Authors: Mary Kay Andrews
A
fter making a mental note to give up all forms of gymnastics in the future, Gina waded back out into the waves to try to rinse away all the sand. When she reached the shore again, she felt suddenly chilled—and vulnerable. She hastily scrambled back into her damp clothing, finger-combing her wet hair into some semblance of order.
The rain had almost let up, and she could see the sun valiantly trying to break through the low-lying cloud cover.
She resumed her trek, rounding the tip of the island. Suddenly, she found the visibility clearing. Off in the distance, across the sound, she saw a long low shape that she decided had to be Eutaw Island. How far across was it really? she wondered. Less than a mile? If the tide weren’t running in the wrong direction, if they’d had a boat with a motor, she bet she could be back on dry land in less than an hour. But right here, right now, she felt like she was hundreds of mile from civilization. From the Food Fight. From Scott.
She saw an object moving slowly across the water, and when she squinted, she could just make out the shape of a boat with nets extending out on booms from both sides. A shrimp trawler.
Feeling ridiculous, she stepped out into the water and waved her arms wildly over her head, but only for a moment.
What was she thinking? Rescue me? From what?
Her foot scraped something sharp. She reached down into the water and pulled out an oyster. It was small, but tightly closed and intact. She reached down, and by groping cautiously with her fingers and toes, managed to unearth another, and then another.
Oysters! She ran to the beach, slipped her shoes on again, grabbed the plastic bucket, and waded back out to the same spot. She filled the bucket almost to the brim before deciding she was cold and wet and tired.
Slogging back to the beach, she stood and faced the sound—but now the clouds and mist had obscured the island so that all she could see of it was the faintest gray suggestion of a faraway landmass. The shrimp boat, too, had disappeared.
So that was it, she thought, heading back to the campsite. She was on this island for the night, and she wasn’t getting off.
And what was so bad about that?
M
oonpie heard her coming before he did. The setter went bounding off to greet her, jumping up and planting his paws on her chest, then sniffing anxiously at the bucket, before racing back to Tate to announce her arrival with a short, sharp bark.
He glanced up from the fire, trying to act casual. “Hey,” he said, half standing, half crouching under the shelter of the boat. “You’re back from exploring.”
What a totally lame thing to say. She was dressed now, of course, which too bad, because she looked sort of bedraggled, in a drowned-rat kind of way. Well, not a rat, really, more like a drowned mouse. But a cute drowned mouse.
Gina held out her bucket. “Look what I found. Oysters!”
“Oysters?” Tate reached down into the bucket and held one up. “Pretty dinky. And you can’t eat oysters in June. They’re poisonous. Or something.”
Wounded, she snatched her bucket back. “Wrong. That’s an old wives’ tale. I read up on it last night. The Geechee people on these islands always ate oysters in the summer months. They preferred the fatter, juicier ones from colder months, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with oysters in June, as long as they’re harvested from clean waters, which these were.”
He stuck his nose into the bucket and sniffed doubtfully. “They smell okay. Where’d you say you found ’em?”
“Over on the other side of the island,” she said.
That would be the naked side of the island. He slapped his forehead, trying to dislodge the image of her, which was stuck there now, in the permanent data bank in his brain, a mental photo album where he filed other memorable images.
Like the forty-pound snook he’d caught on ten-pound test on a blistering day in Sarasota, the twelve-point buck he’d bagged as a nine-year-old, and, yes, he wasn’t proud of it, but the first set of naked breasts he’d ever seen outside
National Geographic
, which belonged to a girl named Khandee, Miss December 1989, who, come to think of it, also liked long walks on the beach.
“Something wrong with you?” Gina asked, looking at him oddly.
“Sand gnat,” he said, scratching a nonexistent bite. “You hungry?”
“Starved.”
“The fire’s almost ready,” he told her, gesturing toward the grill he’d rigged with the odds and ends from the trash dump.
He’d scrubbed the grease-and soot-caked metal grill with a bit of rag dipped in wet sand, and propped it up on a couple of sand-filled Mr. Pibb cans over the fire. He’d also flattened out a wadded-up piece of aluminum foil, which he laid over the grill.
As Gina watched, he carefully placed the redfish fillets on the foil.
She leaned back on her elbows on the plastic mat and enjoyed the novelty of having somebody else cook for her.
Tate had stripped off his wet shirt and draped it over a piece of driftwood he’d stuck into the sand, near the fire. His cargo shorts rode low on his hips, and it occurred to Gina that he was, as Lisa would put it, “going commando.” Why hadn’t she thought of that? No underwear was supremely superior to damp ones. She flicked her eyes over him, appreciating the view. He was deeply tanned, and he was, as Lisa had aptly put it, “Fine.” Very fine, in fact.
He sat down beside her on the mat. “I cleaned your bluefish, and put the fillets in my cooler. There’s only a little bit of ice left, but maybe they’ll keep till we get back to Eutaw in the morning.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I should have thought of that myself. My daddy always says it’s best to clean oily fish like mackerel and blue
fish just as soon as you catch ’em, to keep them from tasting too strong.”
He was sitting so close that his bare shoulder touched hers, and his bent knee knocked casually against hers, and the thrill of it nearly sucked the breath out of her chest.
“The morning,” she said weakly. “You think we’ll be able to get back by then?”
“If the wind doesn’t change again, and the rain quits,” he said.
Let it rain, she thought.
H
er hair smelled like rain, and her wet shirt clung to her body, and he could see the faint outline of her nipples beneath the undershirt sort of top she wore beneath the work shirt. He was trying hard not to stare at that work shirt, at the buttons, all six of them, wishing he had supernatural comic-book powers, like martian mind-meld, that could magically unfasten the pesky mother-of-pearl buttons, one by one.
Tate found himself suddenly loopy, unaccountably tongue-tied by her proximity. “What do you want to do with your oysters?”
Mental head-smack.
His question brought her abruptly back to reality.
“I’m a sissy,” she admitted. “I don’t do raw oysters. How ’bout we grill ’em?”
“Be my guest.”
She heaped the oysters on the edge of the grate, and soon the smell of roasting fish and grilled oysters was wafting out from under the overturned johnboat.
Her eyes watered from the smoke, and her stomach growled in appreciation. When Moonpie ventured too close to the fire, Gina coaxed him away, emptying one of her bottles of water into her empty cooler. He lapped it all down in moments.
“Hey,” Tate said, ashamed that he hadn’t thought of it himself first. “Thanks. That was nice of you.”
She reached over and scratched the dog’s chin, which he obligingly stretched out for her. “He’s my bud. Aren’t you, Moonpie?”
Tate took the blade of his knife and flaked the fish fillets, grunt
ing with satisfaction. “Just right,” he said, sliding the foil off to the side of the grate.
When he stood and stretched, Gina noticed an odd bulge in his cargo shorts. She motioned to the pockets of his shorts. “What ya got there?”
He actually found himself blushing. “Uh…”
And then he remembered. Reaching into both pockets he whipped out the cans of beer, brandishing them like an Old West gunslinger’s pearl-handled Colts.
“These were floating in the water, over near the abandoned garbage dump where I found the raft and the grill. Some fisherman’s cooler must have tipped overboard.” He extended one to her. “I was saving ’em for dinner.”
She took one of the cans and considered it. “Warm beer?”
He popped the top of his own can and took a swig. “The English drink warm beer all the time. They think Americans who insist on beer being ice cold are barbarians.”
“These are the same people who eat cold baked beans on toast for breakfast,” Gina pointed out.
She set the beer down and helped herself to an oyster. “Not bad,” she said. “But I’d kill for some cocktail sauce and lemon slices.”
Tate tipped an oyster into his mouth and followed it with a swallow of beer.
“Perfect,” he pronounced. He opened another shell with the tip of his knife blade and tossed the oyster to Moonpie, who caught it in midair.
They lingered over their dinner, sitting close together on the plastic mat, as much for companionship as for the warmth of the fire, eating with their hands. The fish was tender and flaky, perfectly sweet and fresh.
“This was great,” Gina said finally. “I take it all back. You really can cook.”
“Of course,” he said, annoyed. “What did you think?”
She considered whether to tell him the truth. Which was that she’d assumed he’d gotten his hit cooking show because of his great butt and killer abs, which she’d been staring at off and on all day.
“Who taught you to cook?” was what she actually said. “Your mama?”
That made him laugh out loud. “My mama? No, sweetheart, my mother didn’t teach me how to cook. She barely knows how herself. She just retired as vice president of corporate communications for the Bales Group. You heard of them? Insurance, banking, securities?”
She shook her head. “Nope. So who did teach you how to cook?”
He lifted the last of the fish from the grill and set it out on the lid of a cooler for Moonpie, who greedily scarfed it all down.
“Different people. My dad liked to hunt and fish. We belonged to a fancy hunting club that had a quail plantation down near Tallahassee, so I learned a lot from the women who worked in the kitchen there. In college, we had an old guy, Gilbert, who did all the cooking at my frat house. He’d been a cook in the navy. I’d hang out with him, watching the way he fried chicken, how he made sawmill gravy. Like that.”
She took a tentative sip of the beer. It wasn’t so bad after all. “You never went to cooking school?”
He grinned. “You found my shameful secret.”
“And you’re not really a redneck, are you?”
He leaned back on his elbows and lazily stretched out his legs. “Never said I was. Just because I drive a pickup truck with a gun rack and live in a trailer with my bird dog—you’re the one who made that assumption, Reggie.”
“So you’re not exactly what my mama calls po’ white trash. You’re college educated….” She stretched herself out beside him, hip to hip, and rolled over so that their faces were only inches apart. “Since you’re sharing all your secrets—what about telling me how you managed to kill that pig?”
“Swear you won’t tell another soul?”
She flashed the Girl Scout pledge again. “I’ll take it to my grave. Now give.”
“Pure dumb luck,” Tate said. “I hit it with my golf cart.”
“No way!” she exclaimed, giving him a playful punch.
“Afraid so,” he said, laughing. “It just ran out in front of the cart, and boom—next thing you know, me and Moonpie are knee-deep in hog. I managed to get it on the cart the next day and take it over to Iris and Inez’s. I swore ’em to secrecy in return for a year’s worth of pork chops and fatback. Now it’s your turn. Tell me all about the secret life of Regina Foxton.”
“Nothing else to tell. I’m Birdelle Foxton’s oldest girl, thoroughly boring, predictable, and white-bread, through and through.”
He stared right through her, and the image came back, unbidden.
“I know about your secret life, Reggie,” he said quietly. “I saw you on the beach today. Earlier. On the other side of the island.”
The color drained from her face. “You saw me?”
“I didn’t mean to spy on you.” His words came rushing out. “Moonpie took off with the lighter, and I went running after him, and well, there you were.”
“Naked.” Her voice sounded strangled. She closed her eyes. “Oh, God. I thought I was alone. You saw me making a fool of myself.”
“Hey…” He touched her cheek. “I’m sorry. It was a private moment, and I spoiled it.”
Her eyelids flew open. “You were watching the whole time?”
“Kinda. Look, I swear, I’ll never say another word on the subject. I’ve forgotten it already. Swear to God.” He held up the three fingers on his right hand, in his own version of the Scout’s oath. But behind his back he crossed the fingers on his left hand. Forget, hell.
Gina rolled onto her back and concentrated on the night sky. She’d never seen so many stars. A tear rolled from one eye and slid off her cheek.
“I saw a shrimp boat out on the sound over there. Earlier. While I had my clothes on. And at one point, the clouds cleared and I could actually see Eutaw. I had no idea we were so close.”
“Yeah, we’re not far from it at all,” Tate said, glad for the change of subject. “Only thing keeping us over here tonight, like I told you, is the tide and the wind. Once the tide changes, we should be able to row back across with no problem. Long as the boat holds water.”
“You’re gonna think I’m an idiot when I tell you what I did when I saw that boat,” she said, helping herself to another sip of beer, which really was beginning to taste better and better.
“Oh?”
“When I saw that shrimper, I waded out into the water and actually tried to flag it down,” Gina said. “As if they could even see me over here. Dumb, huh?”
“Scott is probably pretty worried. You did disappear. At the same time as me.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. “What about your producer? Won’t Val be worried?”
“Nah,” he said. “She knows I can take care of myself. She’ll be pissed that I messed up the shooting schedule, that’s all. What about your sister? What’ll she think?”