“Not about that. I mean, okay, about that, too, but I wasn’t talking about that.”
“What were you talking about?”
“It wasn’t a heartbreak,” Becky said. “It was a romantic disappointment.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what I thought of when I went into the water. I thought my whole life would flash before my eyes, but instead I thought of Jerry.”
“Look, you’re obviously in shock and we need to—”
“He was my high school sweetheart. We’d been together since I was seventeen. I’d always assumed we were going to get married. Everybody in the whole town thought we would get married. They called us Salt and Pepper.”
“You know what? This will keep. I have to—”
“It won’t keep. It’s important. I have to say it before I forget it. Before this moment passes.”
“Oh, sheesh,” he said, his tone indicating he wanted nothing more than for this moment to pass.
“I wanted that. I wanted to be Salt and Pepper, forever. My parents had split up the year before. It was awful. My dad owned a hardware store. One of his clerks. And him.”
“Look, Becky, you are obviously rattled. You don’t have to tell me this.”
She could no more have stopped herself from telling him than she could have stopped those waves from pounding on the shore.
“They had a baby together. Suddenly, they were the family we had always been. That we were supposed to be. It was horrible, seeing them all over town, looking at each other. Pushing a baby carriage. I wanted it back. I wanted that feeling of being part of something back. Of belonging.”
“Aw, Becky,” he said softly. “That sucks. Really it does, but—”
But she had to tell all of it, was compelled to. “Jerry went away to school. My mom didn’t have the money for college, and it seemed my dad had new priorities.
“I could see what the community needed, so I started my event company.”
“Happily-Ever-After,” he said. “Even though you had plenty of evidence of the exact opposite.”
“It was way more successful than I had thought it could be. It was way more successful than Jerry thought it could be, too. The more successful I became, the less he liked me.”
“Okay. Well. Some guys are like that.”
“He broke up with me.”
“Yeah, sorry, but now is not the time—”
“This is the reason it’s important for me to say it right now. I understand something I didn’t understand before. I thought my heart was broken. It is a terrible thing to suffer the humiliation of being ditched in a small town. It was a double humiliation for me. First my dad, and then this. But out there in the water, I felt glad. I felt if I had married him, I would have missed something. Something essential.”
“Okay, um—”
“A grand passion.”
He said a word under his breath that they disapproved of in Moose Run, Michigan.
“Salt and pepper?” She did a pretty good imitation of his snort. “Why settle for boring old salt and pepper when the world is full of so many glorious flavors?”
“Look, I think you’ve had a pretty bad shake-up. I don’t have a clue what you are talking about, so—”
She knew she was making Drew Jordan wildly uncomfortable, but she didn’t care. She planned to make him more uncomfortable yet. She leaned toward him. He stopped talking and watched her warily.
She needed to know if the life force was as intense in him right now as it was in her. She needed to take advantage of this second chance to be alive, to really live.
She touched Drew’s back through the wetness of his shirt, and felt the sinewy strength there. The strength that had saved her.
She leaned closer yet. She touched her forehead to his, as if she could make him feel what was going on inside her, since words could not express it. He had a chance to move away from her. He did not. He was as caught in what was unfolding as she had been in the wave.
And then, she touched her lips to his, delicately, needing the connection to intensify.
His lips tasted of salt and strength and something more powerful and more timeless than the ocean. That desire that people had within them, not just to live, but to go on.
For a moment, Drew was clearly stunned to find her lips on his. But then, he seemed to get whatever she was trying to tell him, in this primal language that seemed the only thing that could express the celebration of all that lived within her.
His lips answered hers. His tongue chased the ridges of her teeth, and then probed, gently, ever so gently...
It was Becky’s turn to be stunned. It was everything she had hoped for. It was everything she had missed.
No, it was more than what she had hoped for, and more than what she could have ever imagined. A kiss was not simply a brushing of lips. No! It was a journey, it was a ride on pure energy, it was a connection, it was a discovery, it was an intertwining of the deepest parts of two people, of their souls.
Drew stopped kissing her with such abruptness that she felt forlorn, like a blanket had been jerked from her on a freezing night. He said Moose Run’s most disapproved-of word again.
She liked the way he said that word, all naughty and nasty.
He found his feet and leaped up, staring down at her. He raked a hand through his hair, and water droplets scattered off his crumpled hair, sparkling like diamonds in the tropical heat. His shirt, crusted in golden sand, was clinging to his chest.
“Geez,” he said. “What was that about?”
“I don’t know,” she said honestly. But I liked it.
“A girl like you does not kiss a guy like me!”
She could ask what he meant by a girl like her, but she already knew that he thought she was small town and naive and hopelessly out of her depth, and not just in the ocean, either. What she wanted to know was what the last half of that sentence meant.
“What do you mean a guy like you?” she asked. Her voice was husky from the salt and from something else. Desire. Desire was burning like a white-hot coal in her belly. It was brand-new, it was embarrassing and it was wonderful.
“Look, Becky, I’m the kind of guy your mother used to warn you about.”
Woo-hoo, she thought, but she didn’t dare say it. Instead, she said, “The kind who would jump in the water without a thought for his own safety to save someone else?”
“Not that kind!”
She could point out to him that he obviously was that kind, and that the facts spoke for themselves, but she probed the deeper part of what was going on.
“What kind of guy then?” she asked, gently curious.
“Self-centered. Commitment-phobic. Good-time Charlie. Confirmed bachelor. They write whole articles about guys like me in your bridal magazines. And not about how to catch me, either. How to give a guy like me a wide berth.”
“Just in case you didn’t listen to your mother’s warnings,” she clarified.
He glanced at her. She bit her lip and his gaze rested there, hot with memory, until he seemed to make himself look away.
“I wouldn’t have pictured you as any kind of expert about the content of bridal magazines,” she said.
“That is not the point!”
“It