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Enough to rip his heart out with her reflexive over-reaction. She took a breath. Held his eyes. Held her breath. ‘I didn’t hate it.’
This was where he’d kiss her in a movie. The water. The cold. The intimacy. The moonlight. And her admission practically cried out for his mouth on hers.
Instead, he nudged her head back down to his shoulder and rested his cheek against her wet hair. She felt his low words against her ear, vibrating in his throat. ‘Thank you, Beth. Deep down, I worried I’d struck the death blow.’
No. That honour remains with me. Snapping on the heels of that thought came another. He’d wondered about his part in that kiss? That wasn’t the admission of a man who’d never given it another thought.
Beth lifted her face to study his. A particularly full wave washed over them and buffeted Beth against him with its chilly brush. Waiting for a kiss was stupidly naive and impossibly romantic. Her heart squeezed hard. Had she been so starved for affection in her loveless marriage that she was finding it now in impossible places? Marc was just moved by their circumstance and harking back to better times. That was all.
Since there was to be no kissing, she needed, really badly, to get off him. But her body had practically seized up in the foetal position and straightening her limbs was a new kind of agony. Just when she thought she’d already met all the cousins in the Pain family.
‘Easy, Beth. You need to walk off the ache. Your muscles will be eating themselves.’
Pretty apt, really. Starting with the giant thumping one in her chest cavity. Crawling into Marc’s lap had not been part of her plan as she drove up the coastal highway this morning, but now that she had it was hard to imagine ever getting the sensation out of her mind. Her heart.
But she had to.
Her back screamed as she pushed against Marc’s chest and twisted up onto her knees, between his. She gave herself a moment to adjust.
‘Just one more thing … ‘ he said before she could rise much further.
Those powerful abdominal muscles she’d spied back at the car did their job and pulled his torso up out of the splash and hard into hers. His lips slid warmly, firmly against her mouth and he took advantage of her shocked gasp to work them open, hot and blazing against her numb flesh. Her lips drank heat from him and came tingling back to life, startled and wary. His hands forked up into her wet hair and held her face while he teased and taunted her blissfully with his tongue, letting her breathe his air as though he were giving her the kiss of life.
Which, in a way, he was.
Relief and a decade of desire surged through her. Forgiveness tasted an awful lot like this.
He lifted his face and stared into her glassy eyes. ‘This is how I would do it if I had my time over,’ he said softly and then lowered his mouth again.
Whether he was making a point or making good on a ghost from his past, Beth didn’t care. His mouth on hers felt as if it belonged there. Her nipples, already beaded from the icy ocean, suddenly remembered they had nerve endings and they sang out in two-part harmony from the pleasure of being crushed against solid granite. Heat soaked out from the contact even through his wetsuit.
Marc seemed to notice too, because he groaned against her mouth and let one hand slide down to where small waves lapped against her underwear, worked under her blouse and then surged back up, scorching against her frozen spine.
It was the only other place that her skin met his. Other than his amazing, soft, talented mouth. Maybe she just hadn’t kissed enough men, but she couldn’t imagine how a kiss could possibly be better. Or more right. It was every bit as confronting as their last one.
Only this time she was equal to it.
It was a weird kind of rush, kissing a total stranger and your oldest friend. The man who knew everything about you. And nothing at all. Exactly as that unwelcome thought shoved its way to the front of her mind, she felt Marc stiffen beneath her. He ripped his lips away and turned his head. Disbelief painted his features.
‘Stop …’
A rock lodged in Beth’s chest. He tugged his hand out from under her shirt and resolutely pressed her away from him. She twisted sideways against the pain of his rejection and found herself on hands and knees in the shallows, undignified and lost. How must she look to him?
But he wasn’t looking at her as he scrambled to his feet.
Beth followed the direction of his eyes up the beach, where a dark mass lurched and twisted on the shore near the calf.
‘She’s re-stranded, ‘ he said, stumbling away a few steps, his voice thick from their kissing. Or from the agony of having failed to save the whale.
When he turned and reached out his hand, she waved him off. ‘I can’t, Marc. I hurt too much. You go. I’m going to need a second.’
It was a measure of their past friendship that he didn’t falter and worry about helping her up. If anyone had ever respected her independence, it was Marc. Just another way he used to show his belief in her.
Pain came in all shapes and sizes. As Marc found the strength to run up the beach towards the beleaguered whale, stooping to grab his whale-washer from the shore, Beth knew she’d have to too.
They were in this together. Ready or not. And she was not about to let him down for a second time. Not when he was the only man she’d ever known who had ever believed in her.
She cried out as she straightened her tortured spine, an anguished mix of pain and frustration and self-recrimination. Then she lurched up the beach after him, the golden glow of his kiss feeding her the necessary strength.
Just.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_c3ed1e24-0c3f-55c0-845a-6aeb4e3b7f43)
THEY hadn’t spoken in an hour.
Not because they were angry with each other, Marc knew. Not because there was weirdness after their kiss, which had happened so naturally. And not only because their spirits were broken by the return of the whale they’d worked so hard to save. It was just that they were both putting all their energy into the endless drag-and-slosh—slower, shorter, choppier. Eternal. At least there was no blazing sun to contest with now.
The whale could see her calf from her new beach position and Marc wondered if the stillness of her body meant she knew it had died. Attributing human qualities to it was as pointless as it was hard not to. Beth’s eyes followed his to the whale’s small round ones.
‘Why do they do it—strand themselves?’
Marc shook his head. ‘No one knows for sure.’
She blinked her fatigue. ‘Do they want to die?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Can’t they see the land?’
‘Some blame our electromagnetic technologies which throw their guidance systems out of whack. Others say their inner ears are damaged by under-sea quakes which mess with their ability to navigate.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. I just know what it does to them.’
Beth stroked the whale’s cool skin. ‘I think she came back for her baby.’
Marc nodded. ‘Could be. I’ve seen mothers and calves together in the deep water creches, the bond is definitely strong enough.’
‘Maybe she just wanted closure.’
Beth’s dark head tipped back, rolling gently on her shoulders to ease the ache. His eyes followed hers upwards. It seemed bizarre to notice, through the death and the pain and the blistering cold, how pretty the night was. It truly was a beautiful Australian night. More stars than he’d ever seen in his life—that was what he’d thought when he’d first moved to the deep south of the state. The Milky Way in all its blanketing glory. It was kind of nice to see someone else appreciate it.
Beth arched her head back so far she almost stumbled. He twitched to race to her—even knowing he’d never get there—but caught himself just as she did.
‘We’re so small,’ she murmured, regaining balance, her face still turned heavenward. ‘Do you think that there’s a Marc and a Beth and a whale somewhere out there fighting for life, just like we are?’
Marc followed her glance up to the sky. ‘I guess … statistically. Could be.’
Her thoughts were as far away as those stars.
‘It seems impossible that life could only exist on one planet out of a million twinkling lights.’
‘You aren’t seeing the planets. Only the suns in solar systems full of other planets.’
She turned cold-drugged eyes on him and considered what he’d said for an age. Marc frowned. Her speech was getting slurred, her lids heavy. He’d have to get her out of the icy water soon. She was turning hypothermic. And talking about space.
‘We’re such an insignificant part of an insignificant part of something so big, ‘ she murmured. ‘Why do we even worry about things that go wrong? Or things that go right. Our whole drama-filled lives are barely a blink of the universe’s eye. We make no difference.’
Marc stopped sloshing. ‘It makes a difference here and now. And life is not about how long it is. It’s about how full it is.’
‘Full?’
‘Full of love. Joy.’ He looked back at the whale. ‘Compassion.’
She lowered her face to look at him. ‘Even if it’s only a blink?’
‘I’d rather have a moment of utter beauty than a hundred years of blandness. Wouldn’t you?’
Her eyes blinked heavily. ‘You would have made a good astronaut, ‘ she mumbled.
Marc frowned.
‘Fourth grade. You wanted to be a space-man. You thought there was a space princess you were supposed to save.’ Her teeth chattered.
A numb smile dawned. ‘I haven’t thought about that for years. I can’t believe you remember it.’
She returned her focus to him. ‘I remember everything.’
She’d driven him crazy in the playground, insisting on being the astronaut and refusing to be the princess. Was that the beginning of her tomboy ways? An insane glow birthed deep inside him that she’d held on to those memories. It suggested she hadn’t stopped caring when she’d pulled the pin on their friendship. She’d just stopped being there.
His smile withered.
‘So tell me about your mum, ‘ she murmured.
His gut instantly tightened as she forced her eyes to focus on him.
‘What happened between the two of you?’
His heart started to thump. Hard. ‘Didn’t we already cover this?’
‘Nope. I asked, you hedged.’
‘Doesn’t that tell you anything?’
‘It tells me you don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Bingo.’ He glared at her. ‘But I’m sure that’s no deterrent to you.’
The more defensive he got, the more interested she got. It seemed to slap her out of her growing stupor. ‘Not particularly.’
He threw his shoulders back and shot her his best glare. Subtlety was wasted on Beth. ‘If you give me a few minutes I’ll see if I can find a stick for you to poke around in that open wound.’
Her face was a wreck. Grey beneath the windburn, shadows beneath her eyes. But she still found energy to fight him on this. ‘I’m more interested in why you have an open wound in the first place.’
Because my mother is a nightmare.
‘Family stuff happens, Beth. I’m sure your relationship with your parents isn’t perfect.’
She got that haunted look from earlier. ‘Far from it. I’ve disappointed them in a hundred different ways. But I still see them. What happened with Janice?’
‘You don’t remember? How she could be?’
She tilted her head in that hard to resist way. He’d never felt less like indulging her. He didn’t discuss his mother. Period.
So why was he?
‘I always assumed it was because she lost your father,’ she said. ‘That it kind of. ruined her.’
He stared. ‘That’s actually a fairly apt description.’
Beth frowned, stopped sloshing. Her teeth chattered spasmodically between sentences. ‘I remember how hard she was on you. And on me. I remember how hard you worked at school and at the café to do well for her. But she barely noticed.’
His heart beat hard enough to feel through his wetsuit. He crossed his arms to help disguise it. ‘What do you remember about her personally? Physically?’
Beth’s frown intensified. ‘Um …’ She was tall, slim. Too slim, actually. Kind of …’ Her eyes widened and her words dried up momentarily. When she started again she had a tremor in her voice that seemed like a whole lot more than temperature-related. ‘Kind of hollow. I always felt she was a bit empty.’
Marc stared. She’d just nailed Janice. And those were still the early years.
‘I’m sorry, ‘ she whispered, as if finally realising she was stomping through his most fragile feelings.
‘Don’t be. That’s pretty astute. After we. went our separate ways, she got worse. Harder. Angrier. The more I tried to please her, the less pleased she seemed. She’d swing between explosions of emotion and this empty nothing. A vacant stare.’
Beth swallowed hard enough to see from clear across the whale. She’d completely stopped sloshing. Her pale skin was tinged with green.
‘She’d always been present-absent. Since my dad died. But it got worse. To the point she’d forget to eat, to lock the house up, to feed the cat. He moved in with the over-the-road neighbours.’
A tight shame curled itself into his throat.
‘It took me another two years before I discovered she was hooked on her depression medication,’ he said, swiping his towel in the ocean ferociously. ‘And that she had been since my dad died.’
The earth shifted violently under Beth’s feet and it had nothing to do with the lurching roll of the whale. A high-pitched whooshing sound started up in her ears.
‘Your mum was addicted to painkillers?’
‘Is. Present tense.’
Oh, God. The unveiled disgust on his face might as well have been for her. The description of Janice ten years ago might as well be her two years before. Beth’s voice shook and she forced herself to resume sloshing to cover it up. ‘And that’s why you don’t see her?’
