Pamela Browning - Life Is A Beach - Life Is A Beach / A Real-Thing Fling

Karma said something like “Hmmpf,” and he tossed the robe down. He tactfully turned his back as she put it on, but he heard her splashing around and it seemed to take her an overly long time to get into the robe. “Everything all right?” he called over his shoulder.

“You must realize,” she said, “that this thing has soaked up a ton of water. Yes, I’ve got my arms through the sleeves, if that’s what you want to know, but I think it’s going to pull me under. Like an anchor.”

Slade turned around. She was suitably swathed, but she was now riding slightly lower in the water and her expression was anything but pleasant.

He knelt down on the dock, held his hand out to her. She grabbed it.

He supposed that it was some peculiar flight of fancy that tied in with his earlier fantasy about finding the right woman for him, but all the same, he could have sworn that a bolt of electricity flashed through their connected hands. It was so strong that he almost let go.

But he didn’t let go. He hung on for dear life even as he tried to sort this thing out. He concluded as he gave a mighty heave and yanked her up onto the dock that he had been mistaken. He couldn’t possibly have felt anything. He was out of his mind for thinking so. He wasn’t at all attracted to this woman. She wasn’t his type.

And yet when she stood dripping in front of him, her eyes searching his face, he did feel something, an emotion that he finally identified as relief. No harm had come to her and he was glad. That was all.

“I guess I can say goodbye to that bike,” Karma said ruefully.

“Well, maybe not. I’ll see if the marina manager can do anything about it,” he told her.

Karma shrugged, sending a veritable Niagara sluicing over his bare feet. “Come on,” he said, shaking his feet to rid them of water. “I reckon we can find you something warm and dry to wear.”

She walked glumly and wetly beside him back to Toy Boat. “I brought some things,” she said. “They’re at the bottom of the bay along with my bike.”

He stepped down onto the boat first, handed her onto the deck. “What things did you bring?”

“Crackers. Spicy tofu-cilantro garlic spread. Things like that.”

Slade had never heard of spicy tofu-cilantro garlic spread, but it sounded downright unappetizing. He hadn’t thought this was a social call. Wasn’t it supposed to be business? To videotape him so she’d have something to show her female clients as a kind of sales pitch? He narrowed his eyes at her. She was now dripping all over the teak deck.

“Maybe you could, uh, wring yourself out,” he ventured.

She eyed the yards and yards of wet white terry cloth doubtfully. She made as if to wring out one side of the robe, but he quickly directed her toward the side of the boat. “Over the side,” he said helpfully. “If you don’t mind. These teak decks take a heap of maintenance, according to Mack.”

“Who’s Mack?”

“The cousin who belongs to this boat.”

“And where is he?”

“I dunno. He made it rich selling off his share of the family land, used the money to buy this boat and a lot of other things. I expect he and Renee are flying around in his Lear jet.”

“A Lear jet,” Karma repeated.

“Yeah, well, Renee hates flying in it.”

“That’s why it’s important to find the right wife,” she said. “That’s why you came to Rent-a-Yenta. So that you wouldn’t find someone who isn’t suited to you, that is.” She reached up and fluffed her hair, which was already drying in the breeze off the bay.

Slade thought it was cute that even now, sodden and miserable and annoyed about losing her bike and the tofu whatever, this woman could still inject a plug for her business into the conversation.

“Let’s go into the master stateroom. Mack’s wife’s clothes are there. Maybe some will fit you.” He realized when she shot him a skeptical look out from under her eyelashes that this might sound like a come-on. “You can go in there alone. I’ll stay right here on deck like a gentleman.”

She looked heartened by this statement. “No funny business?” she asked.

“No funny business. I’ll even leave the boat, walk over to the marina office and see if I can rustle up the head honcho around here, ask him about your bike.”

“That might be a good idea,” she allowed, and so as she made her way through the salon, scattering a narrow path of water droplets on the woven-to-order rug, Slade went to find the marina manager, who might know what you had to do to salvage sunken bicycles.

WOW, KARMA THOUGHT AS HER eyes popped at the sumptuous master stateroom. Slade Braddock certainly wasn’t slumming. The boat looked like a picture right out of an upscale travel magazine, the kind of publication she’d read maybe once in her whole life. There was teak everywhere, and cove lighting, and some kind of pale shimmery fabric draping the portholes. The bed was huge and covered with a subtly patterned spread. The bouquet on the built-in dresser was composed of fresh flowers and hothouse variety at that.

She walked across the cushy seafoam-green carpet to the closet and flung the door open. Inside was a whole wardrobe of clothes arrayed on matching padded hangers. She pulled out a dress and a pair of slacks; they looked as if they’d been made for a midget. Slade’s cousin’s wife was apparently a nutritionally challenged size two.

All right, so she couldn’t wear these clothes. She threw open the next closet and found more promising duds; the trouble was, these were Slade’s.

She yanked a worn denim shirt out of the few hanging there and held it up for inspection. It was the typical Western-style shirt with two pockets in front and a yoke in back. It snapped instead of buttoned. The best part about it was that it would fit her.

Well, almost, anyway. After a longing look at the shower in the adjoining bathroom and mindful that Slade hadn’t said she could make use of it, she shrugged out of the wet robe and into the denim shirt. It came down to the middle of her thighs.

A glance into the full length mirror on the inside of the closet door reassured her that the shirt covered all the important points. She bent over experimentally and realized that she’d have to find something to wear underneath it. She kept looking and settled on a pair of stretchy black exercise tights that tumbled off the closet shelf. They probably belonged to the petite Renee, but they stretched to cover Karma’s long legs.

She decided that there was nothing to be done about shoes, since her own sandals were swimming with the fishes at the bottom of the bay and none of the ones here fit. But she could do something about her bedraggled hair, and that was to dry it with the use of a hair dryer that was conveniently mounted next to the sink in the bathroom, which she supposed, since it was on a boat, would properly be called the head.

The only head she was prepared to worry about at the moment was her own. She wore her hair shoulder length, and when wet it tended to frizz. The dryer had one speed—hot. That frizzed her hair even more, and when she was finished, she looked as if she’d just unplugged herself from an electrical socket.

Never mind, she told herself. You’ve already blown any chance you might have had with Slade Braddock. She cast one last resigned look into the mirror and went outside to wrap this up.

When she emerged from the salon onto the deck, Slade looked up appreciatively from the magazine he was reading.

“This belongs to you,” she said apologetically, lifting the edge of the shirt.

“I never filled that shirt out so well,” he said.

“What did you find out about my bike?” She was worried now about how she would get home. She didn’t have cab fare, and it was a long walk back to the Blue Moon.