Page 39 of An Irish Summer

“Do you have a bra and underwear?” she asked. I rolled my eyes, knowing we both knew the answer was yes. “Then you have a swimsuit,” she said. “Let’s go.”

As we approached the platform, I heard a mixture of accents, the familiar soundtrack at the Wanderer.

“You girls made it,” Lars called to us as he clambered out of the sea, shaking water from his hair. Unsurprisingly, his body matched his Ken-doll face, and I wondered if that was part of how he convinced so many guests to jump from a thirty-foot-high diving platform into the sea.

“We did,” Flo said, flinging her arms wide. “And this one’s going to do the jump.”

“I don’t know which one she’s talking about,” I said, “because it definitely isn’t me.”

“Chelsea Gold, get your arse up here.”

I recognized Collin’s voice before I looked up at the platform, and I wasn’t sure what was more unsettling: the fact that he was here, or the fact that he was talking about myarse.

“Of course you’re here,” I called.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” he yelled back.

“It is,” I said. “Too much pressure.”

“So give in.”

His words were laced with undertones I was in no positionto decode. “Not a chance,” I said, wondering if he could hear the wobble in my voice from all the way up there.

“She still hasn’t learned she doesn’t have a choice, has she?” he asked the other two.

“I tried to tell her it was a rite of passage.” Flo shrugged. “But you know how she is about embracing Galway’s customs.”

“Sheis standing right here,” I said.

“When really she should be taking her clothes off and getting up here,” Collin said. As if I wasn’t nervous enough, now I also had to think about the way it sounded when Collin Finegan told me to take my clothes off.

I looked from expectant face to expectant face, slowly coming to grips with the fact that there was no getting out of this. There were a few whoops and cheers from the guests as they plunged into the water, while the others watched our conversation and waited for me to make a move.

“Ah, lads, we shouldn’t be surprised,” Collin said eventually. “We all know Chelsea isn’t a chancer. She isn’t going to change her ways now.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but he had backed me into a corner. If I said I was, in fact, a chancer, I’d have no excuse not to jump. And if I agreed with him, he would be right. I could barely make out his features from so far down below, but his expression was just cocky enough for me to know we were thinking the same thing.

“You’re such a pain in the ass, you know that?”

“Heard it a few times.” I could tell he was smiling. “Now, what’s it gonna be, Chelsea? Are you going to be brave for once, or are you going to go for security, like you always do?”

“You have no idea what I always do.”

“Is that your answer?”

“I’m going to kill you,” I said.

“You’ll have to come up here for that.”

I wasn’t sure if the burning in my chest was my nerves, my frustration with Collin, or my frustration with myself, but it was becoming less bearable the longer I stood down there looking up at him.

The breaking point came, however, when a beautiful, curvy woman in a tiny black bikini materialized beside Collin, announcing in a posh English accent that she would show us how it was done.

She trailed her fingertips along Collin’s back as she passed him, stepping up to the edge of the platform and cracking her neck for effect.

“Watch and learn,” she said to no one in particular, though her words spread icy fingers through my chest. She dove from the platform with more grace than I’ve probably ever done anything and landed in the water with hardly a splash.

Collin stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled through his teeth as she surfaced, and the ice in my chest turned to flames. Who was this woman?

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