What Happens in Paradise(82)

“She told us Huck would pick her up,” Cash says. “She told us it wouldn’t be an inconvenience because his charter was running late…”

“Wait,” Irene says. “What?” Cash watches Irene snap into parenting mode and it’s like being transported back in time fifteen years. “Let me call Huck.” Irene fishes her cell phone out of her bag and dials. Cash can hear her reach Huck’s recording.

“He’s not answering,” she says. “And I don’t want to leave a message and panic him. Maybe Maia is home and they’re sitting down to dinner.”

Maybe, Cash thinks. He pictures Huck and Maia at a table, Maia describing the baobab tree.

Cash needs her to be home, to be safe. He can’t handle losing anyone else.





Huck




When he gets out of the shower, he sees Irene has called.

Prayers answered, he thinks.

It was bad luck that there had been no charter today—or maybe it was good luck. Huck isn’t sure.

Huck has done nothing all day but think about kissing Irene. He kissed her on the boat, then he kissed her in his truck, and finally he walked her up the steps to the villa and kissed her next to the sliding glass door. He thought that maybe, just maybe, he’d get an invitation to come inside, upstairs—but eventually, Irene had put her index finger to his lips and slipped inside alone.

He understood. It was too soon to go any further. She was newly widowed and so much still remained a mystery.

But he had hoped.

If they’d had a charter, would they have gone back to their normal, pre-kiss selves? Would it have been like the kiss never happened? What torture. Huck wouldn’t have been able to focus on fishing for one second. Who cared about fishing? Love was the only thing that mattered.

He prefers to think there would have been a new energy between him and his first mate, barely sublimated. Huck would brush against Irene, their hands would touch, she would sit next to him behind the wheel of the boat. He would count the hours and then the minutes until the clients were walking away down the dock so that he could kiss Irene again.

People would assume they were newlyweds.

It’s been so long since Huck has felt this way about a woman that he hardly recognizes himself. He feels twenty-five again.

But they hadn’t had a charter and so Huck was left in a vacuum of solitude. He wanted to call Irene and invite her to do something. There was a new floating taco bar in the East End called Lime Out. They could drive to Hansen Bay, rent a kayak, and paddle out for tacos. Would Irene like that? Or maybe a simple lunch would be better, at Aqua Bistro in Coral Bay. Huck could introduce Irene to Rupert—but no, Rupert would be smitten immediately and Huck would have to beat him back.

In the end, Huck lay in his hammock and finally finished the Connelly book. After enjoying a brief sense of accomplishment, he’d stared at his damn phone, willing it to ring, willing it to be Irene inviting him to the villa for a swim in the pool.

Three o’clock didn’t even provide its usual respite because Maia was going hiking with Cash so she didn’t need a ride home from school.

Huck figured Maia would be hungry when she got home and so at five thirty, he went to Candi’s for barbecue, then he got the text from Destiny about the next day’s charter and he assumed Irene had received it too. They would be together tomorrow on the boat.

Huck tried Maia to get her ETA but was delivered straight to her voicemail. She always let her phone run down at the end of a day; it was frustrating. He decided to take a shower—and now that he’s out, he can see he has two missed calls, both from Irene, which at this time of day is strange—and maybe troubling.

“Maia?” Huck calls out, but there’s no answer. Huck pokes his head out into the hallway. The house is quiet; Maia’s bedroom door is open. She’s not home yet, but she should be any second, so his privacy is limited. He closes the bedroom door and prepares to call Irene back, but something stops him.

She has called twice without leaving a message, so clearly there’s something she wants to tell him in person. He fears—he can barely say the words in his mind—that the kissing changed things for the worse and that Irene no longer feels she can work on the boat. He’ll be crushed. He has relived the kissing so many times in the past twenty-one hours that it has taken on the quality of a dream. Irene was enthusiastic about kissing him back, right? In his mind, she has her hands in his hair; she’s pulling him closer, wanting the kiss to be deeper. But Huck had been drinking and he has seen far too much on the news not to have doubts about even the most consensual-seeming of acts. Huck shouldn’t have gotten so carried away. There was a moment at the villa where he’d wanted very badly to press his body against hers, but he hadn’t done it. There had been the impulse and then maybe the start of a movement but he’d stopped himself in time. Still, he worries she read his mind, sensed the power of his urges, and now is afraid and maybe even repulsed by him and thinks that working together is no longer a good idea. In fact, it’s inappropriate. In fact, the friendship has to go as well.

As Huck is spiraling down into bleaker and bleaker depths, his phone rings. It’s Irene.

Hard things are hard, he thinks. He’ll just have to apologize and promise to be a gentleman from here on out. But he cannot, cannot, let her quit.

“Hello?” he says, as jolly as Santa Claus.