12
Summer, Four Years Ago
“Bee, if you don’t stop jiggling your leg, I’ll tie it to a cement block.” Bridget tore the husk off a corncob. “You’re shaking the entire deck.”
“Sorry. Sorry.” My mind was a train station at rush hour. I was working up the courage to put sound to an idea so outlandish, I was nervous to voice it. I knew what my parents would say if I broached it with them. “Too risky.”
And I knew what Bridget would say. But being on Prince Edward Island, away from the stuffed streetcars and high-rises and noodle containers that decorated my everyday life in Toronto, made unlikely dreams seem less far- fetched.
Bridget and I sat side by side on the steps, the platter of shucked corn resting between us.
“I’m thinking about asking my aunt if she’d let me take over In Bloom,” I said, plucking silvery threads from sunny kernel strands.
“Whaaat?” Bridget grabbed me by the shoulders, sending the corn tumbling onto the grass. “Tell me everything. How long have you been thinking about this? Bee! This is amazing.” Her cheeks were pink, her freckles darkened by the sun. She looked like part of the island—someone born of soil and sea and wind. So beautiful, my best friend.
“You think so? I’m twenty-five. I’ve never run a business. I’ve never hired anyone. Or fired anyone. The paperwork alone would be overwhelming.” I pictured my aunt’s bomb of an office. “I’ve been thinking
about all the ways I could improve the shop and our online presence, but what if they don’t work out? And taxes! What—”
Bridget sandwiched my cheeks in her hands, and I stopped talking.
“Breathe,” she said.
I took a long inhale. “Do you really think I could do it?” I whispered.
“Yes! Of course! One thousand million billion percent! You have to do it.” Her eyes were shining with glee. “You can do anything, Bee. And I’ll help with the tax stuff and paperwork if you want.”
Ugh. Bridget’s faith in me was boundless. I really needed to stop eyeing her brother like I wanted to dip him in melted butter. I monitored her closely.
“You’d do that?”
“Of course, you sweet potato. It will be fun for me. I love Stacy, but I’m sure her bookkeeping leaves room for improvement. We can talk to her about it at our next dinner. She will be thrilled.”
Stacy had Bridget and me over for dinner most weeks. She couldn’t cook, but she knew her way around a take-out menu.
Bridget shivered, giddy, then rubbed her palms together. “I’ve always wanted to get my hands on her office.”
I fidgeted with the waist tie of my sundress.
“What’s wrong?”
“My parents wouldn’t be happy.”
“Bee, your family sort of sucks,” she said gently. “The way they treat you is not glaringly awful—they’re just mildly shitty. It’s almost worse because it’s hard to recognize the ways they cut you down.”
I took a deep breath. “I know.”
“But do you?” Bridget asked as the sliding door opened behind us.
Felix was standing there, in a T-shirt and jeans, dressed the way he had been the day we met. I looked at him, and he looked at me, his smile
vanishing into a frown.
“You okay?”
I took another deep breath. Other than the fact that Felix was reading me like an instruction manual, I was okay. I didn’t need my parents’ approval. I had Bridget. And Stacy. I smiled. “Yeah,” I told Felix. “I’m good.”
His lips curved, and my mind slipped back in time. His mouth on the moles beneath my collarbone. Mine on his inner thigh, tasting his birthmark.
“Mom bought four dozen Valley Pearls,” Bridget said by way of greeting.
“Bee’s been given timing duties.”
Felix was competing in an oyster-shucking contest in a few weeks’ time and Christine wanted him to practice. It took place every year in Tyne Valley,
and apparently it was a big deal.
“Oh yeah?”
“Your family’s been bragging about you,” I said. “I told them I didn’t believe you could shuck as fast as they claimed without stabbing yourself.”
His mouth inched up on one side. “I did well last year.”
“Dad’s already given her the full play-by-play,” Bridget said. “Mom says you’re clean, but not quick enough. I think it’s an excuse—they’re trying to feed us two weeks’ worth of food in one night.” After the oysters, a lobster boil, then two kinds of dessert: strawberry shortcake (my favorite) and blueberry-peach pie (Bridget’s).
“Without question. We better get started. Think you can keep up, Lucy?
Being a timer is a very important job.” He looked right at me, eyes flaring like a warning signal. “You can’t take your attention off me for a second.”
I ignored the wave of heat spreading across my chest and tossed my hair over my shoulder. “You bet your shucking ass I can.”
Bridget and Felix groaned.
“What?” I said. “I thought that was a good one.”
“Your shucking puns are brutal, Bee. Please stop,” Bridget said, picking up the scattered cobs of corn. She tossed one at her brother’s head. “And you stop flirting with my friend.”
• • •
I STOOD BESIDE FELIX IN THE KITCHEN, STOPWATCH APP AT THE READY. MY EYES caught on the small silver scar on his wrist.
“Someone distracted me,” he said, tapping his knife on the mark. I lifted my gaze to his. “It was worth it.”
“She must have been cute,” Bridget quipped from behind me.
He smiled at me. “The most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen.”
Danger. Danger. Danger.
I watched Felix shuck three dozen oysters. I stared at his bronzed hands, tracked the tendons in his forearms. I listened to the little grunts he made.
After he’d finished, he passed me an oyster, and when his finger brushed against mine, I felt it low in my belly. I was so riled up, I spilled a tray of ice and shells down the front of my dress and darted upstairs to shower before
dinner. I needed to collect myself.
One more night.
I’d just locked the bathroom door behind me when I realized I’d already packed my body wash in my suitcase. I wrapped a towel around myself, opened the door, spun into the hall, and ran straight into a solid wall. A wall that smelled like ocean and wind and pine. For a second, I stood frozen.
Felix’s hands swept over my shoulders. “You all right?”
I kept my eyes on his chest. “Yep. Good. Thanks.”
He chuckled, and the sound slipped down to my toes, warm as Ken’s rye.
His calloused palms moved slowly down my arms, leaving a trail of blazing skin in their wake. I remembered feeling that same scrape over my waist and thigh, pushing my legs apart.
His hands came to rest on my elbows, and my fingers found their way to his stomach. I lifted my chin as he lowered his. Our eyes collided. I stared into those blue pools, at that little smudge of brown, spellbound. Felix stepped closer, or maybe I did, until the entire front of my body was flattened against his. I moved my lips toward his, or maybe it was the other way around.
“Do you want this?” His voice was a rasp.
Ken’s bellowing laugh sounded downstairs. I split apart from Felix, leaping back into the bathroom as the opening siren from Sloan’s “Money City Maniacs” wailed from the stereo. Felix followed me right in.
I gaped at him. “You can’t be in here.”
“I can’t?” He looked down to where my index fingers were hooked around his belt loops. I’d dragged him into the bathroom. I let go
immediately. But instead of leaving, Felix shut the door, then stepped around me and turned on the hot water, letting the shower run. Steam began to fill the space.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” I said as he moved closer. “We have rules.”
“I know we do.” His eyes flicked to my lips, then to the three moles under my collarbone. “Otherwise things might be different.”
I wiggled my towel higher up my chest. I didn’t need to look to know it was redder than PEI dirt. “They would?”
“Otherwise, I would kiss you right now.” His focus landed on my mouth once more. “And I think you would kiss me back. I think you were about to kiss me in the hall. I think you were thinking about it yesterday on the beach,
too.”
I lifted my chin. “So what if I was?”
The ends of Felix’s hair were already curling in the steam, and I was fighting the urge to touch it. His eyes skated lower.
“So you’d kiss me back and then I’d unwrap that towel, and turn you around so you were holding on to the counter.” He glanced at the vanity by the sink. A drip of condensation ran down the mirror.
My heart pounded wildly. There was a foot of humid air separating us, and I’d never been so turned on. “I hope you’re not still dressed at this point.”
The left corner of Felix’s mouth hooked up. “Just socks.”
I laughed, but it was frothy and nervous. I could barely feel my legs. My skin was growing slick from the steam.
“Do you want to know what would happen next?” His teeth skimmed
over his bottom lip.
“Yes,” I breathed.
“I’d pull your hips back, and put my hand between your thighs, and kiss the skin between your shoulder blades. And when you were close, I’d tell you to wipe the fog off the mirror so we could watch.”
My gaze slunk down his body, snagging on the fly of his jeans. “If we do this, it’s the only time.”
Felix’s eyes blazed. But he didn’t reply.
“Wolf? We need to get it out of our systems, okay? Just this once.”
His chest rose and fell. “I’ll agree to that. I have one condition, though.”
I nodded, businesslike, but I was squeezing my thighs together. “Let’s hear it.”
He stepped into me. His lips drifted over my ear. “When you come, I want you to call me Felix.”
He drew back, opening my towel and dropping it on the floor. His eyes traveled the length of my body—the blush on my sternum, the curve of my breasts, the swell of my stomach and lower. He swallowed, then reached out, thumb brushing over a tight pink nipple.
We stared at each other for three long seconds, and then Felix’s mouth was on mine, his hands cradling my face. The kiss was urgent, demanding, and when I ran my tongue over Felix’s lip, a groan rumbled from his chest. I grabbed at the bottom of his shirt, pulling at it clumsily. His laugh tasted like salt and Tic Tacs. He tilted back, tugging the thing over his head. I saw the narrow trail of dark hair that ran over the smooth plane between his belly button and his waistband, but then his lips were back on mine, palms sweeping over my shoulders. He held them firm, then turned me around so I was facing the vanity. He swiped a hand over the steamed-up mirror, and our eyes met in the glass. We watched each other as he unfastened his jeans. I heard them hit the tile. I heard him open a foil packet.
His hand sailed over my rib cage. “Are you sure about rule two?” he asked, voice thick, fingers coasting down to my hip, my stomach. Lower.
“Right now, I have no idea which one that is.”
A knee came between my legs, coaxing them farther apart. “Are you sure you don’t want to do this again?”
A finger circled with the barest of pressure, and every nerve in my body assembled in the apex of my thighs. I closed my eyes. I felt swollen and
heavy, and I wasn’t sure. Not at all.
“Positive,” I told him.
I felt Felix hot and hard against my backside as he pressed his lips to my ear. “I have another condition,” he said, circling again, just a little harder.
“Okay,” I breathed.
“Look at me.” His fingers halted. I opened my eyes, finding Felix’s in the mirror. “And hold on, Lucy.”
