which shook on its hinges as the same musical voice from her dream, lilting with the lazy rhythms of a Bermuda native, shouted: ‘No use hiding, man. Henry told me you’d be here.’
Ella shot upright, clasping the bed’s thin sheet to her naked breasts, and swayed as several questions bombarded her at once.
How long had she been asleep? Where were her clothes? Where was Coop? And who the heck was that woman banging on the door?
The answer to number one was hours, if the brightness of the sunlight was anything to go by. Scrambling out of bed as furtively as possible, she located her clothes in a neatly stacked pile on the arm of the sagging sofa, answering question number two. Questions three and four remained a mystery though, as she dressed as soundlessly as she could manage while continuing to scan the hut for any sign of her host.
She jumped as the banging began again.
‘Hey, I can hear you in there. Avoidance won’t do you a damn bit of good.’
Rats, do you have bionic hearing?
She waited a few more strained seconds, while debating opening the shutters and escaping onto the deck, but eventually discarded the idea—given the girl’s hearing capabilities.
The banging continued, and her not entirely settled stomach churned. What if this girl were Cooper’s girlfriend? Or his wife? Was that why he’d disappeared? Because what did she really know about Captain Studly, except that he was gorgeous, knew how to dance the soca and had magic fingers, a very inventive tongue, and a huge and permanently stiff...
Don’t go there.
Squaring her shoulders, she swung the door open ready to face the consequences, to be greeted by a stunningly beautiful barefoot young woman of about twenty, wearing a pair of Daisy Dukes, a T-shirt with the message ‘Don’t Mess with a Libran’, tightly braided hair decorated with multicoloured beads, and a stunned expression.
‘Hi.’ She craned her neck to search the hut’s interior, having gained her composure a lot faster than Ella. ‘Is Coop around?’
‘Um, no, apparently not,’ Ella replied, opting for the only answer she could give with any confidence.
‘Uh-huh?’ The girl gave her a thorough once-over that had the heat steaming into Ella’s cheeks. ‘I guess he’s up at the big house.’
The big house? What big house?
‘Sorry to wake you,’ the girl said. ‘Henry didn’t tell me Coop left the Runner with company last night. Just that he headed for his beach hut. Suppose Henry was messing with me. And Coop.’
And me, thought Ella, annoyed by Henry the barman’s joke, and acutely embarrassed that this girl now knew she was the sort of woman who got picked up in bars.
What had seemed wildly romantic last night, now felt pretty tacky.
Ruby had encouraged her to let her inner flirt loose, but there had definitely been no mention of getting tipsy on rum cocktails, then getting nekkid with Captain Studly and jumping him four...no, five...oh, heck, make that at least a half-dozen times during the night.
‘You Coop’s new lady?’ The girl interrupted Ella’s panicked reappraisal of her behaviour.
‘Um, no, we’re just...’ What? Snorkel mates? Dance partners? Bonk buddies?
The burning in her cheeks promptly hit maximum voltage as she searched for the appropriate term while recalling in X-rated detail exactly how intimately she and the invisible Coop had got acquainted last night, after very little provocation. ‘Friends,’ she finished lamely.
With benefits. Gold-standard benefits.
The phrase hung in the brisk morning air unspoken, but not unfigured out if the girl’s frank appraisal was anything to go by. ‘Do you know when he’s going to be back?’
Hardly, seeing as I have no clue where he is.
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Could you tell him I stopped by? I’m Sonny’s daughter, Josie, and I—’
‘Why don’t you come in and wait for him?’ Ella shoved the door wide, determined to make a fast getaway, before this situation got any more awkward. ‘I was just leaving.’
Josie sent her a doubtful look as she stepped into the room. ‘You sure, I—’
‘Absolutely positive,’ Ella replied, grabbing her bag from the hook by the door and slipping past the girl, before she could ask any more unanswerable questions.
‘You want me to give Coop a message?’
Ella paused on the porch, the clutching sensation she’d had as she fell asleep the night before returning. ‘Would you tell him thanks?’ She cleared her throat, the stupid clutching sensation starting to squeeze her ribcage.
For being a friend when I needed one, she added silently as she jumped off the hut’s porch and her feet sank into the wet sand.
Josie called out a goodbye and she waved back as she set off down the beach. But she didn’t glance back again. Knowing it would only tighten the band squeezing her chest.
She’d had an amazing night. Maybe she’d gone a little off piste from Ruby’s plan—and discovered the liberating powers of flirtation, soca dancing, Rum Swizzles and sweaty, no-strings sex in the process. Okay, make that a lot off piste.
But it was all good.
Give or take the odd heart murmur.
* * *
‘Up you get, Sleeping Beauty, breakfast is served.’ Coop bumped the hut’s door open with his butt, keeping a firm hold on the tray his housekeeper had piled high with freshly sliced fruit, French toast, syrup and coffee. It had taken Inez a good half hour to assemble everything to her exacting standards—and quiz him mercilessly about his ‘overnight guest’—during which time he’d got stupidly eager to see Ella again. Enough to question why he hadn’t just woken her up and invited her to his place for breakfast.
The fifteen-acre estate that overlooked the cove, and the two-storey colonial he’d built on the bluff, were a symbol of who he was now. And he was super proud of it—and all he’d achieved, after ten long, back-breaking years of dawn wake-up calls refurbing second-hand equipment, long days spent out on the ocean running back-to-back dives, late nights getting his brain in a knot at the local community college studying for his MBA, all while keeping a ready smile on his face to schmooze a succession of tourists and corporate clients and bank managers and investors.
His business—Dive Guys—had made its first million-dollar turnover five years ago, and he’d celebrated by buying himself a brand-new motor launch, and the beach hut he’d been renting since his early days with Sonny. Three years later, he’d expanded the franchise across the Caribbean and had finally had enough to invest in the construction of his dream home on the land he’d bought behind the hut. He’d moved into Half-Moon House two years ago—but still couldn’t quite believe that all those years of work had paid off in a wraparound deck that looked out over the ocean, five luxury en-suite bedrooms, a forty-foot infinity pool, a mile of private beach and an extremely nosey housekeeper.
