Wickedly Wonderful(56)

Beka laughed and patted Chewie on the head before heading toward the car. “I’m more like the fairy godmother than I am Cinderella, but that’s okay—I’m not in the mood for Prince Charming tonight anyway.”

Take that, handsome Irish surfer guy. Marcus felt an unaccustomed trickle of happiness swirl around his heart like the way Beka’s dress eddied and flowed over the ground. Her hand felt warm in his as he helped her into the passenger side.

“That’s good,” he said. “Since I am neither a prince nor charming. But I’ll do my best to be a little less crabby than usual.”

“That’s what I was hoping for,” she said with a laugh, “Prince Hardly Crabby At All. Dude, this is going to be a great night.”


* * *

AND IT WAS. Marcus hadn’t expected much more than to just get through the experience; show up, be as sociable as he could manage, pretend to still have something in common with guys he hadn’t seen since he was a teenager, try not to make an ass out of himself in front of Beka, eat some food, drink a beer or two, and go home.

So far, none of it had gone the way he’d expected, except for the eating and the beer. Maybe Beka’s magical dress had turned him into Cinderella, because he was actually having a ball. Even the crowds weren’t bothering him as much as he’d thought they would, probably because he was too busy watching Beka to pay much attention to anyone else.

His old high school friends turned out to still be pretty nice guys, all married to attractive and pleasant women who went out of their way to try and make him welcome in what was obviously a tight-knit group. He’d worried that he wouldn’t have much in common with the men, since their lives had taken a much different path than his. He was fairly certain that none of them had ever killed an enemy in battle and watched the life seep out of his body.

But everyone else was happy to keep the conversation going, occasionally stopping to ask him a question about his father’s health or what it felt like to be back after all these years. Those he mostly sidestepped, so as not to bring down the mood. Still, it was more fun than he’d expected to hang out on the beach and eat decent barbeque with a cold beer in his hand and Beka by his side, making him look good merely by being there.

If he was going to be completely honest with himself, Beka was most of the reason why the evening was going so well. She’d already charmed all of his friends and their wives, and subtly filled in the spaces in the conversation when he couldn’t think of an acceptable answer to things like, “So, how are you and your father getting along these days?” One of the women recognized her from a craft fair where Beka sold her jewelry every year, and that got them chatting about all sorts of female-centric topics that Marcus eventually tuned out.

Instead, he studied the beautiful woman next to him. In the flickering lights of the torches set out by the restaurant hosting the barbeque, she seemed almost ethereal, as if she might vanish between one moment and the next. She gave every appearance of having a good time, but he’d noticed that she hardly ate anything, pushing the food around on the plate but rarely bringing the fork to her lips. He thought she looked pale, too, although it was hard to say in the tremulous torch light.

Of course, maybe she was just thinking about her work and her lack of progress finding answers. Dave, the guy who invited Marcus in the first place, had already mentioned that he was planning to finally give up the fishing boat he’d inherited from his dad—too few fish to keep going, he’d said. And Frank, who loved the sea almost as much as Marcus’s father did, confessed that he was worried about having the money to send his kid to college, since he’d already taken out a second mortgage on his house. Frank’s wife, Nancy, laughed and said if necessary, she could always take up prostitution. But you could tell that, under their cheery exteriors, they were all worried.

They changed to more pleasant topics of conversation, but Beka just looked grimmer and grimmer. Marcus wasn’t having any of that.

When there was a break in the chatter, he leaned over and said quietly in her ear, “Are you okay? If you’re not having a good time, we don’t have to stick around for the fireworks.”

She gave him a startled look, blue eyes wide. “I’m having a great time,” she said. “I’m just a little tired from the dive earlier. It took more out of me than I thought, I guess.”

Marcus wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t sure how deep she’d gone, but her return journey to the surface seemed to take forever. By the time her head had broken through the water by the dinghy, he’d been on the verge of jumping in to make sure she was okay. Only her periodic tugs on the rope between them kept him from doing so, and by the end he’d been sweating and agitated from the wait.