He laughed, knelt in front of her, and looked at her hair. “Maybe you should wear it back when we go sailing.”
“I will definitely do that next time. Ow!”
He gingerly touched the place where she’d been hit. “There’s a knot forming. I’ll get you some ice.”
When he returned with the ice pack, Charmaine was already feeling better. Although her head still pounded and a headache was beginning to crawl its way across her scalp, she felt warm and safe inside the cabin. Especially with Bradford so close by. He always made her feel safe, something she wasn’t used to. She’d been anxious, alone, and afraid for so long that safety and security were foreign concepts to her. But now that she had them, she didn’t ever want to let them go.
After the pill she took helped ease her headache, Charmaine and Bradford emerged from the yacht’s cabin to see that the storm had passed by without much more than a few fat drops of rain. The sun shone again and was hotter than it had been before.
“Let’s go for a swim,” Charmaine suggested, tugging off her soft cotton cover-up.
She dove into the ocean, enjoying the cooling effect of the water on her head and over the small lump where she’d been hurt. She kicked to the surface and drew a deep breath as she shoved her wet hair back from her face and blinked in the dazzling sunshine.
Bradford leapt into the water beside her, tucking his legs up beneath his chin and holding them tight to his chest with both hands. There was an enormous splash where he landed, and the ocean blasted against Charmaine’s face. She blinked and wiped her face clear of salt water.
“Thanks for that,” she said when his head bobbed to the surface.
He shook his hair with a grin. “No worries.” He swam to her with a few easy loping strokes and then slipped his arms around her.
She nestled against his chest. “I wish things could always be like this.”
“They can,” he whispered, kissing the top of her head.
“I don’t know…”
“We make our own future.” He stroked her cheek.
“Sometimes life has a tendency to knock us down, even if we’re doing everything right.” She sighed.
“Are you referring to something specific? Because I know what you mean, with everything that happened to my mother and how her death impacted me, but you haven’t spoken about your past. I’d like to know more.”
She resisted the urge to pull free from his grasp. Talking about herself, her family, or her past always made her want to run. But Bradford was different. She finally had someone in her life that she trusted completely, and she should let him in. She knew that, but doing it was harder than understanding it. They both climbed the ladder to lie out on the deck side by side. She was puffing lightly when their conversation resumed.
“I told you about the aunt I found on the island.”
“Auntie Finn?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s right. We lost touch with her because my mother saw something when she lived here on Coral Island with me and my brother and needed to leave.”
“Saw something?”
“She was a kid being babysat by a friend, Mary Brown, when Mary was killed.”
Bradford sat up and tented a hand over his eyes to look down at her. “She was there?”
“She witnessed the murder, but the police never believed her description of the assailant because she was so young. So, when she got older, she did some investigating herself and discovered the truth.”
“What truth?”
“I don’t know for certain. Finn believes she found out the identity of the killer and gathered evidence against them. But whatever it was, it was enough for her to receive death threats. She changed her name, moved away, and never came back. She lost touch with her family and friends. Sean and I never knew the life she should’ve had.”
He blinked. “Wow, that’s incredible. I had no idea. Finn told you all this?”
She nodded. “I knew Mum was hiding something. She would start to tell us things, then change the subject. We could never see our grandparents—not after we got a little older, anyway. They called sometimes when I was young, but even the phone calls stopped after a while. I didn’t know what was going on, but it seems as though she was terrified to have any connection to Coral Island.”
“Did you talk to the police about this?”
“No. According to Finn, Mum believed the police were no help. She spoke to them several times herself, and it never went anywhere other than for her to be run out of town. It seemed to make her even more vulnerable.”
