He seemed like a friend, and nothing in the world could have kept her from going and revisiting the most carefree time of her life by jumping in the lake with him!
“Hang on,” she said, “I’ll grab my lemon juice.”
They didn’t go to the public beach, but snuck down a much closer, but little-known lake access, between two very posh houses.
He stood patiently while she doused the stains on both their clothes with lemon juice. She set down the empty bottle and then rubbed the lemon into the stains. His skin beneath the fabric struck her as velvet over steel.
She heard his sharp intake of breath and looked up. He was watching her, his lips twitching with amusement but his eyes dark with something else.
Kayla gulped, let go of his shirt and backed away from him, spinning.
“Race you,” she cried over her shoulder, kicking off her flip-flops and already running. With a shout he came up behind her, and they hit the cold water hard. He cut the water in a perfect dive, and she followed. The day was already so hot that the cold water felt exquisite and cooling.
The water had been her second home since she had moved here. Beaches and this lake were the backdrop to everything good about growing up in a resort town.
It seemed the water washed away the bad parts of their shared past, and gave them back the happy-go-lucky days of their youth. They gave themselves over to play, splashing and racing, dunking each other, engaging in an impromptu game of tag, which he won handily, of course. He tormented her by letting her think she could catch him, and then in one or two powerful strokes he was out of her reach.
Kayla had known, when she had seen David run the other night, that he had lost none of his athleticism. But the water had always been his element.
His absolute strength and grace in it were awe-inspiring.
That and the fact his wet shirt had molded to the perfect lines of his chest. His hair was flattened and shiny with water, and the beads ran down the perfect plane of his face.
But the light in his eyes was warmer than the sun. That awareness of him that she had been feeling all morning—that had been pushed to the breaking point when she had scrubbed at his lemony shirt—was kept from igniting only by the coldness of the water.
Finally, gasping from exertion and laughter, they rolled over and floated side by side, completely effortless on their backs, looking up at a cloudless sky, the silence compatible between them. Even the awareness that had sizzled seemed to have morphed into something else, like the rain after the electrical storm, calm and cooling.
Finally, she broke the silence.
“I know you didn’t lie about him,” she said quietly. “David, I’m sorry I called you a liar.”
It felt so good that he said nothing at all, rolled his head slightly to look at her then rolled it back and contemplated the blueness of the sky.
The cold of the water finally forced them out. On the shore, she inspected his dripping clothes. The dandelion stains were unfazed by her lemon treatment.
“That will have to be your paint shirt,” she said, just as if he was a normal person who actually painted his own home when it needed it.
“Good idea,” he said, going along with her. Then, “For two relatively intelligent people, one of us could have remembered towels.”
“Watch who you’re calling relatively intelligent,” Kayla said, and shook her wet hair at him.
“This is a private beach,” a voice called.
They looked up to see a woman glaring at them from her deck.
In their youth, they would have challenged her. They would have told her there was no such thing as a private beach. That the entire lake and everything surrounding it to the high water mark—which would take them up to about where her lawn furniture was artfully displayed—belonged to the public. In their youth, they might have eaten their sandwiches on her manicured lawn.
But David just gave the sour-faced woman a good-natured wave, took Kayla’s hand, scooped up the empty lemon juice bottle and walked her back out between the houses.
They began the walk home, dripping puddles as they went. Somehow, David didn’t let go of her hand. They laughed when her flip-flops made slurping sounds with every step.
She tried to remember the last time she had felt so invigorated, so alive, so free. Oh, yeah. It had been just the other night, lying beside him in the cool grass, looking at the stars.
A siren gave a single wail behind them and then shut off.
They both whirled.
“Oh, no,” Kayla said. “It’s the same guy.”
“She called the police because we were on her beach?” David said incredulously.
Kayla could feel the laughter bubbling within her. “You and I have become a regular two-person crime wave,” she said. “Who would have thought that?”
The policeman got out of his car and looked at them. And then he reached back inside.
Kayla squealed.
“Bastigal!”
She raced forward and the dog wriggled out of the policeman’s arms and into her own. Her face was being covered with kisses and she realized she was crying and laughing at the same time.
But even in her joy it occurred to her that her dog had been returned to her only when she had learned the lesson: Bastigal was no kind of replacement for human company, for a real friend.
“Did your daughter find him?” David asked. Kayla glanced at him. He was watching her with a smile tickling the edges of that damnably sexy mouth.
“Yeah.”
“I guess she’s going to be getting that new bike,” David said.
“She’ll have to find another way to get her new bike.”
“What? Why?”
“I told her she can’t take the reward. You do good things for people because it’s right, not because there’s something in it for you. To me, teaching her that is more important than a new bike. Though at the moment, she hates me for it.”
“I’m going to buy an ice cream parlor,” Kayla said, the tears sliding even faster down her face.
“Maybe you’re going to buy an ice cream parlor,” David growled in an undertone.
Kayla ignored him. “Tell your daughter she gets free ice cream for life.”
The policeman lifted a shoulder, clearly trying to decide if that was still accepting a reward. Finally, he said, with a faint smile, “Sure. Whatever. Hey, by the way, you were called in for trespassing.”
“Really?” She shouldn’t be delighted, but what had happened to her life? It had surprises in it!
“As soon as I heard two fully clothed people swimming, I somehow knew it was you,” he said wryly. “I told the complainant she only owns to the high water line.”
And then all of them were laughing and the dog was licking her face and Kayla wondered if she had ever had a more perfect morning.
The policeman left and they continued on their way, Bastigal content in her arms.
David reached over and scratched his ears. “He’s so ugly he’s cute,” he said.
“I prefer to think that he’s so cute, he’s ugly,” she retorted. “I think that nice policeman should let his daughter have the reward.”
“Do you?”
“Don’t you?”
“I