Page 2 of The Wedding Proposal

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Elle stared out through the taxi window, heart soaring as high as the blue sky over the sea.

She’d left sensible, dutiful, walking-work-ethic Elle behind in England and she was really here, being driven along the waterfront between the moorings and gardens fringed with waving palm trees. She was going to live on a boat and be carefree and adventurous. Rolling down her window, she breathed the warm briny air.

‘You know where is the boat?’ asked her Maltese driver.

‘She’s called the Shady Lady. She’s all white and quite far along towards Manoel Island bridge, but not as far as the kiosk.’ Elle knew Simon’s directions by heart.

‘OK, the other end.’ The driver nodded.

The boats were moored stern-to, in sailing terminology — tied by their blunt ends. The first they passed were huge, two or three decks with gleaming chrome railings projecting out into the creek.

After a couple of minutes Elle could see a kiosk cafe and glimpses of a long low stone bridge that connected their quayside to another. There, shifting gently on her mooring ropes as if impatient for Elle to arrive, was a boat with Shady Lady in flowing navy script on her sleek white hull.

‘There she is,’ Elle breathed. Definitely one of the junior members of the marina at forty-two feet long, the Shady Lady gleamed in the sun, her sliding glass doors open. Fantastic. The person Simon had said would be at the boat must have arrived already.

The driver brought the car to a halt. ‘I get your bags.’ He jumped out, legs bare and tanned below khaki shorts.

Elle climbed out more slowly, almost in sensory overload as a hot breeze tossed her hair over her face, the sun on the water dazzling. Behind her, traffic grumbled along a road on the other side of the gardens.

‘You like hot weather?’ The driver opened the car boot and tugged out a suitcase, swinging it onto the quayside.

‘I love it.’ Elle gazed around, identifying what she’d learned from Simon and the ‘boating for beginners’ website she’d been haunting for the past few weeks. The metal box rising out of the quayside was where the boat connected to the electricity and water supplies. The Shady Lady didn’t have an integral gangplank, as the bigger vessels did, but a wooden plank lay between the shore and the big shelf on the back of the boat, the bathing platform. White fenders hung at strategic points to keep the Shady Lady from rubbing up against her neighbours, Fallen Star and Alice.

‘Very hot, the sun in Malta.’ The driver hauled out suitcase two.

‘It feels great after the British drizzle.’

‘You be careful.’ Suitcase three slapped to the ground. ‘You get—’ The driver paused to open the back door to drag out suitcase four, which had travelled from Malta International Airport as a rear-seat passenger. He lined it up with the others: two black that matched, a leaving gift from her colleagues in her last job, at Waterfield Systems; a bubblegum pink one from TK Maxx and one decorated with the Union flag, purchased from a market stall by Elle Jamieson, Adventurer.

‘—sunstroke!’ he produced triumphantly. ‘Sunstroke makes you very sick. Sweaty. Dizzy.’

And even as she held out his fare and began to thank him, Elle found herself experiencing something very much as he described, complete with giddiness and sweat. It was nothing to do with the sun, though the heat was beginning to press on the crown of her head.

It was everything to do with the man who had just emerged through the door of the Shady Lady and frozen mid-step.

‘Thank you, madam.’ The friendly taxi driver slid back into his car, inched around nearby fishermen dangling their lines between the boats, turned and set off back along the marina access road.

‘Lucas.’ The word stuck to the sides of Elle’s suddenly dry throat. Her heart, which had been floating with joy, plummeted to the dusty ground. ‘Lucas,’ she repeated, stupidly. His black hair was longer, blowing around his jawline in the breeze, and his dark eyes burned in a tanned face. His feet were bare and if he’d ever carried even an extra ounce, it was gone. Every part of him was hard and lean.

‘Elle,’ he returned, flatly, ‘what the high-flying fuck are you doing here?’ His disbelieving gaze swept over her luggage before returning to her face. Slowly, he stepped down onto the bathing platform and halted at the edge. Eighteen inches of water lapped between them.

Elle’s chest gave a painful squeeze. She swallowed. ‘S-S-’ She paused to will her tongue to untie itself. ‘S-Simon has lent me his boat.’ She glanced down at the name on the stern, seeking reassurance that she was actually in the right place. And that Lucas wasn’t.

‘I don’t think so. Simon has lent me the boat.’

Silence. Stupid tears prickled at the back of Elle’s eyes. Lucas belonged deep in the past, not here, now, obstructing the gateway to her big adventure.

‘You’d better come aboard while we sort this out,’ he snapped. And then, as Elle stooped to the Union flag suitcase, ‘You can leave your baggage there.’

‘Right, like I’m about to heap disaster upon catastrophe by getting my suitcases stolen.’ Masking her anxiety with bravado, she hauled the first towards the edge of the quay.

With a curse, Lucas leaped the gap between boat and shore and stooped to manhandle the gangplank through a couple of iron hoops and into position.

Then he swiped the suitcase out of her hand and swung it on board, beside the cockpit seat. The other three followed rapidly and Elle was left clutching her backpack as Lucas stalked across the plank, through the sliding doors and out of sight.

Barely breathing, she followed, onto the bathing platform and through the cockpit to the saloon, registering only absently the sliding gliding movements of the craft on the sea. Already familiar with boat’s interior from the photos she’d pored over, her focus was on Lucas.

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