30. Clara
— ? —
Clara
The yacht was obscene.
I’d always known that Quin was wealthy, in the way you know a fact you’ve read somewhere.
I’d seen the numbers, lived in the manor, worn the jewelry, attended the galas.
But standing on the deck of a two-hundred-foot superyacht with the Caribbean stretching out in every direction like liquid sapphire, the word took on an entirely different meaning.
“This is ridiculous,” I said, not for the first time that week.
“You’ve said that every day since we boarded.” Quin came up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. “I’m starting to think you don’t like the boat.”
“I love the boat. The boat is magnificent. The boat has a movie theater.” I leaned back against his chest. “I just can’t believe this is our life.”
“Believe it.” He pressed a kiss to my temple. “You earned it, and so did I.”
Somewhere below deck, Katie let out a shriek of pure delight.
She’d discovered the water slide that ran from the top deck straight into the ocean and had been using it roughly four hundred times a day ever since.
The crew adored her, and she’d had the captain wrapped around her finger inside the first hour.
“Should we be worried about that?”
“About the slide, or about the fact that our daughter is turning into a tiny maritime dictator?”
“Both, possibly.”
Quin laughed. “She’s got three crew members watching her at all times and a life jacket that could keep a small elephant afloat. Let her have her fun.”
He was right, and fun was the whole point of the trip. Fun, and joy, and every other thing we’d forgotten how to do during the dark months.
The past week had been a revelation. We’d sailed from Miami down through the Bahamas, stopping at islands I’d only ever seen in magazines, snorkeling in water so clear I could count individual grains of sand fifty feet below.
We ate fish that had been caught that morning and prepared by the yacht’s chef, and drank champagne while the sun went down over an ocean with nothing on the other side of it.
We watched Katie build sandcastles on beaches that might as well have belonged to us, because there wasn’t another soul for miles in any direction.
And we talked, really talked, in a way we hadn’t managed in years. About our hopes and our fears, about the mistakes we’d made and what they’d cost us, about what we wanted the rest of it to look like.
“I want more of this,” I said, watching the waves fold over on themselves. “Not the yacht, and not the money. Just this. Us. Time.”
“Then that’s what we’ll have.” His arms tightened around me. “I’m stepping back from day-to-day operations. I want to focus on the foundation and the ranch and our family, which is to say the things that actually matter.”
“You mean that?”
“I mean everything I say to you now.” He turned me in his arms until we were face to face. “I learned my lesson the hard way, Clara, and I’m not going to forget it.”
***
We reached our private island three days later.
Private island. The words still felt absurd in my mouth, like I was playing pretend and any moment now someone would tap me on the shoulder and explain that there had been a clerical error, that girls from failing ranches did not get to own pieces of the Caribbean.
But there it was, twenty acres of white beach and tropical forest anchored by a villa that made the yacht look modest. We’d bought it years ago, back when Quin was in his acquisition phase and collecting assets the way other people collect stamps, and we’d visited exactly twice, both times for less than a weekend, both times cut short by a business emergency that couldn’t wait.
We came and left with a chopper because it was faster.
And just like that, I couldn’t even point out anything memorable from that trip.
This time there was no emergency and nowhere else to be. There was only us, and Katie, and an entire island whose sole purpose was our happiness.
“Mommy, look! CRABS!”
Katie had found the tide pools and was working her way through them, attempting to befriend every crustacean on the property.
Quin had joined her with his shorts rolled to the knee and his CEO dignity abandoned somewhere back at the waterline, chasing one particularly fast specimen across the rocks.
I watched them from a lounge chair on the beach with a drink in my hand and absolutely nothing on my schedule.
We’d hired a sitter to help with Katie, who was currently in the villa kitchen, almost certainly preparing enough food for a small army.
The crew sat at anchor offshore, available if we wanted them and invisible if we didn’t.
That was what unlimited resources actually bought, I decided. Not the things themselves, but the freedom to say we’re going to stop and breathe for a while and have the world rearrange itself accordingly.
“I got one! Mommy, I got one!” Katie came running up the sand with her hands cupped around something that was very likely plotting its escape, Quin following behind her with sand in his hair.
“That’s amazing, baby girl. What are you going to name him?”
“Bunbun Junior.”
“Of course.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon on the beach, swimming and building sandcastles and watching Katie attempt to teach her father a proper cartwheel, which ended with Quin face down in the sand and Katie folded in half laughing.
By the time the sun started its slide toward the horizon, all three of us were exhausted in the best possible way.
“Bath time, se?orita.” Our island sitter appeared from the villa with her arms outstretched. “Your father buried you up to your ears. We need to make sure there are no crabs hiding in your hair.”
Katie went willingly, still narrating her adventures, and then Quin and I were alone.
He reached for my hand. “Walk with me?”
We walked along the waterline while the sky turned orange, then pink, then a deep bruised purple, the waves running up over our feet and pulling back again. Behind us the villa lights came on one by one. Ahead of us the yacht glowed against the darkening water.
“I keep waiting for it to feel real,” I said.
“What does?”
“All of it. The island, the boat, you standing here instead of checking your phone every five minutes.” I squeezed his hand.
“Not that long ago I was in a two-bedroom apartment counting what was left in my account at the end of the month, and now I’m walking on my own private beach watching the sun set over my own private ocean. ”
“Not your own private ocean. The government was very clear about that.”
I laughed. “You know what I mean.”
“I do.” He stopped walking and turned to face me, and the last of the light caught his face in a way that made him look younger, closer to the boy I’d fallen in love with.
“I spent years collecting things I never used. Properties I never visited, boats I never sailed. I told myself it was security, that it was proof I’d never end up like my father, scrambling to keep the lights on for one more season. ”
“And now?”
“Now I understand what it was all for.” He cupped my face in both hands. “It’s for this. For watching our daughter chase crabs, and making love to my wife under the stars, and being present for the life I built instead of only building it.”
“Making love under the stars, is it.”
His grin turned wicked. “Melissa has Katie for the night, the yacht has a very comfortable upper deck, and I’ve been thinking about you in that bikini since breakfast.”
“Who says I’m wearing a bikini?”
His eyes went dark. “Clara.”
“I may have packed some things. For occasions.” I shrugged one shoulder. “This seems like an occasion.”
“Get on the boat.”
***
The tender carried us out in the blue dark, just the two of us, the villa lights shrinking behind until they were one more star sitting low on the horizon. The crew had been given the night off with strict instructions not to come back before morning, and the yacht was ours.
Quin handed me aboard and then simply looked at me, standing there on the deck in my cover-up with salt in my hair and no makeup and no jewelry except the ring on my finger, and the look on his face was the one that still undid me.
“Upstairs,” he said.
The upper deck had been transformed while we were on the island.
Someone, who was a romantic under all that practicality, had arranged cushions and blankets into a nest of softness, with candles burning in hurricane glasses and champagne waiting in a bucket of ice.
Overhead the stars had come out in numbers I’d never seen in my life, the Milky Way lying across the dark like a river of spilled light.
“Quin.”
“I wanted it to be perfect,” he said, already working the cork loose. “Tonight, this whole trip, all of it. You.”
“It is perfect.” I took the glass he offered and sipped, and the bubbles danced against my tongue. “Although I’m starting to suspect the champagne is a stalling tactic.”
“Stalling?”
I set the glass down and reached for the tie at my waist. “You said something about a bikini.”
The cover-up dropped to the deck, and I wasn’t wearing a bikini.
The lingerie had been a last-minute purchase, ordered online with my cheeks burning, buried in the bottom of my suitcase, and never once worn because I’d never quite worked up the nerve.
Black lace that covered almost nothing and supported considerably less, the kind of thing women wore in fantasies my husband didn’t know I’d been having.
He went completely still. “Clara.” His voice had dropped an octave. “What are you doing to me.”
“I told you.” I took a step toward him and watched his eyes travel down and back up again. “This seemed like an occasion.”
“You’re trying to kill me.”
“Maybe.” Another step. “Or maybe I’m trying to get you to stop being so careful with me. You’ve spent months handling me like I’m made of glass, and I appreciated it, and I needed it, but tonight I don’t want it.”
“Tonight you want what?”