Twenty-seven
At one in the morning, Wes flipped his pillow over for the sixth time, looking for the ever-elusive cold side. There was none. Despite the fans beating through the soupy humidity, nothing in the house was cool, let alone cold. Janice the cheetah’s crooked eye looked more sunken as the days passed.
He pushed away Erma, who had taken to curling up beside him at night, her fur sticking to his sweaty skin, and sprawled on the bed to consider his options. Sleeping in the library might be more comfortable, and he would feel like a Regency gentleman who had too much punch. If he took a bath, he could soak until he was cold and wrinkled.
Then he sat up. He was thinking like a poor man when he should be thinking like a rich one who had access to his own personal grotto. He didn’t have swim trunks, but that didn’t matter. It was one of the benefits of living, however briefly, on an estate with no near neighbors. He’d get some beer and go for a swim.
A few minutes later, he was working his way through the mini forest behind the house, and thirty seconds after that, he’d put his clothes on a chair and was floating bare-ass naked in the late Dot Voline’s swimming grotto. It was heaven. Pure, unadulterated heaven. He swam to the waterfall and let it hammer down on him, the thunderous roar blocking out the heat, the tension, and everything negative until his mind felt clear.
Time for that drink. He moved into the pool from under the falls, swiping at his face to get rid of the water. The scream came before he had his eyes open, and he lost his footing in shock, causing him to fall back under the waterfall and come up sputtering.
It was Nadine. Topless, by the looks of it, since she had her hands clasped over her chest like the woman on the stripping album. The second they locked eyes, they both dropped down in the pool to their chins. The moonlight covered the water with a white glitter that hid everything under the surface.
“What are you doing creeping around at night, you sneak?” Nadine hissed.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“It was hot. I didn’t know you were here.”
He pointed at his clothes piled up on a chair. “You missed that?”
She followed his glance and squinted. “I thought it was a pillow.” Her eyes bugged out. “Are you wearing any clothes? At all?”
“I am not,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster. “Since I thought I would be alone. Are you?”
Nadine dropped farther under the water. “You need to get out of the pool.”
He couldn’t help but notice she didn’t answer the question, leaving him with no doubts. The polite thing would be to leave her to enjoy the water in solitude. Then Wes felt the night breeze on his face and thought about tossing and turning until dawn.
“No,” he said.
“That’s not fair,” she objected. “You’ve had time to swim alone. I should get the same.”
“You snooze, you lose.”
“I wasn’t snoozing at all,” she said, sounding tired. “Not in that steam bath of a house. That’s my point.”
“Well, you can share this lovely, cool, refreshing grotto, or you can go back inside.” He leaned back to look at the sky. “Up to you.”
“Then I guess we share.” She sounded a bit breathless, which was strange since the pool was shallow enough that they didn’t have to tread water.
“If you promise not to peek when I get them, you can have one of the beers I brought,” offered Wes, generous in victory.
Nadine laughed. “I brought some as well but we can start with yours.” She made a fuss of covering her eyes with her hands before turning around and standing up.
Wes tried not to look, but he wasn’t a saint. The water cascaded over her shoulders to where the pool reached her midback. A shadowed line ran down where her spine dipped in, and he couldn’t help glancing lower to see if she had those little dimples at the base. He loved those.
Then she shifted enough for him to glimpse… No. He almost threw himself toward the edge of the pool so he could avoid being an asshole. He’d told Nadine not to peek, and it was incumbent on him to show her the same respect. He tried to block his mind from busily filling in the curve that he had been so tantalizingly close to seeing.
He grabbed both cans and left one close to her before retreating to the other side. “Okay,” he said.
Nadine looked over her shoulder to see where he was, and Wes did his best not to stare at the shadow of her eyes and line of her cheek. She swam by, and when her body broke the surface of the water, Wes nearly choked on his beer. Nadine turned at the sound of his violent coughing.
“Are you okay?” she asked with concern.
“Fine,” he gasped. “Sorry.”
She cracked the can open and sat hunched over on the steps so she could stay covered by the water. “I don’t know how Dot handled this heat. Either she had ice water in her veins or air-con in her bedroom.”
Wes pictured Dot lying happily in a California king with arctic air swirling around her as the rest of the house boiled. “I bet her bedroom is Scandinavian minimalist.”
“All light oak and white walls?” Nadine shook her head. “No way. Crimson walls and black satin sheets.”
“Paint is for peasants,” Wes reminded her. “Dot would have flocked wallpaper.”
Nadine laughed. “What wallpaper?”
“The kind that looks like patterned velvet.”
“I thought that was so fancy when I was a kid. Yeah, that’s Dot for sure.”
They drank in the quiet night, Nadine dancing her palm on the water’s surface while Wes watched the edges of her wet hair curl on her shoulders.
“I’m going to claim my next question,” said Wes to break the silence.
“Choose wisely.” Nadine made her voice low and spooky, then bobbed up slightly in the water.
Wes swallowed hard but had his question ready. “Why do you always wear skirts?”
***
“That’s your question?” she asked in disbelief.
Wes looked at her with open curiosity, like this was something he truly wanted to know. “I have a few to spend, and I always wondered. I’ve never seen you in pants.”
No one had asked her this before. “You’re going to laugh,” she warned.
“I promise I won’t.”
“When I was in grade one, we had to do an activity where everyone sat in a circle to sing a song about clothes. If you had on that article of clothing, you stood in the center while all the kids sang.”
“We did that too.”
“One day, I was the only one in pants. All the other kids were wearing jeans or skirts or shorts. I stood alone in the middle as everyone sang at me. I started to cry, and when I went home, I cleared out all my pants. Never wore them again.” She still remembered the shame of that day and the way her mother had told her there was nothing to be upset about when she’d come home in tears. She’d never cried in front of others after that, or at least not until Dot died.
Wes put his can aside. “That was way darker than I imagined. I thought you just liked them. I’m sorry. Some incidents can be so small and reverberate years later.”
Nadine shrugged. “It was a tough day for little Nadine, but now I appreciate how versatile and easy skirts are. I bet not a single kid remembers. My turn. Keeping with sartorial decisions, why do you always dress so well? So unwrinkled?”
He glanced over at his neatly folded clothes. “I never thought about it,” he said. “I suppose it makes me feel more confident. Sometimes people tend to overlook me, but they do it less when I’m well put together.”
“Overlook you?” Nadine was disbelieving. How could anyone not notice Wes?
“Quiet people tend to be put in the background at most places I’ve worked.”
“That’s true.” She winced. “That ended up kind of sad too.”
“Let’s keep with the dark theme then.” Wes waited for her nod. “The other day, you were on the phone with your mother. What was bothering you?”
How honest should she be? As she stared at the ripples on the water, she realized she wanted to talk about it. Despite their ups and downs, Wes looked like he might understand.
“My parents want me to move back home. They’ve been telling me that since the problems I had at work and with that guy, and they don’t listen when I say no. They’re so certain, I’m starting to worry they’re right.”
“You don’t want to?”
“No.” She patted the water. “My parents didn’t think journalism was safe either. It’s a long-standing complaint about most things I do.”
“Do they want you safe or static?” asked Wes.
“It’s safe to them and static to me. They don’t like risk.” She sighed.
“It’s hard to stand up to parents, even when we know they’re wrong.”
“Is that you too? Having trouble standing up to your mother?”
“Is that your question?”
“Sure.” She’d talked enough.
“Ma is not the most positive person in the world,” Wes said, and she heard how carefully he chose his words. “She had a rough life, and my sister says I’m trying to compensate for it.”
“How so?” They were inching closer along the edge of the pool.
“I try to make her happy,” said Wes. “Usually by being there with her.”
“That sounds hard,” she said. “Like you have to stay static as well.”
“Sometimes. Did you know I got hired by the CBC after that internship?”
That was impressive, but she wasn’t surprised and was pleased to find the memory of losing out to him no longer triggered a cortisol response. “I don’t remember you working there.”
He gave her a little grin. “Keeping track?”
“Whatever.” She flicked water at him. “CBC?”
“The job was in Victoria, and I told Ma I was going to accept. She collapsed with a heart problem, and I had to take her to the hospital. My sisters were focused on school, so I couldn’t leave them to deal with it.”
“That’s horrible.”
“My sister Amy thinks Ma faked it to keep me home.”
“Wes, seriously?”
He dipped down in the water. “Who knows? It’s hard to tell what she wants because she always seems disappointed no matter what I do.”
He leaned over to get another beer as Nadine tried to figure out the best thing to say. When Wes floated a can in her direction, she picked it out of the water before she spoke. “You’re not a disappointment.”
He blinked at her, then gave a wry smile. “Thanks,” he said. “Enough with questions for tonight, don’t you think?”
“Sure.” They’d gone to some touchy places. She wasn’t sure if she was ready to go deeper with him.
***
Nadine’s quick reply made Wes suspect she was feeling as vulnerable as he was. She looked around the grotto as though casting for a new topic. “Is there something behind the waterfall?”
“Like a hidden Hugh Hefner room? I don’t know. I didn’t go all the way under.”
Nadine put her drink down and swam over. “Given the rest of this house, I have high hopes,” she said. She passed close enough for him to feel the water swirl around his stomach, then dipped under and disappeared.
He couldn’t let her explore alone. What if she found something super interesting? Wes put down his own can and walked through the waterfall, pausing to again appreciate its pressure.
Then he came out and immediately bumped into soft, cool skin. The space beyond the waterfall was tiny and lit by a small line of fairy lights along the edge of the pool. All this was environmental detail that Wes only dimly noted because he was too busy trying to understand that Nadine was in front of him and so close, they were touching. Her back was pressed against the wall. She had nowhere to go, and he should take a huge step back past the waterfall and then get the hell out of this pool.
She blinked, her pretty eyes starry with wet lashes, and he didn’t move.
***
Nadine wasn’t sure if what she was about to do was a bad idea or a good one.
No, it was a bad idea. Very bad. Anything she did at the moment that was not muttering an excuse and swimming away would result in something she was probably going to regret, if not in the next few hours, then tomorrow morning.
She couldn’t bring herself to care.
Who knew being long-term enemies with someone made you think about them endlessly? They might no longer dislike each other, but Nadine wasn’t sure where they’d moved to on the relationship spectrum or how she fully felt about it. All she knew was that she’d been thinking about touching Wes—and Wes touching her—more than she liked to admit.
It was almost an out-of-body experience when his hand came up to grip her waist. “Nadine.” He only said her name, but it was as if he was asking permission.
In answer, she ran her hand along his arm, feeling the muscles clench as she moved up to his shoulder, down his back, and finally to that snake on his ribs. His wet skin was slick under her fingers. “I’ve never made out in a pool before,” she said.
He threw his head back and laughed. “Me neither.”
That broke whatever spell she was under, and Nadine suddenly wanted more of him. All of him. Forget about tomorrow. She stepped closer, and Wes twitched slightly before his eyelids fluttered. He leaned forward, and finally those lips were on hers, fitting as if he’d been made for her. His mouth was warm, and Nadine flattened her hand against his chest, thrilling at the feel of skin and the tight beat of his heart under lean muscle.
Wes made a sound between a sigh and groan that turned her knees to butter, then backed her against the fake stone wall of the grotto. One arm braced by her head to lean in again, but he slowed down to give her a small smile that was far too sweet and way too hot for Nadine to deal with. She pulled him in closer and gasped.
Kissing Wes was to learn him in a new way that instantly ignited every place he touched her. Gone was the buttoned-up Wes, he of the shined shoes and straight collars. This Wes was softer but rougher than she expected, and the mix drove her wild. She couldn’t anticipate what he’d do next, but it didn’t matter, because he was a mind reader, sensing what she craved almost before she realized what she wanted herself.
She didn’t know how long it took before they stopped kissing, but her hair was beginning to dry on top. Wes smoothed it back, then kissed her forehead. They took a minute to catch their breath.
“This is not smart,” she whispered.
“Not smart at all.” His kiss ghosted along her throat. “I want this. I want you. It’s up to you what happens next.”
She knew he would stop in an instant if she said the word, almost as certainly as he must know she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
“What if we regret it?” she asked. Her fingers were back on that tattoo. She loved it.
Wes’s mouth moved up to her ear, and he held her tight enough that her toes lifted off the grotto floor. “I regret lots of things, but I regret the things I didn’t do the most. Don’t you?”
“Yes.” She could barely get the word out.
“We don’t want to add to the list, do we?”
“That’s not the most persuasive argument.”
“How about this?” His hands moved around the small of her back and down as he bent his mouth to her shoulder. Her head fell backward, and her body melted into his.
“That is a more compelling case,” she managed to say.
“Thank you.” His voice shivered against her skin, and she made the choice. Leave the rest for tomorrow Nadine to worry about.
“Ready to take this on land?” she asked.
Wes lifted his head, closed his eyes as if in prayer, then opened them. “Yes,” he said fervently. “Yes.”
So they did.