Chapter Eight
“And after everything he put his dad through, you’d think he’d be ashamed to show his face.”
IT HADbeen nearly a week and the phone hadn’t rung. Flynn had eaten all the macarons. He slouched in the battered black leather recliner while the rain pelted the side of the lighthouse, and he wondered if he’d finally ducked his head underwater one too many times. When someone bargained down from sex to an offer of leftover cake, it was a pretty good bet that, no matter how sweet they kissed or how hot their ears got, they weren’t interested.
Even if he had been, did Flynn really want to play the bit of rough for real? Nate hadn’t been wrong about what people on Ceremony thought about him. Some places might have seen him as the Prodigal Son when he came back, but all people on the island saw was that he hadn’t had any choice.
He came back because he had to bury his father, and he stayed because he’d gotten into the habit of not leaving.
You’re never going to leave.The echo of that last big fight with Kier, the one that turned out to be their last fight, bounced around Flynn’s skull.You still think you’re that rebellious kid who left with the one-way ferry ticket and his black leather jacket, but you’re not. You’re too old for that fucking jacket. Too old for that fucking attitude. You need to come to terms with that and with whatever issues you have with your father.
The memory of that cutting judgment made Flynn recoil, just like he had during the original argument. He was no longer a twenty-year-old—with a belly full of resentment for the island and a wrinkled envelope of cash in his back pocket—but that didn’t mean anything. Working men’s clothes and a tab at the bar wasn’t for him. He could still leave.
Nate wouldn’t, though. He was one of the Granshire boys. His friendship with Max tied him to the Saint John family as tightly as any that had the name—tighter than blood. Hell, there’d been enough mutterings back in the day that the name was all that Nate lacked. His mother had never told anyone who his father was, and the one time someone threw the gossip in Teddy’s face, he didn’t take it well.
Flynn absently ran his tongue over the back of his teeth as though the hot penny taste of blood were still fresh in his mouth.
A quick fuck might be fun, but it wasn’t going to happen. Anything else wouldn’t work. Yet—he picked up his phone and glanced at the screen—he was still waiting on the call like a teenager.
Idiot.
The abrupt buzz of a vibrating alert made him fumble the phone. He stared at it for a second, but it was still black and quiet. It wasn’t the phone, and it wasn’t Nate. Flynn grabbed his pager. It was the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, or RNLI, an emergency call for the lifeboat volunteers.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
He lurched up out of the recliner and grabbed his jacket—the same battered black leather one that Kier so hated—and ran for the door. The rain hit him like needles as he stepped outside. It was in his ears and chilly down the back of his neck. He skidded precariously down the worn steps, which were more treacherous than usual in the rain, and got into his Land Rover.
The stopwatch in his brain ticked down. Five minutes to get to the RNLI station, eight minutes till they launched the lifeboat. It was an easier run from the garage, but if he scrambled, he could make it.
Four minutes.
FLYNN SAWNate’s car parked by the side of the marina as he swung into the parking lot. The glossy hunter-green paint job shed water like a duck. It occurred to him that Nate might be one of the new trainees, but it didn’t take him long to dismiss that out of hand. As much as he liked Nate’s lean elegance and nice hands, the idea of the man clinging to the side of a lifeboat was ridiculous.
There wasn’t any more time to waste on Nate. He parked and jumped out of the Land Rover, and his jeans quickly soaked to midcalf as he ran through the puddles. Inside, Albert, the stocky, gingery coxswain, shoved his gear at him and ordered him onto the boat.
Flynn quickly stripped down to his T-shirt and underwear. After all the years he’d spent doing that, he didn’t have much body modesty left. He wore boxers to spare the blushes of the trainees—that, and sometimes you ended up squeezing your junk into someone else’s undersuit.
He stamped his feet into the bright yellow rubber boots and yanked the diagonal zipper closed across his body. Sweat broke on him almost immediately and was trapped inside the muggy environs of the suit. It wouldn’t take long to change that.
“Oh God!” A shrill, terrified voice sliced through the low, businesslike mutter of noise in the boathouse. “I can’t believe this is happening. Oh God.”
He grabbed his life jacket and glanced around as he squirmed into it. At the doorway to the boathouse, Nate, still in his suit, held back a sobbing platinum blonde who was struggling to run to the lifeboat. One of the volunteers was trying to calm her down. It wasn’t working.
The dawdling bridegroom, Flynn recalled abruptly. Nate had said, at some point during the awkward lunch, that maybe the happy couple could come back the next weekend. Maybe the poor bastard was running late again. What was his name? Brian? Bradley?
“Ready to go?” Albert grabbed the straps of the lifejacket and yanked on it hard enough to make Flynn stagger. Once he was sure Flynn was properly geared up, Albert shoved him toward the boat and grabbed spotty Deano Mac to adjust his cowl before he got drenched.
“I swear to God I know that lass,” Deano said as they scrambled into position. “She’s an actress or something.”
“She’s not your business,” Albert snapped. “Focus on the job, Deano.”
The minute the boat hit the open sea, Flynn completely forgot about sweating. It was always wet, but the spray the wind blew into his face felt like ice. His nose was numb, and his cheeks ached as he yelled information back to Albert.
It didn’t take long to see the boat—or rather, to see an oily cloud of smoke being shredded by the rain. Flynn twisted around with one hand still locked on the anchor rope, and gestured for Albert to turn. Albert ducked his stubbled chin in acknowledgment and angled the lifeboat to the left. As they got close enough to see the details of the accident—a smoldering engine, a hard list to the left, and two shuddering, drenched men in their shirtsleeves—he cut the engine.
“You guys all right?” Flynn asked, his voice raised to be heard over the wind. “You hurt?”
One of the two men looked vaguely familiar. He was gray-haired and expensively tanned, instead of just weathered. Flynn couldn’t place his name, so he was probably a blow-in instead of a local, but he’d seen him around. The other man had to be Katie’s fiancé. He had buzz-cut short hair and a broad, earnest face that looked a bit blue at the moment.
