Lorelie Brown - Riding the Wave

“But we both know that’s not true.” His voice was as silky as a spider web and as sticky. She wanted to be on him. With him. “If you and I were sleeping together, there’d be no forgetting that.”

She rolled her eyes a tiny bit. “With that ego, you are entirely your father’s son. How the hell could you stop talking to him when he was practically you ?”

That was apparently the entirely wrong thing to say. He surged up from the booth, a muscle sharply carved in the side of his jaw. After peeling bills off a thick wad, he tossed down money to cover their drinks. “You’ll do what you need to, and I’ll do what my contract says I have to. But don’t think you’ll get any special consideration. I’m not talking about him.”

“Tanner, I’m—” But before she could finish the sentence, he turned away like some sort of petulant teenager. Huffing an annoyed breath, she crossed her arms over her chest and sat back in the booth. The only person who got to treat her like she was nothing was her mother, and even that was a close call. She injected all the saccharine sweetness she could muster into her voice. “I’ll drop by your place in the morning. Don’t worry—Mr. Wakowski gave me the address.”

He stopped short. Even the backs of his calves pulled into a sharp shelf of divided muscle. She could tuck a pencil under that rivet. The sunglasses he tugged from his cargo pocket were expensive, with a dragon emblem on the side and likely comped. All the top surfers got gear and clothing for free. He might not like his notoriety, but he sure benefited from it.

The slow pivot he did was all show. One more thing he was certainly good at, whether he wanted to admit it or not.

She snapped off a handful of pictures, the whir of the lens like a subtle raspberry at him. He wanted to play at being as mercurial as the ocean before a storm, fine. She could be as much of an ass in return.

“There’s one thing you ought to know,” he said. His voice was a quiet purr, half threat, half promise that would forever go unexplored, at least with her. “Hank Wright was no god. There are things you don’t know about him.”

“And you do? You’re the one who was gone. You don’t want me to ask, fine.” She stood as well. No way was she finishing this conversation from such a disadvantage, staring up at him. She’d never been much of one for doormatting. Her camera dangled, strap wound loosely around her wrist. She lifted it with a smile that felt only mean. Snapped off a couple more shots. “But I’m the one who was here. The whole time. So unless you’re prepared to spill about the dark and dirty? You don’t also get to rub it in my face.”

Out of nowhere, the wrinkles across his forehead cleared. He grinned. She didn’t want to admit how much she liked the shape of his eyes, the darker sweep of his brows above them. “It’s a damned shame,” he said.

She swallowed down her sudden confusion. It was so much easier to be annoyed. “What’s that?”

He leaned down and brushed a kiss across her mouth, too short to be much more than a tease. She didn’t even get a taste of him, and sure didn’t get any more than the shock of a tingle. “That we won’t get to follow up on this. Not anymore.”

It hadn’t taken Tanner long to realize very little had changed in San Sebastian. The place was a funny mix of half organic-eating, biofuel-spouting, crunchy ex-hippies and half young, heavy-wave, cutting-edge surfers. The only difference from his last time in town was that both factions sported smartphones that they put to entirely different uses.

The surfer crowd filmed themselves doing wicked tricks and had it up on the web in less time than it took to dry their hair. The hippies flash-organized protests when the local grocery store was discovered to be passing off regular grapes as organic.

The downside meant Tanner had to weave and dodge through them all as they were nose-to-screen wandering down the main strip.

The good part was the eclectic offerings at the heart of the town, smack up against the beach, right where the street led inland from the pier. The rental house he’d taken was intentionally less than three blocks up the beach from the retail section. He’d pretty much planned on parking his SUV in the garage and walking all over town, the way he had when he’d been a kid.

So far, mission accomplished.

Late in the evening, he wandered his way toward some grub. His hands slipped deep in his pockets, it almost felt like he was slouching in an intentional reclamation of his teenage years.

He’d been such a shit. More attitude than one too-skinny body should have been able to handle. But no one had called him on it because he’d had the talent to back it all up.

His dad had told him plenty of times that nothing mattered but winning and making sure everyone knew you’d won—keeping up your image.

Hank had gotten that right, and lived up to it to the utmost. Even if it had left Tanner holding the bag when it came to guilt and secrets.

Tanner shoved those thoughts away and let everything else go. Nothing got through to him but the quiet shush of his sandals over the sandy sidewalks. The cool breeze coming in off the water, scented with the salt he’d always considered a vital part of anywhere resembling home. Now he had the real thing.

The front doors of his father’s store—no, now it was his mother’s—were propped wide open. A rack of cheap tourist T-shirts had been planted outside the threshold, but the quality goods were on the inside. All the last-minute essentials for a day of good surfing, plus Sage’s surfboard-making studio in the back.

Tanner strolled on by. He might’ve even looked across the street as he passed the lit-up windows, in case his mom was manning the front counter. He’d come back, and he was dealing with the fallout of almost a decade of choices. Seeing his mom and Sage in Australia and Hawaii had always been bittersweet. He’d wanted so much to tell them the truth of what Hank was like, about the secrets Tanner was forced to keep. But he knew how painful it was to have their father’s façade crushed. He didn’t want to inflict that on them.

The slot next door had been a psychic’s storefront when he’d been young. The place had always been draped in purple and gold, and Tanner had been fascinated with the dark-haired woman who’d run it. He’d never quite been able to figure out if she was a fraud preying on tourists or if she’d actually believed her spiel. Eventually he’d realized it didn’t matter. She was there, she did her thing, and no one seemed to get hurt. Good enough.

But Madame Rozamund was apparently gone. A candy store now filled the narrow storefront. Pyrex bins and giant tubes filled with brightly colored munchies lined three and a half walls.

Oh, he was totally getting some of that, though after the Sebastian Pro. Training was training. He couldn’t even say it sucked, not anymore. It just was . As much an ingrained part of him as the motions of surfing itself.

Though he passed a couple restaurants, he couldn’t seem to pick one. Instead, he wandered to the foot of the pier. The real wood of his childhood had been replaced with recycled material that sprung under his steps. He turned back to face the town he’d willingly abandoned for the better part of a decade.

Tiny streaks of light burned through the growing twilight. Mostly it was the main street, running east, that was still bright and populated. The houses to the north and south of the pier were lighting up, most of them with towels drying on the back railings. Expensive-as-hell beachfront property had racks of surfboards and wetsuits pinned up on clotheslines.