Three months later
Wes leaped into action.
Jumping down the three steps leading from her salon to the stern deck, he shouldered a coil of rope and sprang over the railing.
He landed on the dock with a slap of sandals and twisted a neat cleat hitch to secure their vessel in her slot.
Several months of habit should have seen Isabel running out a hydraulic gangway while he worked.
But after powering down the navigation dashboard and cutting the fuel injection, she left the cockpit—decorated with a wall-mounted guitar and a Santa Cruz caricature, strewn with half-eaten packets of dried pineapple—and just watched him for a moment, admiring the freckles on his forearms, the hair clustering in untidy, salty curls at his nape.
. . and his sly, bronze-eyed glint of awareness when he caught her staring.
She quickly extended the moveable platform.
He straightened to rake back his bun into its elastic and raised an eyebrow, watching her in turn.
“What?”
He knew what. Despite the brisk air frisking through her light, bright cotton dress, warmth bloomed between her thighs.
The tanned skin on her arms pebbled. Her neck and cheeks flushed with anticipation.
She stepped swiftly along the gangway toward him.
When her feet would have touched down onto the marina’s mooring planks, however, he whisked her into his arms.
“Wes—”
She squirmed. Laughing as flounces of sun-thinned tie-dye rode up over her knees, she risked toppling both of them into the harbor while he wobbled by ranks of other pleasure and live-aboard craft, down the dock past a security kiosk, then on in the direction of the tidal marshes, beaches, and picnic slopes of Crissy Field.
Neither of them had set foot on land since they had overnighted in Panama during their return voyage from the Aegean Islands.
Now the wind blowing off the grass and asphalt was briny but sweet, the scent of sun-heated bicycle tires tickling her nose.
The distant whoosh of traffic and the happy barking of a dog rang in her ears beside the vibration of Wes’s own laughter, his heartbeat sounding in her ribs, swooping through her stomach—and her impulse to kiss him was too strong to resist. She raised her head from his shoulder and her mouth to his, eager to catch him by surprise, when—
“Wes! Isabel!”
Wes’s left sandal snagged on a curb. He stumbled across Yacht Road. “What the—”
“Over here!”
Coming toward them along the waterfront Golden Gate Promenade was a boisterous, waving clan of four Monaghans with zipped fleeces, hiking boots, and smiles, plus Ethan Meyer with a Frisbee and his golden retriever. Wes barely had time to set Isabel down before they were surrounded.
“You didn’t tell us you’d be back in San Francisco today!” Erin tackled her brother.
“Ooof!” He returned her enthusiastic embrace, rubbing his knuckles through her hair until she yelped. “Yeah, but that clearly didn’t stop any of you from showing up—”
“Only because I’ve been watching your boat.” Adrian flipped his aviators onto his head. “You can track registered seacraft, just like jets.”
“Are you starting an espionage side hustle?” Wes released Erin to slap his brother’s shoulder.
“Darling, it’s wonderful to see you. But your sunscreen. . .” Glasses glinting on a beaded chain, Lori Monaghan assessed Wes’s Mediterranean tan for evidence of burning, even while she moved Adrian aside to enfold her eldest son in her own hug.
“Don’t worry, Isabel kept reminding me and slathering me up, Mom.”
“And Isabel!” Lori turned. She swished a hand through her blonde-graying ponytail instead of grabbing Isabel for an embrace, and twinkled a greeting.
“Welcome back to California, dear. We’re so happy to finally meet you in person.
Of course, you two wanted your honeymoon to yourselves, but I’m very pleased that you’ve—”
“Were you honeymooning while you skipped out on so many of our Monday calls, though?” Erin hooked her elbow through Wes’s arm.
Grinning over her shoulder at Isabel, she motioned for her to join them, then tugged her brother toward a picnic green overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
Ethan and his retriever had already decamped there under the fog-fringed sunset to spread a blanket and open a cooler large enough to fit a giant Pacific octopus.
Ethan tossed Erin a lemonade, which she thunked into Wes’s chest before offering Isabel a second bottle.
“Or were you actually working for MORI and the wildlife magazines?”
Wes rolled his eyes and dropped onto the blanket. He settled Isabel into a nook between his knees. “Well, we—”
“I tracked your route, remember?” Adrian popped his cap with a carbonated fizz. “You were sailing around Greece’s marine preserves. It’s not hard to put the pieces together.”
“Exactly.” Erin continued the attack. “If I peek at your film, will I see you two sipping wine in seaside stucco bars and lounging on Elafonisi Beach? Or will I get a thousand shots of barracudas and algae blooms?”
“Some of both. You can’t avoid either in the Aegean Islands.
My roll’s mostly octopuses right now, though—thanks to Isabel.
” Wes’s thumb teased the vertebrae at the nape of her neck, where her cropped pixie cut exposed the strong, delicate bones.
Setting aside his lemonade, he plucked a clover blossom from the grass and tucked it behind her ear.
“Buttercup, want to tell them about those new cephalopod camouflage patterns that you identified at the Chania reefs?”
Yes.
Her stomach swooped again with excitement, with discovery.
Before she could catch her breath, however, the Monaghan group’s focus shifted away from her and Wes with lightning speed: Lori was unpacking vegetable-and-hummus sandwiches from the cooler, plus pasta salad with feta, snap peas and peanut butter, a massive bunch of grapes, and chocolate-covered strawberries—and Ethan’s retriever had lunged for a rogue cube of cheese.
“Bunsen, no!” Snorting with apologetic laughter, he wrestled his dog away.
Lori palmed the feta to Bunsen anyhow. “I hope you took some time off from your work. Salad? I wasn’t sure what you liked, Isabel, so I got a variety of things.”
“Cleaned out the deli,” from Robert Monaghan, helping his wife to crack lids off the multiplying containers, nodding at Wes. “Special day.”
“Thank you, but you didn’t need to—”
“Yes.” Lori smiled at Isabel, kissed her husband’s cheek, then fixed a stern gaze on her son. “I did. And did you think you could avoid a celebration by rushing off to sea, darling?”
“Now you have to man up and deal with Mom stage-managing a huge engagement, rehearsal, and wedding party over the holidays this year.” Adrian’s smirk was unsympathetic around a grape. “Is that brave or stupid?”
Wes chucked a snap pea at him. “Don’t talk to me about brave or stupid. Not when I’d bet this entire jar of peanut butter that you still haven’t called Mart—”
But Adrian yanked the picnic blanket out from under his brother before he could finish.
Wes and Isabel topped together onto the grass.
Bunsen howled with excitement as the pasta salad wobbled in his direction.
Both Ethan and Erin dove to grab the golden retriever’s collar, and missed when they collided with each other.
A sandwich went flying, spewing chickpeas, spinach, and mustard.
The commotion attracted a flock of seagulls wheeling in over the bay.
Wes reached for a handful of projectile grapes.
For the gulls or his brother? Maybe both.
From the corner of his mouth, he whispered, “Run for it, Buttercup.”
She did.
Not far, though, and not beyond the range of the Monaghans’ laughter.
Breathless behind a smile, she paused her flight by a rock-walled promenade that footed the park’s picnic slope, where the Golden Gate Bridge directed ships and dreamers out to sea, where Alcatraz blinked its warning lights.
. . and where the St. Francis Yacht Club overlooked the same stretch of water and sky.
Just over three months ago, she’d gazed out at this vista and wished to be anywhere else.
Now she had been—anywhere and everywhere.
And while she’d been to her everywhere, everything had also happened.
Erin had sent the news via a gleeful postcard that Chase had been fired from UCSF Medical Center for malpractice.
When they’d resupplied the Nauti Thalassa and picked up a stronger internet signal in Heraklion, Isabel and Wes had learned that BioPulse’s satellite facility had closed due to health-and-safety and environmental regulation violations.
Given the company’s plans to initiate human trials with a medication known to cause brain damage in its animal test subjects, BioPulse Pharmaceuticals was under federal investigation for premeditated criminal negligence, as well.
Plus, the San Francisco Medical Center had notified Isabel that its Phase Three clinical trial for Ceretobicin had been completed successfully; the drug was approved for commercial use.
Everything is—good.
Still smiling, she sneaked a look back toward the younger Monaghans roughhousing on the grass while Lori and Robert enjoyed their deconstructed picnic. She nodded at Ethan and Bunsen (the dog had either soft cheese or gull guano painting his muzzle) when they approached to join her by the sea wall.
“I had to drag him away before he scarfed down the whole peanut-butter jar.” Amusement tucked an answering smile into Ethan’s cheek. “But we can leave you alone, if you want the quiet.”
“I don’t mind.”
“That’s good, because. . .” he echoed her glance at the exuberant chaos, shrugging, his smile deepening, “welcome to the family.”
“Is it always like this?”
“Are the Monaghans always like this? Based on my extant personal data, there’s actually less hot sauce than usual—except, no, Adrian’s found a bottle somewhere, but—”
“No, I mean: family.”
“Family? God, I hope so,” and his smile split into a grin as Erin came sprinting away from the picnic green, shouting that she’d escaped with a chocolate strawberry. Adrian was in pursuit. “Wait, shit—”
Isabel couldn’t help laughing when Ethan ran off to intercept the sister and brother, to help one and hinder the other. But which? Maybe even he didn’t know.
Maybe it didn’t matter.
What mattered was Wes: sauntering over to her in his siblings’ wake, winking while he offered up a smudged but very edible berry that he’d stolen from the other Monaghans and the dog.
Pirate. She bit into the sweet treat. He took advantage of the chocolate smeared across her lips to coax her close, to nibble and kiss away the mess, which was even sweeter.
Then he drew back to brush his mouth over a curl of ink on the fourth finger of her left hand.
A ship’s anchor formed the center stone of her tattooed wedding circlet. The band was a delicately rendered octopus arm.
She’d chosen this ring for both of them, and wore it with pride.
“Sorry about the family’s ambush,” Wes said, raising his head. “You all right?”
Okay, she signed. “Yes.”
“Good. I know we’d planned on a few weeks of shore leave before we make bubbles for the Great Barrier Reef”—they needed to sign some offboarding paperwork at UCSF to finish her medical trial, then visit MORI to see Dr. Solomon’s new pearl-octopus nursery, Isabel’s volunteer friends, and to hand off some data originals, and finally fly to Grand Arbor for the holidays—“but still: even if you’re all right, if you do want to dock and roll out of here now, I know someone with a boat, and a Jeep—”
“I’m really fine, Wes.” More laughter tickled her throat. Not nausea from rough sea swells, just joy. Her palm skimmed her stomach.
We’re fine.
“We can do better than fine, though, can’t we?” He cradled her nearer to kiss her a second time, and a third.
Flash.
A thousand kilometers away, or maybe over at the picnic green, cameras blazed: tourists snapping photos of the Golden Gate Bridge before the fog rolled in, or Adrian admitting defeat in his race against Erin, trading his hot-sauce bottle for his phone, wolf-whistling while he captured their silhouettes against the water.
Isabel only tugged Wes closer, her smile wider and brighter and richer than the sun-spangled sea, and—
Brrrriiinng!
“Hell no. Not again.” Wes fumbled for his own phone and wound up to chuck it into the bay.
“Wait!” She caught his wrist. “Shouldn’t you at least see who’s calling?”
“I don’t care. We’re off duty.”
But the caller ID read: Wildlife Photographic.
Wildlife Photographic was the most prestigious magazine in his field.
“You should take it,” she urged him.
He grimaced through his chuckle. “Damn. You’re right. Like always.”
“I know.” She put the call on speakerphone.
“Wes Monaghan here.”
“Hello, Mr. Monaghan.” The caller introduced herself as the magazine’s commissioning agent.
“Our editors caught your work in National Geographic two years back, as well as your recent restoration profile in Monterey Eco. They’re interested in offering you a contract to photograph the endangered megafauna in South Africa’s Maputaland Marine Reserve.
Specifically coelacanths, but also whale sharks, potato cod, and leatherback turtles.
It would be a two-month assignment with a complete benefits package and paid airfare.
Due to seasonal migration patterns, we’d need you to start next week. Are you interested and available?”
“Am I interested in working for Wildlife Photographic? With a full benefits package?” Wes’s eyebrows rose.
“Yes. Thanks. That’s an incredible offer.
But while I’d definitely welcome future opportunities, that timeline doesn’t work with my schedule.
I’m busy for the rest of the year on an assignment that already has excellent benefits. . .”
Oh, no.
Helpless, horrified, delighted laughter burst across Isabel’s tongue.
Wes grinned at her, shameless. “Being Mr. Wright.”