* * *
Within half an hour they were under way, out on the open ocean, and Stella couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this alive. She’d waited patiently while Rick had used the motor to manoeuvre out of the harbour, then helped him with the still familiar motions of putting up the sails. She heard Lucinda sigh as they billowed with the moderate breeze and her pulse leapt as the boat surged forward, slicing across the whitecaps.
Rick, who had taken his shirt off—of course—stood behind her at the wheel for the first ten minutes, giving her a quick refresher. It wasn’t needed. Her feel for the boat was instantaneous, like the familiarity of her own heartbeat, and even if it hadn’t been they could easily have switched to the sophisticated autopilot system guided by the satellite technology that he’d had installed as part of the fully computerised upgrade.
But it was exhilarating to feel the pulse of the ocean beneath her feet again. She shut her eyes, raised her face to the sun as the big wheel in her hands felt like a natural extension of her being. In her mind’s eye she could see Lucinda laughing up at her as she undulated through the waves, riding the bow with the dolphins.
Rick looked up from tying down a loose rope and caught her in her sun-worshipping stance. He’d worried that buying the Dolphin on a whim had been a mistake, an indulgence he didn’t have the time to realise, a reaction to Nathan’s sudden death.
But he didn’t any more.
Nathan’s accident had rocked him to his very core. He’d been there that day. Had seen Nathan’s lifeless form, minus his breathing apparatus, bob to the surface. Had frantically dragged him aboard, puffed air into lungs that had been consumed by sea water too many minutes before.
Had demanded that he stay with him.
Stay for him.
Stay for Stella.
His own father’s memory had faded to nothing over the years. He’d been too young when his father’s regular bouts of drunken shore leave had caught up with him. Just a few faded photographs and the oft-repeated stories that got more and more fantastical late into the night after one too many beers.
Anthony Granville had occupied a legendary status amongst the men that knew him but he’d still got himself dead.
It was Nathan who’d been Rick’s role model. His stand-in father. And Nathan who had taken on his full-time guardianship when he was a tearaway fifteen-year-old and his grandmother had washed her hands of him.
Rick had only ever wanted to be at sea managing his half of the business. And Nathan had facilitated it.
But he hadn’t made it easy—oh, no.
Nathan had been a tough task master.
Rick had thought his days of schooling and routine were done but Nathan had been worse than his grandmother. Nathan had insisted that he do his schooling by correspondence. And when he was done with that for the day, he’d given him every lousy job possible.
Had worked him like a navvy.
And Rick couldn’t be more grateful. In his own way, Nathan had given him a better grounding than if he’d grown up in a loving, two-parent secure home.
He’d been so angry with Nathan when he’d landed in the UK thirty hours after they’d given up trying to resuscitate him.
Angry that Nathan had left him to be the bearer of bad news.
Angry that he’d left full stop.
But he’d known the news had to come from him.
The thought of someone else telling Linda—telling Stella—had been completely unpalatable. Nathan would have wanted it to be him and he hadn’t wanted it to come from anyone else.
How could he have let some faceless policeman tell Linda? She and Nathan might have been divorced but even Rick had been able to see the deep and abiding love she still felt for him.
And there was no way he’d have let anyone else tell Stella.
The autopsy results just prior to the funeral had made Nathan’s death more palatable. Rick had understood, as a man of the sea himself, that Nathan had chosen the ocean over a hospital.
But it hadn’t lessened his loss.
And his very impulsive purchase of the Dolphin was so mixed up in the whole vortex of grief he just hadn’t been sure of his motivations.
But, as she opened her eyes and smiled at him as if she were riding a magic carpet instead of some very tame waves, he was one hundred per cent sure.
The Dolphin was part of them. Their history. And whatever else happened over the years in their lives, it would always bond them together, always be theirs—his, hers and Nathan’s.
* * *
It had been quite a few years since Stella had been snorkelling. But as they lay anchor a couple of hours later crystalline tropical waters the exact shade of Rick’s eyes beckoned, and she was below deck and back up again in record speed.
‘What on earth are you wearing?’ Rick demanded as she appeared by his side while he was rummaging around in a storage compartment for some goggles and fins.
Stella looked down at her very sensible one-piece. ‘You don’t like the colour?’ she asked.
He tisked to cover the fact that he didn’t give a damn what colour it was. ‘It’s stinger season, Stel. There should be a wetsuit hanging on the back of your cabin door and a stinger suit in one of the drawers.’
Stella looked at the water, desperate to feel it on her skin with no barriers just as she had in her Lucinda dream.
‘Oh, come on,’ she protested. ‘We’d be pretty protected out here on the reef, surely?’
‘I’ll be sure to tell them that’s what you thought when they’re giving you the anti-venin.’
Stella shrugged. ‘I’m willing to risk it.’
Rick shook his head emphatically. ‘I’m not.’
He worked in an inherently dangerous field—there were a lot of things in the ocean that could kill a man—and his reputation for safety was second to none. He certainly wasn’t going to have to explain to Linda that he’d let her daughter die too.
He pointed to the stairs leading to the lower deck. ‘Go,’ he intoned.
Stella rolled her eyes. ‘Yeh, yeh.’
‘Don’t make me come down there,’ he threatened.
Stella felt the flirty threat right down to her toes. What would he say if she challenged him to do just that?
Rick smiled to himself as she slunk away, her one-piece riding up the cheek of one buttock. He looked away. When she reappeared a few minutes later she was zipped into light blue neck-to-ankle Lycra.
‘I hate these things,’ she complained as she pulled at the clinging fabric. ‘I look like a dumpling.’
Rick deliberately didn’t look. What Nathan’s daughter did or did not look like poured into a stinger suit was none of his business. He was still trying to not think about that half-
exposed butt cheek.
‘Everyone does,’ he said, handing her some flippers and her mask and snorkel.
Stella glared at him. No, not everyone did. Not size-zero six-foot supermodels. Which she wasn’t. And certainly not him, half zipped into his, his thighs outlined to perfection, the narrowness of his hips a stark contrast to the roundness of her own. He looked like an Yves St Laurent cologne guy or James freaking Bond walking out of the Mediterranean in his teeny tiny swimming trunks.
She fitted her mask to her head and looked at him. ‘Aren’t you coming?’ she asked, staring pointedly at his state of undress.
‘Right