that’s in here are fragments and...things I’ve been told that somehow don’t seem to...belong to me, they’re not really there. And there has to be a reason for that, a reason I can’t remember.”
“Or a reason you won’t.”
“Or a reason I won’t,” she conceded.
His turn to lay his napkin across his lap. He looked down at it for a long moment, and then his head came up. “You know, Zoe, one of the things I remember about the old days is how you always managed tense situations by detouring around them. Playing nice. Keeping the peace. Making everyone’s road smooth even if the destination you wanted to reach threatened a bump or two along the route. Little white lies to your girlfriends, like how you felt about fishing. Pleading with your parents for space but never all-out fighting to take it for yourself. Letting everyone in the village smother you rather than insisting they leave you alone.” He laughed, a short, harsh sound. “I never heard you raise your voice until that night, with me.”
“Please, Finn!”
Another long impenetrable silence which she could not fill with anything except her thudding heartbeat.
And then Finn leaned back in his chair. “So be it, Zoe. Consider that night expunged from the record.” He looked at the table. “Food, right? That’s all we’re talking about? Well, for dessert we’ll be having po’e, which is a pudding made from papaya, mango and banana, Tahitian coconut cake, and a fruit platter that’s heavy on the pineapple because the pineapple in French Polynesia is the best in the world. So save some room.”