“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Tablecloths flying off tables. Women’s dresses blowing up over their heads. Napkins catching fire. Flower arrangements being smashed. There’s really a whole lot of things people should think about before planning their wedding on a remote island in the tropics.”
Becky glared at him. “You know what? I barely know you and I hate you already.”
He nodded. “I have that effect on a lot of people.”
He watched the plane taxi toward them and grind to a halt in front of them.
“I’m sure you do,” she said snippily.
“Does this mean our date under the palm frond is off?”
“It was never on!”
“You should think about it—the building collapsed, the tablecloths on fire, women’s dresses blowing over their heads as they run shrieking...”
“Please stop.”
But he couldn’t. He could tell he very nearly had her where he wanted her. Why did he feel so driven to make little Miss Becky English angry? But also to make her laugh?
“And you and me under a palm frond, licking wedding cake off each other’s fingers.”
At first she looked appalled. But then a smile tickled her lips. And then she giggled. And then she was laughing. In a split second, every single thing about her seemed transformed. She went from plain to pretty.
Very pretty.
This was exactly what he had wanted: to glimpse what the cool Miss English would look like if she let go of control.
It was more dangerous than Drew had anticipated. It made him want to take it a step further, to make her laugh harder or to take those little lips underneath his and...
He reminded himself she was not the type of girl he usually invited out to play. Despite the fact she was being relied on to put on a very sophisticated event, there didn’t seem to be any sophistication about her.
He had already figured out there was a heartbreak in her past. That was the only reason a girl as apple pie as her claimed to be jaundiced about romance. He could tell it wasn’t just dealing with people’s wedding insanity that had made her want to be cynical, even as it was all too evident she was not. He had seen the truth in the dreamy look when she had started talking about how she wanted it all to go.
He could tell by looking at her exactly what she needed, and it wasn’t a job putting together other people’s fantasies.
It was a husband who adored her. And three children. And a little house where she could sew curtains for the windows and tuck bright annuals into the flower beds every year.
It was whatever the perfect life in Moose Run, Michigan, looked like.
Drew knew he could never give her those things. Never. He’d experienced too much loss and too much responsibility in his life.
Still, there was one thing a guy as jaundiced as him did not want or need. To be stuck on a deserted island with a female whose laughter could turn her from a plain old garden-variety girl next door into a goddess in the blink of an eye.
He turned from her quickly and watched as the door of the plane opened. The crew got off, opened the cargo hold and began unloading stuff beside the runway.
He frowned. No Joe.
He took his phone out of his pocket and stabbed in a text message. He pushed Send, but the island did not have great service in all places. The message to his brother did not go through.
Becky was searching his face, which he carefully schooled not to show his disappointment.
“I guess we’ll have to find that spot ourselves. Joe will probably come on the afternoon flight. Let’s see what we can find this way.”
Instead of following the lawn to where it dropped down to the beach, he followed it north to a line of palm trees. A nice wide trail dipped into them, and he took it.
“It’s like jungle in here,” she said.
“Think of the possibilities. Joe could swing down from a vine. In a loincloth. Allie could be waiting for him in a tree house, right here.”
“No, no and especially no,” she said.
He glanced behind him. She had stopped to look at a bright red hibiscus. She plucked it off and tucked it behind her ear.
“In the tropics,” he told her, “when you wear a flower behind your ear like that, it means you are available. You wouldn’t want the cook getting the wrong idea.”
She glared at him, plucked the flower out and put it behind her other ear.
“Now it means you’re married.”
“There’s no winning, is there?” she asked lightly.
No, there wasn’t. The flower looked very exotic in her hair. It made him very aware, again, of the enchantment of tropical islands. He turned quickly from her and made his way down the path.
After about five minutes in the deep shade of the jungle, they came out to another beach. It was exposed to the wind, which played in the petals of the flower above her ear, lifted her bangs from her face and pressed her shirt to her.
“Oh,” she called, “it’s beautiful.”
She had to shout because unlike the beach the castle overlooked, this one was not in a protected cove.
It was a beautiful beach. A surfer would probably love it, but it would have to be a good surfer. There were rocky outcrops stretching into the water that looked like they would be painful to hit and hard to avoid.
“It’s too loud,” he said over the crashing of the waves. “They’d be shouting their vows.”
He turned and went back into the shaded jungle. For some reason, he thought she would just follow him, and it took him a few minutes to realize he was alone.
He turned and looked. The delectable Miss Becky English was nowhere to be seen. He went back along the path, annoyed. Hadn’t he made it perfectly clear they had time constraints?
When he got back out to the beach, his heart went into his throat. She had climbed up onto one of the rocky outcrops. She was standing there, bright as the sun in that yellow shirt, as a wave smashed on the rock just beneath her. Her hands were held out and her face lifted to the spray of white foam it created. With the flower in her hair, she looked more like a goddess than ever, performing some ritual to the sea.
Did she know nothing of the ocean? Of course she didn’t. They had already established that. That, coming from Moose Run, there were things she could not know about.
“Get down from there,” he shouted. “Becky, get down right now.”
He could see the second wave building, bigger than the first that had hit the rock. The waves would come in sets. And the last wave in the set would be the biggest.
The wind swallowed his voice, though she turned and looked at him. She smiled and waved. He could see the surf rising behind her alarmingly. The second wave hit the rock. She turned away from him, and hugged herself in delight as the spray fell like thick mist all around her.
“Get away from there,” he shouted. She turned and gave him a puzzled look. He started to run.
Becky had her back to the third wave when it hit. It hit the backs of her legs. Drew saw her mouth form a surprised O, and then her arms were flailing as she tried to regain her balance. The wave began pulling back, with at least as much force as it had come in with. It yanked her off the rock as if she were a rag doll.