She felt a tap on her shoulder and saw Max pointing down a crevice in the rocks. She moved closer for a better view. Her hand found Max’s shoulder.
A sea turtle slept deep in the mottled shadows of the coral, its shell sparkling with gold in a shaft of sunlight.
She treaded water, watching. Suddenly the turtle began to move. It swam away from her, out of the coral enclave and toward deeper water.
Grace couldn’t help it—she began to swim after it, just to see the ballet of its motion in water. It swam farther and she followed, the water becoming cooler; below her, the coral dropped away. Still, like the hypnotic lure of a mermaid, the turtle coaxed her deeper.
She could feel Max behind her now and again, tapping her as if trying to keep up.
Then the turtle shot off and disappeared. She rose to the surface to talk to Max.
Max surfaced five feet away. Something about his expression set a fist in her stomach. “Come back!” he shouted.
She treaded water but had the sense of moving, and that’s when she saw the sign, the buoys. She’d swum beyond the boundaries, into the channel of the riptide.
“Swim back!”
Grace dug down into the water, but even as she kicked, she felt a grab, a tug at her body as the tide yanked her into the dark channel of the sea.
Max was going to get her killed. After all his talk of adventure, he’d pushed her into this, and now Grace would drown, somewhere miles away from home, in the ocean.
He’d tried to grab her as she swam with the turtle, tried to warn her that the ocean could turn on her, that she had to respect it, heed the dangers. But she’d swum past the barrier without even seeing it, and now the riptide sucked her away from him.
“Swim to me!” He launched out after her, every single warning against following a victim into a riptide blaring in his brain. But she hadn’t quite lost herself to the pull yet and—
She touched his hand. Briefly, but she was kicking hard, fighting, and yeah, she could swim. He lunged for her again and caught her, pulling against the fingers of the cold current.
“Kick!”
It seemed they’d alerted the lifeguards from shore—a cadre of rescuers on surfboards paddled their direction. He tried to remember his safety training on how to escape a riptide. It seemed he had to swim perpendicular to it, maybe.
Or maybe he should surrender to it, let it take them both to sea.
“Don’t let go!” Grace screamed.
Never. He tightened his iron grip on her hand, and they seemed to be breaking free. Or maybe the buoy had simply moved with the wind. His leg began to tighten, a cramp working up the length of it. He groaned.
Then suddenly they popped free, surging forward in a giant stroke. Grace came abreast of him, paddling hard, while Max kicked, fighting the burn in his calf to keep up.
A lifeguard on a paddleboard shot out of the boundary area. “What are you doing?”
Like he couldn’t figure that out? Max took the proffered paddle so the guard could drag him closer to the safe zone. Another guard pulled up, letting Grace rest on his board as he paddled her back in.
Max let the guard tow him into the swimming area. “Thanks.”
“We should kick you out. Don’t you know it’s forbidden to go out of the buoy area?”
“It was an accident,” he said, glancing at Grace, who now stood shoulder-deep on the sandy bottom. “Believe me—she didn’t realize how far she’d gone.”
“You were lucky,” the guard said and paddled away.
Grace had her arms wrapped around herself, shaking despite the bathtub-warm water.
Max moved over to her, feeling the same dark chill deep inside. He lifted his mask, then hers. His hands cupped her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
She shivered even as she nodded. But her big eyes held his as if needing confirmation, and he didn’t know what to do.
Mostly because he wasn’t sure of the answer either. No, he wasn’t okay.
For a moment there, he’d felt as if a hand reached in, closed around his heart, and threatened to rip it from its moorings.
And because that scared him nearly as much as watching her rocket out to sea, he wrapped his arms around Grace and pulled her to himself. Tight. Breathing in her salty, wet skin, pressing his head against her hair.
Feeling her wrap her arms around his waist and hold on.
Bad idea, because she fit into his embrace like she belonged there, the way her head landed just below his chin, the curve of her body so perfect against his that it only added to the cold tremble inside. His heartbeat probably betrayed him, thundering against her ear even as it filled his head.
What if she’d died?
Max blew out a breath, then another, and finally released his hold. He thought she might be crying, and he felt the same way. Grace folded her arms in front of her and looked at him, her heart in her beautiful eyes . . . and that’s when he realized he’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.