to Brodie’s boat in the first place! Now he knew… He knew what a mess she was. She couldn’t even fall asleep without working herself up.
‘Here.’
He took the glass from her hand and set it down, helping her weakened limbs into the armholes of a T-shirt and guiding her head through the neck opening.
The fabric swam on her, smoothing over her curves and giving her protection. The T-shirt was his—it smelled of him. Smelled of ocean air and soap and earthy maleness.
‘Are these panic attacks a recent thing?’ He leant against the bench, his face neutral.
‘No, I’ve had them a while.’ She couldn’t look him in the eye.
‘They suck,’ he said. ‘My little sister gets them pretty bad too. Water usually works for her.’
Chantal bit down on her lip, toying with the glass before taking another sip. Could she be any more humiliated right now?
‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You know that, right?’
He touched her arm, the gentle brush making her stomach flip. Her breathing slowed a little.
‘Ellen gets them a lot. She’s only nineteen, but she puts a lot of pressure on herself to do well. She wants to get into a performing arts school.’
‘What does she do?’ Curiosity piqued, she looked up.
Brodie dropped down onto the stool next to her, his knees inches from her thighs. ‘She plays piano pretty damn well, if I do say so myself. I used to run her to practise when I lived at home—went to all her recitals too. She’s ace.’
The pride in his voice was unmistakable. Chantal had often wondered what it would be like to have siblings—to look after someone other than herself, to worry about people all the time. She would have been a terrible sister—she couldn’t even keep her own life together, let alone help anyone else.
‘Then there’s the twins: Jenny and Adriana. They’re twenty-two, and as different as two people can be. Jenny is the loud one. She got into modelling a while ago and has done a fair bit of travelling with it. Adriana is still studying. She’s going to end up being a doctor of something one day.’ He smiled. ‘Then Lydia is the oldest… she’s twenty-four.’
His eyes darkened for a moment and she wondered if he was going to continue. His lips pulled into a flat line as he raked a hand through his hair, stopping to rub the back of his neck.
‘Lydia is in a wheelchair. She was in a car accident some years ago and she was paralysed from the waist down.’
‘That’s awful.’
‘Yeah.’ A sad smiled passed over his lips. ‘She wanted to be a dancer.’
Emotion ran through her—grief for this poor girl whom she didn’t even know, for the sadness on Brodie’s face and for what their family must have gone through. At least she could still dance. Her heart swelled. He cared so deeply about his family. For all her jokes about his carefree attitude, he was a good person.
He drew a breath, steadying his gaze on her. ‘So there you go. You wanted to know something else about my family—it’s not all sunshine and roses.’
‘I guess we’ve all got our stuff to deal with.’ She downed the rest of her water. ‘I nearly gave up dancing once.’
‘Really?’ His blond brows arched.
‘It wasn’t long after my dad left. We didn’t have a lot of money and Mum had lost her job cleaning one of the local motels.’ The memory flowed through her, singeing her heart with the same scorching hurt that came every time she remembered what life had been like back then. ‘She picked up cleaning work at my school. The kids used to tease me, so I told her that I wanted her to find another job… but there aren’t a lot of jobs in little beach towns.’
Why was she telling him this? She hadn’t told anyone this story—not because she was ashamed of having grown up with no money, but because she’d been so horrible to her mother. More than a decade and a half later, guilt over her behaviour lingered.
‘She gave me a choice. Give up dancing and she would quit her job at the school—because that’s what it was paying for. Otherwise, if I wanted to keep dancing, she had to keep working two jobs.’ She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. ‘So I gave up dancing for a week.’
‘You can’t blame yourself that. How old were you? Ten? You were just a kid.’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever hurt her as much as I did then.’ She shook her head, amazed that it felt as though a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. ‘I wish I could take it back.’
‘I’m sure she knows how you feel.’
‘I hope so. She gave up so much for me to be able to continue dancing. She hardly ever came to my competitions or exams because she was always working, but she never complained.’ She let out a hollow laugh. ‘Not once.’
‘She never gave up?’
‘Nope.’ She shook her head. ‘Which means I can’t give up.’
‘Sounds like you got a lot of your tenacity from her.’
The tenderness in his voice sparked her insides, lighting up her whole body—as if he had a direct ‘on’ switch to her nervous system. Her hands were fluttering in her lap. The desire to reach out and touch him made her fingers tingle. If she didn’t put some distance between them—and fast—she’d do something stupid.
‘Thanks for the drink.’
She went to hop off her stool but Brodie’s hand came down on her bare thigh. His fingers skimmed over her knee, touching the hem of the T-shirt. The touch was so light she could easily convince herself that she was imagining things. Despite her brain shouting out warnings, she didn’t want this to be a dream.
‘Is it wrong that I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about you?’ he asked.
His bare torso was the only thing she could look at. Broad shoulders, the ripple of muscle at his abdomen, the V that dipped below his cotton pyjama bottoms. He would be naked underneath them. She could tell from the inadequate way the thin fabric concealed the length of him.
Her breath hitched, and the sudden flutter of her heart had nothing to do with panic. ‘You were the one who wanted to go to sleep.’
His hand inched up, the tips of his fingers slipping under her hem of the T-shirt. Each millimetre his hand travelled stoked the fire low in her belly, stirred the tension in her centre. She pressed her thighs together, rocking gently against the stool in the hope that it would ease the need in her.
It didn’t.
Nothing would ease the need except him. He was the only solution to her problem, the only cure for her ailments. In that moment she was raw. Exposing her past had opened up something within her—a cavernous hunger long buried by insecurities and fear. He’d shown her it was safe to be who she was, to open up and allow herself to be vulnerable. She wanted nothing more than to wipe away the old hurt with new pleasures. To erase the parts
