nervous, and her body folded at the center, legs and head going up, abdomen and torso going down, under the water.
“Ahh,” she yelped.
His hands were floating inches below her, and so he supported her again, very quickly.
“Try and keep your body stiff.”
“I thought I was supposed to relax!”
“Well, relaxed stiffness.”
“There is no such thing.”
“Maybe not in Italian. There is in English.” He managed to say it with a straight face.
She smiled in spite of herself, and then he let her go, and she tried again. Again, she got nervous and began to fold; again he used his hands to steady her. The third time, she got it. She kicked on her own and he shadowed her.
“Am I swimming?” she demanded. “Am I swimming all by myself?”
He smiled at her enthusiasm, and she seemed to realize she was swimming, unaided, on her back. The realization ruined it, of course. This time he wasn’t quite quick enough, and her head went under the water. She came up sputtering, her hair spilling rivulets of water down her golden skin. She grabbed for him and clung to him.
He realized he was enjoying that way too much and put her away from his chest, though he allowed her to hang on to his forearms.
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” he asked her.
She shook water from her hair. “No,” she said, surprised and then delighted. “No, it was fine. I just held my breath when I went under.”
There was a moment when people reached deep inside and found out who they really were that was awe-inspiring. It could happen as you sneaked them across a border or pushed them out of a plane, or it happened in those moments, large and small, when people required just a tiny bit more of themselves.
And so it could happen just like this, a woman in a swimming pool on a warm spring day when everything seemed suddenly infused with a light that was not the sun.
It was always an amazing thing to be a part of this moment. She was grinning ear to ear, which increased Connor’s sensation of basking in the light. He had to force himself to move away from that moment and back on task.
“And that brings us to part two,” Connor said. “For some reason, people have a natural aversion to getting their faces wet.”
“I told you not today,” she said. The grin disappeared.
“Let’s just ride this wave of discovery,” he suggested.
For a moment, she looked as if she intended to argue, but then, reluctantly, she smiled again. “All right. Let’s ride this wave.”
Both of them had said it—let’s. Let us. Us. A duo. A team. Sheesh.
“So, before you dunk again, we’re going to work on getting your face wet,” Connor said. There it was again, slipping off his tongue naturally. We. “Lie on my hands again, this time on your stomach.”
She flopped down on her stomach, and he supported her, his hands on the firm flesh of her belly. “Good. Now put your face in the water and blow air out of your mouth. Make bubbles. The more the better. Think of yourself as a motorboat.”
Whatever reservations she might have had up until this point now disappeared. Isabella gave herself over to learning to swim with unreserved enthusiasm. With Connor supporting her stomach, she blew bubbles and then they added a scissor kick. She managed a few kicks without any support before she went under and came up laughing.
Isabella laughing.
Isabella soaking wet, in the world’s skimpiest bathing suit, laughing.
It was probably one of the most dangerous moments of Connor’s entire life, and he had had a life fraught with danger.
It wasn’t dangerous because she was so beautiful, or even because she had lost her self-consciousness and she was so sexy in her teeny bathing suit. It wasn’t dangerous because she was finding her inner resources of courage and strength.
No, what made the moment beautiful was her joy. What made the moment astounding was the serious expression gone from her face and the sorrow completely erased from her eyes. No matter what the danger to himself, Connor was glad he had given her this moment.
“I think that’s probably enough for today,” he said gruffly. “We’ll start some basic arm work tomorrow, moving toward a front crawl. And we’ll do work on your legs with a kickboard. By the end of the week, you’ll be swimming across this pool by yourself.”
“Really?”
“You are a complete natural.”
“I am?” she asked, so pleased.
“Absolutely.”
“What an amazing afternoon.” She cocked her head at him. “What do the American teenagers say? Awesome!”
She was standing facing him. She leaned a bit closer. He had plenty of time to move away from her. But somehow he didn’t, frozen to the spot, like a deer in headlights, not able to back away from where awesome could take them.
She stood on tippy toes. Her body, slippery and lithe, came in contact with his in a far different way than it had when he was using his arms to buoy her up in the water. She kissed him, a tiny brushing of their lips.
He, of all people, knew how little time it took to change everything. A millisecond. The time for a bullet to find its way from rifle to target, the time for tires to crunch across the trigger device on an explosive, the time for a school to go from rooms of laughing children to completely engulfed in flames. He, of all people, knew how quickly everything could change.
But maybe he hadn’t known this: as quickly as you could be sucked into darkness and everything could shatter around you, just as quickly you could be thrust toward the light, propelled into a world that promised love was stronger.
Love? He felt furious with himself, and not too happy with Isabella, either. But then she was backed away from him, still laughing, that delightful, carefree, water-over-rocks laughter, as if she had no awareness at all how badly she had just disrupted his well-ordered world.
“Thank you, Connor. I can’t wait for tomorrow.”
And then she walked away from him, through the water, by herself, the woman she had been an hour ago—clinging to the handrail and then to him—gone forever.
Isabella got out of the pool without the benefit of the stairs. She put her hands on the deck and levered herself out, wiggling her bottom at him in the process. And then, free of the pool, she gathered up that voluminous caftan but didn’t put it on. She scampered across the deck to the cabana, not once looking back.
Thank goodness she did not look back. Because she would have seen him, still standing in the water, stunned by the power of that one tiny little brush of lips. To change everything.
The man he had been an hour ago might have
