Chapter 20
Koa comes for me at six on the dot, which is so on-brand it’s almost a love language, and he still won’t tell me where we’re going.
He’s out of the badge and into dark jeans and a slate-gray button-down with the sleeves rolled to the forearm, and I need a moment.
Possibly several. The shirt is doing things across his shoulders that would make every last female at the resort scream for all the right reasons, his hair is still damp from the shower, and when he leans over to pull my door open, he smells like cedar soap and good intentions.
Those espresso eyes land on me, and one dimple makes a rare public appearance, and I remind myself that I’m a grown woman with a resort to run and not a teenager whose ride to prom just pulled up.
The reminder doesn’t take. Somewhere out there, Birdie is sensing this exact moment and snapping a pencil in half.
“So, where’s this mystery destination?”
“You’ll know when we’re there,” is all I get, and then he drives us inland, away from the resort and the tape and the long sad business of Flash, up into the green heart of the island where the roads get narrow and the houses thin out and the jungle starts pressing in from both sides as if it were curious about us.
“If this is where you bury the bodies,” I say, “I’d like it noted that I came willingly and you should feel terrible.”
“Noted.”
“That’s it? That’s all I get?”
“You came willingly,” he says. “It’s on the record.”
He parks on a red-dirt shoulder with no sign, no marker, nothing but a gap in the trees that you’d never find unless somebody showed it to you, and before we get out, he turns to me with a seriousness he usually reserves for reading people their rights.
“I’ll take you in here,” he says, “under one condition.”
“Anything.” I swoon without notice.
“You never tell a guest about this place. Not one. The locals keep it quiet on purpose. Some tourists have found it, and we ask them not to geotag it, not to post it, not to turn it into a line. It stays ours.” He holds my gaze. “Promise me.”
“Never,” I say, and I mean it. “Cross my heart and hope to—” I catch myself. “You know what, given the week, let’s leave it at cross my heart.”
“Smart,” Koa says. “Two for two. I’d hate to make it three on a date.”
“That is the darkest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“You bring it out in me.”
The trail in is short and soft underfoot, and the jungle on either side is being almost aggressively, almost rudely beautiful, which is standard for this island and I still haven’t adjusted.
The air is thick with heat, twice as humid, and holds the scent of the island’s signature perfume, sugar and spice and lots of plumeria.
Giant ferns unfurl at shoulder height. Vines drip down from somewhere overhead.
The trees lace together into a green vaulted ceiling that breaks the light into pieces, and the air smells like rain that hasn’t happened yet and crimson earth that’s been damp since the dawn of time.
Somewhere off in the canopy, a bird asks a question, and somewhere deeper in, another bird gives what sounds like the wrong answer.
And then the trees open, and the ground falls away, and I stop walking.
We’re at the edge of a little clifftop, and below us the valley drops into a vast soft canopy of treetops that rolls all the way out to the mountains, green on green on green with mist threading through the folds of it.
And hanging from a massive branch right at the lip of the drop is a swing.
Just a weathered wooden seat on two long ropes, swaying a little in the breeze, dangling over a hundred feet of open air and the entire world.
“No way,” I say, because I happen to have my head screwed on straight today. Most days I don’t, but still.
“Jinx.”
I glance at the vast drop once again. “That’s a hard no,” I tell him. “That’s a clear no. You’re not getting me on that thing. There is no way in H-E-double-Canada.”
“Canada?” He looks genuinely stumped.
“It’s a Ruby thing,” I say. “Besides, the fact you want to push me over a cliff, after I found a body that was pushed over a cliff, reeks of unoriginality. You’re a detective.
Surely you could come up with dozens of creative ways to finish me off.
I know your game. You’re trying to rid the island of the Jinx.
And seeing that Kauai has no active volcano, you’ve selected the next best thing.
You’re throwing me into the heart of the wild.
Sort of like a virgin sacrifice, minus the virgin.
Not that you would know. You haven’t even tried to deflower me yet! ”
I practically shout that last part at him, and he winces. Okay, so he knows I’ve been married before—so has he. Technically, it would stand to reason that I’ve already been deflowered—so has he.
“Regardless,” I continue. “I’m not going in.”
He looks more than a little amused. “We drove all the way up here.”
“And it was a lovely drive, and now we can have a lovely drive back.”
“You found a dead body this morning,” Koa says reasonably, “and a different dead body four days ago, and you’ve been threatened, chased, and nearly run off a ranch in a vehicle named Mud Honey.
You’ve been functionally impervious to the Grim Reaper all week.
You’re telling me a swing is where you draw the line? ”
“Is this really the moment to be quoting my résumé back at me?”
“I’m just saying the swing has a lower body count than your average day of the week.”
“That is not the reassurance you think it is.”
But he’s holding the ropes now, steadying the plank of a seat, looking at me with those chocolate eyes gone warm and patient in the green light, and there is a limit to how long I can refuse a man who drove me into the jungle to give me the whole world, so I sit.
I grip the ropes until my knuckles go pale, and then I squeeze my eyes shut.
“Don’t you dare—”
He dares.
He pushes me hard and fast, and the ground drops out from under me, and I scream loud enough to relocate several birds as the swing carries me out over the edge into open air, over the valley, over the canopy, over nothing at all.
“Open your eyes,” Koa calls out.
“Absolutely not!”
“Jinx. Open your eyes.”
And I do. And suddenly the whole verdant world is under my feet.
The valley spreads out below me, endless and green and impossibly far down, the treetops rolling away to the mountains, and I’m flying over all of it, the wind in my hair and my stomach somewhere back on the cliff, and it is, without contest, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
And then, because the island of Kauai is a showoff and always has been, it starts to sprinkle, warm and soft, even as the sun blazes down through it, and I look up and there’s a rainbow, an entire rainbow, arcing across the valley like the place was waiting for its cue.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that if a unicorn had wandered out of the treeline right then, I would not have blinked.
It would have felt like the appropriate amount of magic for the moment.
The swing slows, and I feel the ropes shift, and then Koa’s there, hopping on behind me, settling in close, his arms coming around either side of me to hold the ropes and, incidentally, me. We swing together, slower now, the rainbow holding, the mist drifting up out of the valley.
“You did good,” he says against my ear. “For someone who tried to negotiate her way out of a swing.”
“I’d like it on the record that I was very brave.”
“It’s on the record. Right next to came willingly.”
“Speaking of records.” I lean back into him. “Your ex-girlfriend tried to repossess you at a mud ranch this week. Birdie. With the babies and the prophecy and the third eye that’s never wrong.”
I feel him groan more than hear it. “She’s harmless.”
“She kissed you on the mouth in front of forty witnesses.”
“And I introduced you as my girlfriend in front of the same forty.”
“You did.” I smile out at the valley. “That was a good moment. I’m keeping that one.”
For a while we don’t say anything, just swing.
“Jinx.” His voice changes, dropping into the lower register, the one I can’t resist. “I want you to let me handle this one,” he says.
“The case. Flash, Vera, all of it.” His arms tighten a little.
“Whoever this is, they’re not careless and they’re not desperate.
They planned both of these. They waited.
They’re patient, and patient is dangerous, and I don’t want you out there pulling threads where they can see you do it.
” A pause. “Let me carry it. Please. I can’t do this if I’m worried about you the whole time. ”
I could argue. I usually would. But there’s something in his voice, low and a little raw, that I don’t want to step on.
“I’ll be careful,” I say, which is not the same as a yes, and we both know it, and he lets it go anyway because the rainbow is still up and we’re a hundred feet over paradise and some arguments can wait.
He turns me, gently, until I’m facing him, and the swing sways and the mist rises and he kisses me, slow and warm and thorough, the way he does everything, with the whole green valley falling away beneath us and the rain on our faces and the sun shining straight through it.
It is, hands down, the single most romantic moment of my entire life.
And for once, the small traitorous corner of my brain that keeps the ledgers, the one that wants to point out that I’m making out with the lead detective over a fatal drop, four days and two corpses into the worst week in resort history, gets overruled. I close the folder on that one.
And I let the rainbow win.
Some things you investigate.
Some things you just surrender to.