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“Me.”
All Lilly had been looking forward to this afternoon was a few last hours of peace and quiet. A slow sail home from the old cabin on Molokai, where she’d been taking a few days away from the family. From the job. From the claustrophobia of Oahu, where too many people made too much noise and she was forced to participate.
Today she’d meant to have wind and water and sky. She’d ended up with Cameron Ross instead.
“Come on,” she urged him, trying her best to sound pragmatic and purposeful when she just wanted to shake. She wanted, ridiculously enough, to giggle.
He was beautiful. Every bit as rugged and dashing as he was said to be, with that just-too-long dark hair and those crystal-blue eyes. Dimpled chin, perfect nose and broad chest. And all of that floating in a life raft in a tux and Stetson. Who said life was mundane?
He didn’t look exactly like himself, Lilly decided, but that didn’t matter. Her cousin Koki, who had worked on Magnum, P.I., assured her that nobody really looked just like they did on screen. Cameron Ross looked good enough, that was for sure. Good enough to give Lilly weak knees.
Which wasn’t going to be much help, when he was hurt and confused and lost out in the Pacific on a life raft. So Lilly swallowed her surprise and reached out, not to Cameron Ross, but to the injured man in the life raft.
“Here,” she coaxed. “You get over here, and we’ll get some water in you. You really got smacked on the head. That’s probably why you don’t remember. Soon as I get you ashore, we can take a look at it. Are you dizzy or anything?”
“I’m dizzy and everything,” he assured her, his voice gravelly and tired.
She took hold of solid, strong arms and leaned back until his face was almost in her neck so he could get his legs over. He really must have been hurt. She’d seen Cameron Ross dance through a fight scene like Baryshnikov. Now he could hardly move four limbs at once.
And then she saw more blood.
“What did you do to your leg?” she asked, trying her damedest not to inhale the earthy smell of him. The sharp tang of sweat, the darker, smokier hint of cologne. It was distracting her from the rusty stain just above his left knee.
He flopped over into her little boat and took a distracted look down at his leg, as if somebody had left him with one he hadn’t used before. “I don’t know...hurts, though.”
“Can you sit up?” Lilly asked. “Just for a minute. You need to get that jacket off.”
It took some struggling and more than one surprised grunt of pain, but between them they managed, while Lilly held her breath and tried valiantly to ignore the spread of his shoulders and the curl of chest hair that glistened beneath an unbuttoned collar.
Then, settling him back on the deck, she reacquainted him with his hat and broke out the bottled water she always carried with her. “It’s not cold,” she offered. “But it’s wet.”
He just lay there at her knees, his eyes closed. The skin around his eyes and mouth was white, in contrast with the raw red of the rest of his face. His chest rose and fell in short, ragged breaths. His eyes were closed and his mouth open. Lilly tried not to be afraid. Her first movie star, and he was going to die on her boat because she’d taken off his jacket.
“Mr. Ross?” she whispered, a hand out to his head. Almost. She couldn’t quite touch him, as if her intentions and her fantasies were getting scrambled.
He didn’t answer. Just lay there, breathing with a funny grunting sound Lilly recognized all too well. She had three very large brothers who played sports and loved nothing more than a good fight. Unless Lilly had wasted all that time in emergency rooms, Mr. Ross had hurt his chest. Or worse.
“Mr. Ross, please,” she begged, now touching him. Feathering her fingers against his hair, along his cheek, his throat. Just to make contact, to reassure herself with his warmth. “Please. You need some water.”
He gave another little grunt and then startled awake, flinching. “Sorry...I, uh...don’t feel very...good.”
She tried smiling upside down into fabulous robin’s-egg-blue eyes that were now clouded and tight. “You have every nght not to. Take some water and then put your hat back over your head so I can get us to Maui.”
He blinked at her. “Maui? Is that where I was going?”
She gave up waiting for him to lift his head and did it for him, resting it against her thighs so he could drink. “That’s not even where I was going. I was on my way back to Oahu, but we’re much closer to Maui, and I think you need closer. Now, drink.”
He did, gulping, so the water ran down his neck. He raised his hands to cup hers and closed his eyes. Lilly let him drink a little and then pulled it away. “I have plenty,” she assured him. “You need to take it easy.”
He rested his head back against her thighs, still watching her. “Thank you. I think...I think you’ve just saved my sorry butt.”
She couldn’t help smiling again. “Trust me,” she said. “It’s my pleasure.”
She even prided herself on not mentioning how very not sorry his butt was. His feet were bare, she suddenly realized. Now, why did that make her giddy? She wasn’t exactly a foot fetishist, but the idea of bare feet on a man wearing a tux was unbelievably erotic. Besides, they were beautiful feet. Long and strong and graceful. But Lilly shouldn’t have time to think of that either. She should have been thinking that they were probably going to blister from that sunburn.
She couldn’t quite think that, though.
“Can I ask?” he asked. “How you know me?”
Lilly dragged her attention back to the look of uncertainty he was sharing with her. “Everyone in the civilized world knows you, Mr. Ross. You’re probably the most famous movie star there is.”
He stared at her for a minute, processing. Then he just snorted. “No, I’m not.”
Lilly laughed. “Oh, I’m afraid you are.”
“What about you?” he asked.
She should be moving. She couldn’t manage it. Somehow, even battered and bloody, he had managed to dredge up the most delightful sparkle in those eyes of his. “What about me?” she asked, breathless all over again.
“Are you a movie star?”
“Almost,” she said with a bright grin. “I’m a librarian.”
Now he smiled. Really smiled. It was a softer smile than on screen, less assured. A little boy’s smile, all heart and humor, and Lilly understood just why he’d earned that reputation he had as a lady-killer.
“And my name’s Cameron Ross?” he said.
She nodded.
He thought about it for a second. “Doesn’t sound right. I don’t know why, but it...” He shook his head, closed his eyes. “There’s something else, too. Something I think I should remember. And something I’m supposed to be doing....”
Lilly found herself perilously close to stroking his cheek again, just to soothe that look of tension. Instead, she straightened. “Well, it’ll wait ’til we get you back in. Or at least to a motorboat that can get you there faster. If you’d had the good sense to fall off your boat on the south side of Molokai, you would have been picked up in a minute. It’s lousy with traffic down there, and within sight of Maui and Lanai both. On this side there’s just water.”
“And you.”
“And me. Who should have paid a lot more attention to her Tutu Mary when she was teaching me first aid.”
“Tutu Mary? Who’s that, a ballerina?”
If anybody else had asked that, Lilly would have bristled. Somehow Cameron Ross failed to make the old joke offensive.
“Tutu is Hawaiian for grandmother,” Lilly explained. “My tutu was a healer. She tried to teach me, but I was better at theory than practice.”
At least, that was what Lilly had always contended.
He smiled again. A soft smile of understanding. “I know first aid.”
Lilly smiled back. “Of course you do.”
Even so, she checked his leg to find that the bleeding was old, the tear in the slacks minimal. She checked his head to find a couple of good gashes up beyond the hairline, and one along his temple that some fancy plastic surgeon was probably going to charge a fortune to fix. Nothing was bleeding actively, though. Lilly couldn’t see anything else obvious, and she couldn’t do anything about it if she did, so she decided it was time to sail.
“Here,” she said, wetting down a beach towel and draping it over his blood-caked head. “I’m going to give you your hat back to keep the sun out of your eyes.”
She did, tilting it just enough that he could feel the wind underneath.
“Is that Molokai over there?” he asked, closing his eyes.
Lilly turned to see the undulating curtain of emerald cliffs that seemed to simply spill from the clouds straight into the glistening sea.
“It is,” she said, her voice unconsciously softer.
“Can’t believe I didn’t notice it before. Can’t we just go there?”
“Not on the north coast,” she said. “No way to get you to civilization from there.”
“It’s beautiful.”
Lilly smiled like a fond parent. “It is.”
Actually, there was civilization on the north coast. Kalaupapa. A small peninsula of lush green that had been poured straight down the side of those forbidding cliffs to form a perfect tongue atop the sea. It held a community. It had medical care. Lilly had actually given brief thought to staying on her original course and landing there. But the only people living on the Kalaupapa peninsula were the last of Father Damien’s children, elderly survivors of Hansen’s Disease. Leprosy. As rigidly as they now guarded their privacy and shelter, Lilly wasn’t sure they wanted the notoriety of a famous star dumped on their doorstep. Besides, Maui would be much better suited to transporting and pampering somebody who wore tuxes and sailed in yachts. Carefully climbing to her feet so she didn’t disturb Cameron, Lilly untied the boom and set to work.
“I remember a storm,” he said, his voice muffled as Lilly gently eased the little Sunfish over around the way she’d come. “Lots of noise and lights.”
“Night before last,” she said, gingerly stepping over him. “It was a beaut. I almost lost a roof and a radio in it. We’re expecting a bigger one later. I was trying to get home before it got too close when I spotted you.”
“I remember...diving. Diving? That’s stupid. Why would I dive?”
“Probably falling off the side. Was it a sailboat?” she asked. “A cabin cruiser? Do you know if you had a crew? If you were on a ship of any size, there’s probably a search out for you.”
If she’d actually listened to that radio she’d had at the cabin, she might have known. But she’d walked. Thought. Wished.
Mr. Ross lifted a hand to rub gently at his chest. Sore, Lilly thought. There’d probably be a bruise or two under that once-starched tux shirt.
“I don’t... remember,” he admitted. “I don’t remember much more than the wind and lightning, and trying like hell to get my shoes off. But I feel like...like there’s something important I’m forgetting.”
“More important than your name?” she asked, alternating her attention between him and her task. The wind had caught her sail, and the little boat skipped like a flat rock, the wind spinning her hair out behind her and cooling the sweat on her chest and back from the effort of hauling in a strange man.
“Not like name important,” he said slowly, thinking hard beneath that hat. “But important.”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” Lilly said, much more blithely than she felt. “As soon as we get you ashore, you’ll have plenty of time to remember.”
They were still quite a ways from help of any kind, but with any luck, once they swung into the Pailolo Channel they would run into a good-sized yacht, maybe a deepsea fishing charter, that wouldn’t mind conveying Mr. Ross to a doctor. And, if worse came to worst, Maui was only about five miles beyond.
Wait ‘til she told her mother, Lilly thought with a stunned little shake of her head. Wait ’til she told her colleagues. So there I was, minding my own business, just breaking the speed record between Molokai and Oahu, and who do I happen to rescue in his tux and Stetson but Cameron Ross? They wouldn’t believe it. Heck, she still didn’t believe it.
The brightly striped orange-and-yellow sail strained with the wind, and the cliffs of Molokai were slipping slowly past. Time to check her patient again. Lilly once again tied off the boom and bent to retrieve the water.
“Mr. Ross?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. She panicked.
“Oh, please don’t do this to me,” she begged, dropping right back to her knees to shake his shoulder. “I’m not good in a crisis.”
She lifted his hat to find him squinting up at her. “Doin’ okay by me,” he said with a rakish grin.
Lilly almost clobbered him. “Don’t do that. I think you’re not supposed to fall asleep, but I can’t remember why. Health wasn’t my section.”
“Your section of what?”
“Research. I’m a research librarian. I can find the information once I get home, but I can’t remember it. All I can remember is the line of Stuart succession.”
He scowled. “Well, don’t tell me that. I’d be out in a nanosecond.”
Lilly wanted to smile. “Not into British royalty, huh?”
“Nope.”
“How ’bout Hawaiian royalty? I can name you that succession, too.”
“How about telling me your name? Since you seem to know mine.”
“Lilly,” she said, handing over the bottle of water. “Lilly Kokoa.”
He squinted again. “Named after that Hawaiian queen? Liliuokailani?”
“Nope. The flower. I was born on Easter.”
He grinned. “Not nearly as romantic. You are Hawaiian, aren’t you?”
“Half. Quarter Portuguese, quarter Chinese. I’m a mutt.”
He squinted again, as if assessing. “I’m no judge right now, but I’d bet that when I can actually see you, you’ll be the best-looking mutt I’ve ever come across.”
Lilly frowned down at him. “What do you mean, when you can see? Can’t you see?”
His shrug was minimal. “It’ll probably clear up. I’m already less sick.”
Lilly knew he was trying to ease her mind. He wasn’t having much success. Not only did she know perfectly well how she looked, she knew just what it meant that he couldn’t tell. She’d lied to him about not knowing about head injuries. She knew enough, and he was scaring her again.
“Have some more water,” she begged, hoping that maybe it was dehydration talking rather than head injury. After all, if he’d really fallen out of his boat the night before last, he’d been out in the sun an awfully long time.
“Thank you, Lilly,” he agreed, once again wrapping his hands around hers to bring the bottle to his lips.
He had wonderful hands, she thought. Beautiful, long-fingered and callused from real work. Marred by nicks and old scars across a couple of knuckles. Strong hands. Lilly watched them, watched him sip the water, his eyes closed, the liquid dribbling down his throat. And she thought he didn’t look a thing like a pampered movie star. His hands hadn’t been manicured in a while, and his face was rough with old beard and new sunburn. Even in the tux, he looked like an outcast. A sexy, charismatic, vulnerable outcast.
And Lilly had been alone for too long, she decided, pulling away before her libido got the best of her.
“You don’t want to rush that,” she warned him, closing the bottle with hands that shook just a little. “It could make you sick.”
