Judith Arnold - Right Place, Wrong Time

Falling into bed was easy. Falling asleep proved a much greater challenge.

He pictured Gina in her narrow bed across the hall. He pictured her niece in the other bed. What kind of woman vacationed with her niece? Gina seemed too funky to be an aunt. Aunts didn’t wear toe rings, did they?

He tried to imagine Kim wearing a toe ring, then chastised himself for comparing her with Gina. They were two different women. Two very different women. Kim was a human resources executive at an insurance company in Hartford. Gina Morante looked like a chichi sales clerk at a SoHo boutique, or maybe a waitress at one of the trendier midtown restaurants. Kim wore tailored suits and dresses to work every day. The only kind of dress Ethan could imagine Gina wearing would be short, sheer or both. To hide those legs of hers would be a crime.

And he was a bastard for even thinking such a thing while his almost-fiancée slept beside him.

He drifted in and out of a slumber until sounds beyond the door alerted him that Gina and her niece had arisen. He remained in bed, thinking he might sleep more easily if they were in the kitchen, at the opposite end of the apartment. But when he closed his eyes, he was kept from sinking into dreamland by a memory of them as they’d looked from the balcony yesterday, digging in the sand, bowing their heads together and laughing.

Finally, unable to force himself to lie still any longer, he slid out of bed and moved silently to avoid rousing Kim. After donning a pair of khaki shorts and a polo shirt, he tiptoed out of the bedroom.

Their hushed voices rippled down the hall like a gentle current. The bathroom was empty, so he made use of it before heading to the kitchen.

The kid was seated at the small table, a heaping bowl of cold cereal before her. Gina stood leaning against the counter, holding a bowl of what appeared to be yogurt and sliced bananas. The room was filled with the soul-stirring aroma of freshly brewed coffee. He and Kim should have bought coffee yesterday when they’d stopped at a local convenience store to purchase beer, imported bottled water, macadamia nuts, cheese and other such necessities. Kim had insisted they wouldn’t need coffee, since they would be meeting her parents for breakfast every morning. But right now, inhaling the fragrance of Gina’s coffee, he realized that Kim had been wrong.

“Good morning,” Gina greeted him. From her, the word came out mawn-ing.

“Good morning,” he responded, rubbing his hand through his hair. He should have brushed it while he’d had access to the mirror above the bathroom sink, but he’d left his brush in the bedroom. Gina and her niece had monopolized the shelf space in the bathroom.

His eyes took a moment to adjust to the sunny brightness of the kitchen, and then went to work processing the sight of Gina, dressed today in a lime-green T-shirt and short white shorts. She was barefoot except for the silver ring circling one of her left toes. The sight of it jolted him in some way, and he lifted his gaze to her face. She’d pulled a hank of her hair back from her face and clasped it with a large barrette, the way a child might wear her hair. On her, it didn’t look childish.

“I hope we didn’t wake you up,” she said. “We were trying to keep quiet.”

“You were very quiet. Thank you.” He gestured toward the hallway. “Kim’s still dead to the world.”

“You want some coffee?”

Desperately, but he should decline. If he drank her coffee, it would represent an unseemly mingling of their vacations. Yet when he watched her reach for the large ceramic mug on the counter beside her, lift it to her lips and take a sip, he couldn’t resist. “I’d love some.”

“Help yourself. The cups are in that cabinet.” She gestured toward the cabinet above the coffeemaker. “I bought a pound of ground beans and there’s no way I’m going to finish it all by myself in one week. So really, help yourself whenever you want some. I found a stash of filters in the cabinet with the napkins and paper towels.”

“I’m too young for coffee,” the little girl announced as she patted the cereal flakes beneath the surface of the milk in her bowl. “We’re going snorkeling today.”

“Are you?” Okay. He could handle this—drinking Gina’s coffee and making small talk with her niece. Despite his lack of experience with children, he figured that discussing snorkeling with a spunky little girl couldn’t be any harder than discussing politics with Ross Hamilton.

“Aunt Gina says it’s easy.”

“Aunt Gina knows what she’s talking about,” he confirmed as he filled a mug with coffee for himself. The fragrance flooded him like an elixir, sparking inside him the notion that sharing the condo with Gina and the kid was actually a stroke of luck. If they hadn’t been there, he would be having his first conversation of the day with Kim’s father—after having spent the night on the couch.

“You could come snorkeling with us,” the girl said.

He glanced sharply at Gina, who shrugged noncommittally. “They rent gear at the cabana on the beach. There’s milk in the fridge, by the way. No sugar, though. I don’t use it, so I didn’t buy any.”

He sipped his coffee, then shook his head. “I drink it black. Thanks. It’s wonderful.”

“They have good water here,” she said. “Coffee tastes different depending on the water you brew it with. This—” she raised her mug toward him, as if proposing a toast “—is delicious. Must mean the water is good.”

He thought of the bottled water Kim had insisted on buying, even after he’d pointed out that St. Thomas was part of the United States and he was sure its water had passed U.S. health standards.

“So, you wanna go snorkeling with us?” the child insisted.

“Ali, he’s here on his own vacation,” Gina reminded her. “He’ll be doing things with the people he came with.”

“They could come, too. They could get snorkeling stuff at the casino.”

“Cabana.”

“Yeah.” The girl scooped a mound of cereal into her mouth, chewed and gave him a toothy grin. “Aunt Gina says we’ll see fish. I wanna see an octopus.”

“I don’t know how many fish come to this beach. There’s another beach about a mile up the coast that’s supposed to be incredible for snorkeling,” Ethan informed them.

Gina’s dark eyes widened with interest. “Really?”

He felt absurdly proud of his knowledge. “Paul—the friend who owns a share of this unit—mentioned a beach to me. Coki Beach, I think it’s called. There’s even better snorkeling on St. John, but you have to take the ferry to get there.”

“Coki Beach?”

She looked so interested, so grateful for his knowledge. His ego inflated a bit more. “Just a mile or so west of here.”

“Can we go?” The girl twisted in her seat and gazed eagerly at her aunt. “Can we go there?”

“I don’t know. We’d have to get a cab, I guess. Or there might be a public jitney.”

“What’s a jitney?”

“Kind of like a bus.”

“I could—” Ethan cut himself off before completing the sentence: I could drive you there. Maybe he could; maybe he couldn’t. He’d rented the car for the convenience of the Hamiltons, not a strange woman and her niece.

Of course, if he and Kim went snorkeling with Gina and the kid, they could all drive there together, and leave Kim’s parents to fend for themselves. Why not? The Hamiltons were residing at a luxurious hotel. They could get massages and drink Absolut vodka martinis while lounging by the pool. Or they could hit the links. Given a choice between snorkeling and golf, Ethan couldn’t imagine choosing golf—and he couldn’t imagine Ross Hamilton choosing snorkeling.

Maybe this whole time-share disaster would turn out to be a huge blessing. Ethan and Kim could do things with Gina and her niece and ignore Kim’s parents. The time he’d spent with them on the flight to St. Thomas and last night at dinner was enough to convince him that an in-law relationship with them would never be a close, loving bond. He really ought to withhold judgment until he’d spent more than one day in their company, but where people were concerned, his instincts were usually pretty accurate. He’d known, within minutes of glimpsing Kim, that they would wind up in bed together, and that the experience would be spectacular. They had, and it was. And here he was, having spent a grand total of less than an hour in Gina Morante’s company, and he knew…