Anne Winston - Born to be Wild

“I heard you were widowed.”

She nodded. God, how she hated that word.

“I’m sorry.”

She saw something move in his eyes and she looked away quickly. Compassion from Reese, of all people, would do her in. “Angie, how about putting Mr. Barone in the Margolies’ slip along pier four. They won’t be back until May and they gave us permission to rent it out on a temp basis.” She gave a perfunctory nod of her head without meeting his eyes again. “Enjoy your stay.”

Enjoy your stay.

That night, lying in the stateroom of his boat, Reese’s teeth ground together at the memory of Celia’s glib words. She’d blown him off as easily as she had thirteen years ago. No, he corrected himself, even more easily. Last time, she’d had her father do it.

Father. That led to thoughts of other things she’d said. Father-in-law. He knew, on an intellectual level, that time had passed. But he didn’t feel any older. And Celia still looked much the same. It was hard to believe she’d married and buried a husband since he’d seen her last.

Had she had something going with the Papaleo guy that summer while she’d been with him? His memory of this marina was vague, since his family had always kept their crafts at Saquatucket, but he could dimly recall the wiry Greek fellow who’d kept things in order years ago. He had an even less reliable memory of the man’s son, no more than another wiry figure, possibly taller than the older man.

No. If she’d cheated on him, he’d have known it. He’d been sure of Celia back in those days. She’d been his. All his.

He swore, gritting his teeth for an entirely different reason as his body reacted to the memories, and flipped onto his back.

Celia. God, she’d been so beautiful she’d taken his breath away. Today had been no different. How could that be? After thirteen years she shouldn’t look so damned good. She was thirty—he knew she’d just had a birthday at the end of September.

The thought pulled him up short. Why did he still remember the birthdate of a woman he’d slept with years ago for one brief summer?

She was your fantasy.

Yes, indeed. She had been his fantasy. At an age when a young man was particularly impressionable, Celia had been lithe, warm, adoring and pliable. If he’d suggested it, she’d rarely opposed him. She truly had been every man’s dream. But that was all she’d been, he assured himself. A dream.

A dream that had evaporated like the morning mist over the harbor once she’d heard the false rumor about him and that girl from Boston.

An old wave of bitterness welled up. He didn’t often allow himself to think about the last words he and his father had exchanged all those years ago. To people who asked, he merely said he had no family.

And he didn’t. He’d never opened nor answered the letters from his mother or his brothers and sisters, mostly because there was nothing to say. He hadn’t done a damn thing wrong, and he had nothing to apologize for. Nick had been the most persistent. Reese bet he’d gotten fifteen letters from his big brother in those first five years or so. There were probably more out there floating around. He’d sailed from place to place so much there would have been no way to predict his movements or the places he might have chosen to dock.

On the other hand, he’d never received so much as a single line from his father. That was all it would have taken, too. One line. I’m sorry.

He exhaled heavily. Why in the hell was he thinking about that tonight? It was ancient history. He had a family of his own now, was a very different person than he’d been more than a decade ago.

The thought brought Amalie to mind and he smiled to himself. He’d never pictured himself as a father, and he certainly wouldn’t recommend acquiring a child the way she’d come into his life, but he loved her dearly. If he could love a child who wasn’t even biologically his so much, what would it be like to have a child of his own?

As if she’d been waiting for the chance, Celia sprang into his head again. He was more than mildly shocked when he realized that, subconsciously, he’d always pictured her in the role of his imaginary child’s mother. Dammit! He was not going to waste any more time thinking about that faithless woman.

Throwing his legs over the side of his bunk, he yanked on a pair of ragged jeans and a sweatshirt and stomped through the rest of his living space to the stairs. On deck, he idly picked up a pair of binoculars and scanned the horizon. Nothing interesting, only one small fishing boat. A careless captain, too, he observed, running without lights.

Casually he swung the binoculars around to the shoreline. The area had been developed considerably since he’d been gone, as had the whole Cape and the rest of the Eastern seaboard. A lot of new houses, some right on the water. The only place that would still be undisturbed completely would be the Cape Cod National Seashore on the Outer Cape, but here along the Lower Cape he couldn’t see that.

The quiet sound of a small, well-tuned motor reached his ears and he glanced back toward the south. The little boat he’d seen was coming in, still without lights. Then the motor cut out and he saw the flash of oars. Why would the guy kill his power before he reached the dock?

The quiet plish of the oars came nearer. The boat was close enough that he could now see it easily without the binoculars, then closer still, and he realized the guy intended to put in right here at the marina.

There appeared to be only one sailor aboard, and a small one at that. Probably a teenager flouting the rules, which would explain his cutting the motor early and trying to sneak in. The boy tied up his boat and caught a ladder one-handed, nimbly climbing to the dock while carrying a fishing cooler in his other hand.

Reese grasped the smooth mahogany rail of his boat and vaulted over the edge onto the dock. He walked toward the boy, intending to give him a rough education in proper night lighting, but just then the boy walked beneath one of the floodlights that illuminated the marina.

The “boy” was Celia daSilva. No, not daSilva. Papaleo.

“Celia!” He didn’t even stop to think. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Of all the irresponsible, un—”

“Shh!” He’d clearly startled her, but she recovered quickly. She ran toward him, making next to no noise in her practical dockside slip-ons. Before he could utter another syllable, she clapped one small hand over his mouth.

Reese wasn’t a giant but he was a lot bigger than Celia, and the action brought her body perilously close to his. He could feel the heat of her, was enveloped in a smell so familiar it catapulted him instantly back in time to a day when he’d had the right to pull that small, lithe figure against him. His palms itched with the urge to do exactly that and he rubbed them against the sides of his jeans, trying to master the images that flooded his mind.

Her eyes were wide and dark, bled of any color in the deep shadow thrown by the angle at which she was standing. But he could see that she recognized the familiarity of their proximity almost as fast as he did.

“I can explain,” she whispered, her voice a breath of sound. “Just don’t make any more noise.”

The words had barely left her mouth when a light snapped on aboard a nearby yacht. “Mrs. Papaleo? Is that you?”

It was a deep, slightly accented male voice. Reese felt the vibration as the man leaped onto the dock, much as he had a moment before, and walked toward them.

“Don’t say anything,” Celia warned. To his astonishment, her hand cupped his jaw, sliding along it so that her thumb almost grazed the corner of his lips. At the same time he felt her bump his hip with the cooler she still carried. He lifted his own hands automatically, curling his fingers around the handle, over hers and putting his other hand at her waist. A part of him registered the fact that the cooler felt a lot lighter than it should if it was full of fish. But a larger part of him was much more attentive to Celia’s proximity, the way her soft hand felt curled under his and the way her palm cupped his jaw. Her hands were warm and he knew the slender body concealed beneath the wind shirt and jeans would be even warmer. Even softer.