Page 31 of Turn the Tide
Chapter 5
They settled against the stone. Not like before, but side by side. As if by talking about whatever this was between them, they’d opened up something they needed to handle carefully.
“Saw you out once.” He spoke quietly, his head back, eyes on the sky rather than on her, though it felt as if she had every ounce of his attention.
Something prickled up her spine. It wasn’t unpleasant. “Yeah?”
“At Howie’s, down near the beach.”
She nodded. She’d been there exactly once, with girlfriends. “You didn’t say hi?”
“No.” Why did that hurt, just a little? “You’re…young.”
“I’m twenty-nine.”
He looked surprised, which wasn’t a shocker. She’d always been told she appeared younger than her age.
“How old are you, Eric?”
“Forty-one.”
What were a few years, really? “That’s nothing.” His profile, long and stern and immovable, looked cut from the rock he leaned on. He fit in out here, seemed a part of the landscape. She tried to conjure up an image of him sitting at a bar like Howie’s, full of Marine Corps recruits and college girls. In a rowdy place like that, he’d stick out like a rock in a stream. And no way would he sit. He’d stand, so that the crowd would have to flow around him. That image made her smile.
“You were with a guy.”
She threw him a disbelieving grimace. “Iwas?”
“Surfer type. Joined you and your girlfriends.”
“And?”
“He was into you. He seemedrightfor you.”
That sent a spike of irritation through her. Who was he to decide what kind of guy she deserved to be with? “Rightfor me?”
“Easygoing. Good-looking, I guess, in a young, hip shithead kinda way.”
“What does that make you? Old and out of it?”
He shot her a look, not quite smiling. “Pretty much.”
“Were you wearing dad jeans?” She’d only seen him in shorts, but he had the kind of long, rangy build that would look really good in a pair of jeans.
“Of course. I am retired, after all. Not to mention I’m your elder, so…”
“Yeah. Retired.” She looked at him, long and hard. Something about him—the careful way he held himself maybe—spoke of feigned nonchalance.
With a burst of insight, she got it. “You were afraid,” she said.
“Huh?”
“That’s it, isn’t it? You—the dude who broke into an oil rig, unarmed, to pull me out of a certain-death situation—were too scared to approach a table full of women and some guy who, I’ll tell you right now, I don’t remember at all.”
“Well, he was all over you.”
After a few quiet moments, she spoke. “I would have been pretty happy to see you.”
“Yeah?”
