Colleen Collins - A Scent of Seduction

He stopped and shrugged out of his jacket. “Here,” he said, wrapping it around her shoulders. “This will keep you a little warmer.”

“Oh, I can’t. You’ll get cold.”

“Let me take care of you.”

He looped her arm through his again and they continued walking down the pier. And for a moment, he felt like a better man.

FORTY MINUTES LATER, at the end of the pier, the festivities were breaking up. Some people were gathering their belongings, others stood chatting in small groups. Off to the side, several teenage boys and a girl stood with their trophies while Lacey, a Times staff photographer, peered at them through the camera viewfinder.

“Say cheese,” Lacey said.

A wave crashed against the pier. Spray rained on them. “Say shred, dudes!” one of the guys yelled, causing the others to laugh.

Lacey snapped some photos. “Great!”

Straightening, she motioned to Coyote and Kathryn. “You’re next. Stand a few feet in front of the railing over there.”

Kathryn looked past the railing into the mist. Twenty or so feet out, a wave suddenly rose, dark and ghostlike, before crashing against the end of the pier. Some people squealed as its thundering impact exploded in a rain of foam and spray.

“She’s got to be kidding,” Kathryn muttered.

“It’ll make a great picture,” said Coyote, next to her. He slicked his hand through his hair.

“We’ll look ridiculous.”

“No way,” Lacey said, adjusting her equipment for the shot. “It’s a perfect shot for the Crest of the Wave. Readers will eat it up. And maybe more important, Tallant will, too.”

Kathryn grimaced as another wave thundered against the pier, the pilings shuddering from its force.

“I could always do the shot alone,” Coyote said casually.

Women would swoon over a testosterone-and-spray-drenched photo of Coyote Sullivan in the Times. She could just hear the overloaded switchboard as women callers chipped their manicures frantically phoning in their votes.

“Over my dead body,” murmured Kathryn, accepting the challenge.

They stood exactly where Lacey told them to, side by side, taking direction—“Don’t cringe…stand straight…Kathryn, stop frowning…great laugh, Coyote!”—while waves crashed and cold ocean water spewed.

Twenty minutes later, Coyote and Kathryn hurried back down Ocean Beach Pier. Along the way fishermen lined the railing, diehards who cast their luck rain or shine, scents of French fries and hamburgers wafted from vendors’ stands, and the ever-present seagulls circled and squawked.

When they were almost at the end, a kid sporting a pink Mohawk clattered toward them on a skateboard. Kathryn jumped out of the way and dropped her purse, the contents spilling on the deck.

“Sorry, dude!” the boy called out as he rattled on down the pier.

Kathryn muttered a few choice words.

“You’re full of surprises,” teased Coyote, bending to pick up some of the spilled items.

“Shocked that I cuss?”

“Pleasantly so.” He held up a large jackknife. “Maybe more shocked at this.”

“That was a gift from my dad.” She took it, dropped it into her purse. “He thought it’d be good protection.”

Coyote did a double take. “Have you? I mean, used it for protection?”

Picking up a tube of lipstick, Kathryn laughed. “No. I mostly use it to cut up food. Before he died, he gave me other things I’ve never used—a wrench set, a power drill. What can I say—he always wanted a boy.”

Coyote moved closer. “I’m sorry.”

She nodded, not really wanting to discuss the family she’d lost. So many things in her past she wanted to keep that way. Locked-up memories in a box, best left unopened.

“For the record,” he murmured, “I’m glad you’re not a boy.”

For a still moment, they looked at each other, neither pretending that what was happening between them wasn’t.

Coyote broke the spell when he looked away and picked up a small bottle. “What’s this?”

Kathryn shrugged. “Nothing. I should toss it, but I keep forgetting to.”

“Nothing?” He held it up and examined the liquid. “Perfume?”

“No.”

It was clear, and yet on closer inspection he caught within it a hint of luminescence—a ray of moonlight captured within. And yet, when turned another way, it was clear again.

“Interesting,” he murmured.

“What?”

“Here, look for yourself.” While handing it to her, the bottle slipped and toppled down a hole in one of the wooden planks.

They both stared down the hole, watching it sift through the air before landing on a patch of sand.

Kathryn made a dismissive gesture. “Like I said, I’ve been meaning to throw it away—”

“I’ll go get it.” Coyote stood. “Tide’s low. It’ll be easy to find.”

“No, really—”

But he was already jogging toward the wooden stairs that led to the beach.

She gathered the rest of the spilled contents, thinking how she’d once pegged Coyote as unapologetically self-centered—most good-looking, charming men were—yet he’d been anything but that today. Loaning her his jacket, doing his best to make her comfortable during that drenched shoot, helping her when her purse took a tumble. And now digging around in the sand for that bogus lust potion.

The guy really did seem to want to take care of her.

Her last relationship, back in Chicago before her life took a nosedive, had been with a good-looking, charming guy who always watched out for number one, himself, with Kathryn a distant second. Or fourth or fifth if she factored in his dog, buddies, career and favorite bar. She wished she could say Steve had been the only guy who behaved that way, but he wasn’t. In hindsight—which was always twenty-twenty, right?—she chalked it up to women’s stereotypical attraction to bad boys, a habit she swore she’d never repeat.

She headed for the stairs, mentally cursing the new, too-tight sandals that were about as practical for shoes as thongs were for undies. At the bottom of the stairs, she stepped onto the sand. Her feet sank like cement.

Screw the shoes.

She slipped them off and left them, along with her purse, on a stair. She hadn’t walked barefoot on the beach in years. Embarrassing, really, to think how close she was to the Pacific, yet the last time she’d been to the ocean had been aeons ago in Jersey.

Underneath the pier, the hazy daylight shifted into layered grays. Wisps of fog hovered in the air and clung to the pilings. More sensed than seen were the shadowy figures of surfers and boogie-boarders bobbing on the distant, swelling waves.

“Found it!” called out Coyote, his tall, dark form emerging through the mist.

Her breath caught at the sight of him. Even in this surreal world, his skin still had that warm, brown glow. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his beige chambray shirt, the color almost stark against his muscled, suntanned forearms. Strands of black hair fell rakishly across his forehead. She’d once heard him say he was half Kumeyaay, the band of Native Americans who’d thrived in the San Diego area centuries ago. The Times had recently run a series of articles on local tribes, and she recalled how, in the late eighteenth century, the invading Spaniards had described the Kumeyaay as fine in stature and affable, but rebellious. They’d refused to be forced laborers and had openly revolted. Eventually, they were punished with expulsion from their ancestral homes.

She understood how it felt to leave one’s home and forced to adapt to a new lifestyle, a new community. For all their differences, she and Coyote shared something profound and fundamental.

The loss of roots.

He walked toward her, sniffing the open bottle. “Smells like…nothing.”