Chapter 2
Stunned into stillness instead of screaming or running, shivering in the living room of Ethan’s beach house, Isabel stared.
She tried not to, because her first impression should have been more than enough to inform an appropriate response: man, stranger, naked.
But her second impression? Ink-storied skin, powerful shoulders and lean hips, a freckled tan alternating with the pale striations of a swimmer’s rash guard, sun-bleached hair pulled into a knot, moisture condensing on a stubbled jaw, bronze-ringed eyes dilating, before rapidly cutting away, hands grappling for a sliding towel—
“Shit!” He stumbled over a duffel bag and careened toward a reef tank beside the television on a credenza.
Water sloshed.
Her body moved without consulting her brain.
Dropping her shoes, bag, and the keys, she lunged for the aquarium, lunged at him—and yes, she preserved a few anemic spires of coral from tipping off the shelf behind the stranger, but only by running her momentum aground against him, her arms extended around and past his ribcage, her palms just making contact with the tank’s dusty, wobbling glass—and oh, his skin was hot—
“Ah!”
Lurching sideways, she nearly upset the tank a second time.
She backed away. She struggled not to inhale, not to admit that dangerous heat farther into herself.
Except the man was watching her retreat, and when she risked a quick glance through her hair, even his gaze was too hot. He caught her looking.
Staring again.
He frowned. One scar-notched eyebrow tilted. “Who. . .?” His voice was low, deep with surprise.
“Um—I. . .” She choked.
“No, wait.”
Shivering, breathless, and dripping—but not cold enough, not even with the wet hair plastered against her skull triggering goosebumps down her spine—Isabel remained where she stood, biting nervously at her thumbnail while he disappeared through a doorway that must have led toward the bungalow’s bathroom.
After cursing and knocking around in the interior, he reemerged with a terrycloth robe belted over his ink and sunburns. He tossed a duplicate robe to her.
“Here.”
Somehow, she caught it.
“Now.” He folded his arms. This time, both eyebrows rose. “Who the hell are you?”
Maybe she should lie. Lying would be a safe response to the situation.
Wouldn’t it?
Instead, her fingers fisted in the robe and she told him, “I-Isabel Wright.”
He nodded. “And I’m Wes Monaghan.”
Monaghan?
“Oh.” She paused halfway through a terrycloth sleeve. “Do. . . do you know Dr. Erin Monaghan?”
“Frizzy?” Another nod, cautious but apparently curious. “That’s my sister. She said I could crash on this couch for a few days, if I needed to. Do you know her?”
A simple falsehood might have helped with the anxious churning in her stomach. It might have distracted his gaze. But a lie was still a lie. “I met her tonight.”
“Right,” slowly, appraisingly. Erin’s brother shifted his weight onto his heels, back toward the reef tank. He cocked his head. “In that case, who’s Isabel Wright? And what are you doing in Erin’s beach house—soaking wet?”
Her silk sheath was transparent.
Burning now with humiliation, she dove farther into the robe.
Wes Monaghan was almost certainly naked under his own terrycloth.
If he was, he appeared nonplussed rather than embarrassed when he went on, patting the bulky television beside the aquarium, “I doubt you’re a burglar.
You knew where to find the house key, you’re not worried about leaving footprints, and you’re more interested in a fish tank than making a getaway with this very valuable vintage piece.
But maybe you’re after the novelty wall clock? ”
“I—I’m not—”
“That’s a joke.” He waved off her protest with an expansive gesture, imperiling the tank and its sputtering pump yet again before stabilizing it. Then, suddenly serious, “I just want to know what you’re doing here.”
“I didn’t steal the car outside.”
“I didn’t think you did.”
“No, but. . .” She swallowed. Breathe. Facts. “Ethan loaned his car to me. He gave me this address. Just for tonight. I’ll be gone tomorrow.”
Her lie was by omission only: why it was that Ethan had offered his car and bungalow to her, when Erin had already assigned the couch to her brother.
“If Ethan offered you his hideaway, you must know him better than Erin.”
She didn’t.
Ethan knew his own brother, however. He’d had this address ready in his pocket. . .
She balled her hands in the bathrobe to hide their shaking. Chase’s ring snagged on the terrycloth. “Um—family.”
“Really.” Wes’s skeptical hum wasn’t a question.
She nodded anyhow, glancing away from his pointed attention and to the clock he’d half-accused her of planning to steal.
Shelled and shellacked, the device’s octopus arms pointed not to numerals, but to whimsical suggestions like Skinny Dip, Lime renewed nerves roiled hotter and tighter, higher under her ribs.
Restlessly—and recklessly, because Wes was still watching her near the reef tank—she reapproached the aquarium.
At least this, she could fix right now. Given the pump’s sluggish, suckless burping and an ecosystem of slime crawling over the glass, the chamber tubing was likely blocked with debris.
The tank’s protein skimmer and any remaining nitrifying bacteria were clearly inadequate.
The stunted coral was suffocating in its gravel and sand bed.
She opened the credenza’s drawers to examine packets of expired fish food, a decades-old warranty booklet, and a few bristle brushes.
Pipe cleaners. She withdrew one. She reached around the tank to wiggle the tubing loose from a suction ring that alligated it to the pump.
Behind her, Wes drew in a breath.
Surprise? Confusion?
“I’ll be quick, before the coral suffers.”
“. . . right.”
Of course, why would he care about that?
She jammed the bristles into the tube.
No one ever cared.
But he didn’t jeer at her. He didn’t laugh.
He let his affirmation settle into silence and continued to observe her—or to observe her fight with the tubing.
She twisted a pipe cleaner down, down, down its length until she met resistance, flexing.
. . and the hose gave a belch and a dribble of slimy water.
The clog cleared. She didn’t recoil at the algal smell, just stared at the burping line while she fitted the hose back into its pump.
The motor juddered and began to inhale marginally cleaner water with an angry urgency.
It might still be too late for the coral.
And really, Isabel herself should have run when she’d had the chance.
It wasn’t that Wes was preventing her from leaving the bungalow.
She’d invaded his space. He was still watching her, though.
She willed her fidgeting hands to quiet.
The moisture oozing from her hair might have been sweat.
She fixed her focus on the tank and waited for questions, braced for judgment.
“Isabel, are you all right?”
. . . what?
She blinked at the pump.
“Are you. . . safe?”
Safe?
No.
No, she wasn’t.
Not when the clock read fifteen minutes past High Tide.
How could she articulate what those simple increments of time meant to her?
How could she explain the importance of every passing second chipping away at the month of September, then the ten months after that?
She had eleven months left until her visa expired and forced her back to Canada.
Unless she secured a spousal Green Card.
But: belt, stilettos, stares—no, no, no.
If she couldn’t manage her situation with Chase, she’d lose access to BioPulse’s experimental migraine medication.
It would take hours to explain why that mattered so much, though.
To really explain. Besides, why would Wes care?
They were strangers in a bungalow rented by other people, interlopers in matching bathrobes.
Nothing about this conversation or situation made any sense. . .
Abruptly, despite the panic and adrenaline and cold, she was so, so tired.
She dragged a hand over the bridge of her nose. Are you safe? She said, “I went swimming. I drove to Monterey, and I went swimming.”
“You went swimming?”
“Yes.”
“At night.” His voice was flat.
“Yes.”
“Without a wetsuit.”
She shrugged.
“That’s insane.”
One of Isabel’s shoulders rose and fell.
Water dribbled along her legs from under the terrycloth robe, dotting her ankles, trickling into a puddle on the rug.
Weren’t her feet frozen? She didn’t retreat, continuing to fiddle with the reef tank’s pump, working to resuscitate a few spires of half-dead calcium carbonate stuck in gravel.
Her lips were set, her eyes downcast through the wet ripple of her hair.
“I don’t think you can save the coral,” he told her, when it was clear that she wouldn’t respond to his incredulity about her swim. “See the bleaching? That means it’s—”
“—stressed.” She unearthed a surface skimmer from the credenza and dunked it into the tank. “Coral expels the zooxanthellae—the photosynthetic cells—living in its tissues when the water temperature or pH is inhospitable. It’s fragile, but it’s not dead.”