She didn’t say anything.
“Hell, I didn’t feel you up.”
She gasped and spun around.
“I could have. I could have stuck my hand wherever I damn well pleased. Your tongue was halfway down my throat, sweetheart.”
“I hate this. I really do.”
He laughed and walked past her, then stopped. “No, you don’t.” He whacked her on her backside. “You don’t hate this, sweetheart.”
She almost took a swing at him.
“You love it.”
He swaggered away, his handprint still warm on her behind, his taste still lingering in her mouth. She looked around for just a second as if she didn’t know where she was.
Slowly she raised a hand to her mouth and took deep breaths. She couldn’t do much else. She realized she knew where she was. She just didn’t know whoshe was.
Because to her horror, to her dismay, to her regret, she knew he was right. She did love it.
* * *
For the nextweekMargaret set out to change things. She was going to learn to cook andshe was going to understand why Hank Wyatt was affecting her so strangely.
A baptism by fire, so to speak.
And it was. She burned three fish, two pans of gull eggs, a coconut—Hank informed her that no one on the face of the blankety-blank earth would cook a coconut—four breadfruit, some yams, her skirt, a wrist, and three fingers.
Margaret had spent a great deal of time watching Hank, searching for answers. Hank spent the next few days adding another room onto the hut—a room for the children when it rained or for sleeping. This was after Annabelle woke him three mornings in a row. She pulled his eyebrows the first morning, then giggled when he woke up yelling. She grabbed the hammock and dumped him out of it the second morning, and that very morning she had tried to stick a banana up his nose.
Actually, the room wasn’t for the children. It was for Hank.
Margaret watched him work, watched him sweat in the sunshine, watched him play with Theodore. He included the boy in everything, even included Lydia.
One morning Margaret had been busy dousing their burning breakfast with handfuls of sand when Lydia came running past her, her dark blond hair in two perfectly even braids. Later that day, after Lydia and Theodore had ridden the waves with Hank, Margaret sat on the beach trying to hide her surprise as she watched him rebraid the girl’s hair. Perfectly.
But it was the hug Lydia gave Hank that almost did her in. Margaret had had to look away until she was certain her eyes had dried and her face didn’t give away what she felt.
He was incredibly good with Annabelle, too, carrying her on his shoulders, letting her touch the tree branches and lifting her high in his arms so she could pick flowers. He showed her birds. The hummingbirds that would flit from flower to flower. And he laughed when she screamed with childish excitement at the gulls and auks and terns that dove through the sky, and the pelicans that waddled along the sand with the pipers and other scavengers.
And even more unsettling was the way he would look at Margaret, as if he knew something she didn’t. Instead of answers, she only found more questions.
Why did his walk fascinate her? She had never even noticed a man’s walk. Why did she stand on the ridge and watch him swim in the morning? Especially when she felt so uncomfortable afterward, as if she’d eaten bad food.
And now, why was she climbing the rocks and sneaking a peek at him shaving? She was thirty-two years old. She was an attorney. She was supposed to be rational and sane and logical. But her hands shook. There was this uneasiness about her—a restless feeling that nothing satisfied.
She stood on the rocks near the pool, thinking that she should leave but not moving. Listening for the sound of him diving in the water. But there was only silence.
Then it hit her. Hard. The embarrassment of what she was actually doing. She covered her mouth with one hand and shook her head. She needed to leave. This wascompletely foolish.
She scampered down the rocks and paused at the bottom, her breath rapid. Her hand went to her forehead, rubbing the frown away. She asked herself what she had been thinking. Fool.
She turned around.
There he stood, leaning against a nearby rock as if he’d been there for a long time, his arms crossed and his smile cocky.
24
