Winter in Paradise (Paradise #1)(38)

Ayers stops to tread water and Cash does the same. She removes her snorkel.

“That’s Luther,” she says. “He’s the biggest ray in the VIs. Five feet, two inches in diameter. He lives out here.”

“Luther is… wow,” Cash says.

“Let’s follow him” Ayers says.

They trail Luther for a while, then Ayers makes a sharp turn—she must have seen something—and Cash kicks like crazy in an attempt to keep up. She’s chasing what looks like a shark—it’s sleek, silver, menacing. She takes off her silver hook bracelet and waggles it at him and he comes charging for it, then Ayers yanks it away and he darts past her.

Cash lifts his head. “What are you doing?”

She laughs. “Barracuda,” she says. “A baby. He’s harmless.” She swims back in the direction of the boat and Cash follows.



They’re back on the boat, headed home. Cash is bone-tired but energized. What a great day. What a transformative day. He’s a convert: he loves the tropics.

“You’re allowed to drink now, right?” Cash asks Ayers. She nods and he grabs two rum punches from the bar and follows her to a bench on the shady side of the wheelhouse. The shade is a relief. He might be a convert in his heart and mind, but his skin is still that of his Scottish and Norwegian ancestors. He has been reapplying sunscreen every hour, but he’s still pretty sure he’s going to have a wicked sunburn.

He hands Ayers a rum punch and they touch cups. Ayers is wearing silver-rimmed, blue-lens aviators and her feet are resting up on the railing. She looks exhausted.

“To a job well done,” Cash says. He takes a sip of his drink, his twentieth of the day. “You know, it’s not so different from my job as a ski instructor.”

“Aside from being completely different, not so different at all,” she says. Together they look at the tired, sun-scorched, happy people below them on the deck—some snoozing, others forging bonds that will last all the way to the bar at Woody’s, or the rest of the week or a lifetime. Cash has Chris’s and Mike’s numbers and promised to call them if he ever finds himself in Brooklyn, which secretly he hopes he never does.

Ayers sucks down the rum punch and seems to both relax and pep up. “You liked it, right?”

“Loved it,” he says. “Can’t thank you enough.”

“Well, you basically saved my life yesterday by sharing your water. And you gave me your bandana. And you were nice to me when I was sad.”

“Like I said, I understand.”

Ayers leans her head on his shoulder. At the same time that he’s experiencing pure ecstasy at her touch, he realizes she’s crying again.

He hands her his damp cocktail napkin; it’s all he has. “I’m happy to give you my shirt,” he says.

She laughs through her tears. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s all lurking there, right below the surface. But I have to sublimate it. This job requires me to be peppy. I’m not allowed to be a human being, a thirty-one-year-old woman who lost her best friend.” She sniffs and wipes at her reddened nose with the napkin. “At my other job it’s different, because Rosie worked there with me, so we all lost her and every single person on the staff knows how close we were, so even though I have to smile while I’m serving, when I need a break I can hide in the kitchen and cry and do a shot of tequila with the line cooks.”

Cash feels a surge of jealousy about the line cooks. He wants to ask if Ayers has a boyfriend or is married. He could be getting carried away for no reason. But instead, he asks if Ayers has a picture of Rosie.

“A picture of Rosie?” Ayers says.

“Yeah,” Cash says. “I’d like to see what she looks like.” It has occurred to him since their conversation yesterday that Ayers’s friend Rosie might not be the same woman in the photograph with Russ. It would be better, so much better, if Rosie Small weren’t Russ’s lover. They would both still be dead, but maybe just friends or colleagues. It would be so much easier.

Ayers pulls out her phone. “Here,” she says. “She’s my screensaver.” She hands Cash the phone.

On the left is Ayers in a canary-yellow bikini on a beach next to a tree that supports a tire swing. On the right is Rosie, the same woman in the photograph with Cash’s father. She’s wearing a white bikini and beaming at the camera.

“She’s really pretty,” Cash says. “Though not as pretty as you, of course.”

“Oh, please,” Ayers says. She tucks her phone back into the pocket of her shorts. “You know, I want to apologize about being short with you yesterday… when you asked about Rosie’s boyfriend.”

Cash holds his breath. We don’t have to talk about it, he wants to say. When he’d registered for the trip, he’d been glad that Wade was handling the paperwork and not Ayers, because he didn’t want Ayers to see his last name and make the connection.

He needs to tell her who he is, but he doesn’t want her to know who he is. And he certainly can’t tell her now, while she’s at work.

“You don’t have to apologize…”

“He was rich,” Ayers says. “Some rich asshole who showed up every couple of weeks and completely monopolized Rosie’s time, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he had this shroud of secrecy around him. They’d been together for six years and I’d never met him. And I was her best friend. The first few years I accused her of making him up, that’s how bad it was. But he was always giving her things—silver bracelets, money, a new Jeep. He almost never left his property, and they never entertained or invited anyone over.”