Life Is A Beach (Mills & Boon Silhouette): Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling (3 page)

“Could be,” said Karma noncommittally. She turned to go.

“Oh, by the way, Geofredo’s probably in your apartment right now. He’s respraying the whole third floor.”

Karma stopped and frowned. “I told you I didn’t want that exterminator guy coming into my place. You know I don’t believe in killing anything.”

Goldy spared her a meaningful look. “You told me you had a family of roaches living under your refrigerator.”

The roaches were palmetto bugs, enormous and all too prevalent in the state of Florida. These were big brown insects the size of hummingbirds, and they also flew. For palmetto bugs and spiders, which creeped her out bigtime, Karma was able to relax her standards slightly as long as she didn’t have to do the killing.

Goldy said, “You tell Geofredo to check the supply room on your floor for spiders.”

“Will do.”

Karma started up the stairs to the third floor; there was no elevator in the building. She figured the stairs were good exercise, which she needed now that she was going to be sitting behind a desk every day. Not that she had done much sitting so far, since the chair was usually piled high with papers. Most of the hours she had put in at the Rent-a-Yenta office had been spent painting and cleaning, with an occasional client thrown in for good measure.

Speaking of clients, Goldy’s niece Jennifer was skipping toward her down the stairs, probably on her way home from
visiting Mandi. Jennifer’s hair was long, straight, and bouncy. She wore a tight cutoff Planet Hollywood shirt with low-slung white capri pants that showed off her silver navel tassel.

“Hi, Karma,” she said, stopping before they passed. “Hey, are those real?”

“Are what—?” Karma began before she realized that Jennifer was unabashedly staring at her breasts.

Karma shook her head as if to clear it. Was she supposed to answer such a question?

“I don’t mean the boobs, silly. If they were fake, you’d have chosen bigger ones. No, I mean the nipples.”

“What?” Back in Connecticut, where Karma came from, people didn’t ask such personal questions.

“Oh, well, I guess they must be. Forget I asked—I was only wondering if your nipples were fake because I’m going to buy some if I can figure out where to get them, and I thought you could tell me.”

“Sheesh, Jennifer, what are you talking about?” Karma had thought, erroneously it appeared, that she had outgrown being freaked by the wacko characters in Miami Beach.

Jennifer tossed her head so that her hair gave off the overpowering scent of mango-coconut shampoo. “Nipples, silly, you can buy fake ones to stick on. My own are kind of puny, and the idea of all these guys I’m going to meet through Rent-a-Yenta has been making me think. Do I want a steady boyfriend? Yes! Do I want to use every means at my disposal to attract one? Yes! Guys love huge nipples, Karma, believe me. It’s a major drawing point. Point, that’s funny!” She laughed uproariously.

Karma made herself keep a straight face. “I can’t help you, sorry. But if I were you, I’d try that place advertised on the big billboard near the airport—The Booby Trap ‘n Boutique.” The billboard featured an overendowed winking woman wearing nothing but a large pink feather.

“Oooh! Good idea! Thanks, Karma.” With that, Jennifer
resumed her skipping down the stairs, and Karma readjusted her blouse so that it didn’t cling.

The exterminator, Geofredo, was backing into her apartment with his bug-spray equipment as she arrived. Karma considered if maybe this was the man she was going to marry, like in the song. She also considered readjusting her blouse so that it
did
cling, but she quickly gave up the idea until she knew more about him.

As he went around her apartment spraying and smiling shyly between squirts, Karma decided that if this guy had any intention of marrying her, he wasn’t letting on.

He gave her one last bashful smile at the door. “
Hasta la vista?
Baby?” he said, looking more tentative than forceful.

“Don’t forget about the spiders in the supply room,” she said, doing a finger-play demo of the kindergarten song about the itsy-bitsy spider. “In el rooma de supply.” This was the best shot she could give Spanish; she’d taken French in high school.

Geofredo shoved the bug bomb he was carrying into his pocket and grinned widely, exposing a row of teeth as white and as straight as a row of Chiclets. “Spi-der,” he said, mimicking her actions.
“Araña.”
That’s when Karma spotted the wedding ring on the third finger of his left hand and realized that he wasn’t the man for her.

“
Hasta la vista
to you, too,” she told him, and then she shut the door behind him fast.

Besides,
she really dug cowboys. Or at least she had ever since she’d set eyes on Slade Braddock.

S
LADE SETTLED BACK
in a deck chair, popped the top off a Guinness, and resigned himself to listening to intermittent jabber and Cuban music wafting over from D Dock. He was trying his best to impersonate a yachtsman, but even after two days in residence on
Toy Boat,
he felt like an interloper. The habitues of the Sunchaser Marina were a tight-knit group. They didn’t so much ignore him as act as if he didn’t exist.

Well, his clothes might have had something to do with it, but whenever he shucked the jeans and boots for one of Mack’s designer swimsuit outfits, he felt like a complete idiot. Silver reflecting sunglasses and a cabana shirt thrown open at the throat weren’t his style.

Still, he might have gotten along with his companions better last night if he’d been dressed in Miami Beach mode. The two guys he’d met at the beach had taken one look at his boots and hat and mistaken him for a rube. They’d invited him along on a little bar-hopping jaunt, set him up with a sumptuous redhead at a party, and tried to steal his money in a back alley. Bad mistake. The guys were nursing aching heads today, no doubt, and not as a result of hangovers. As for the redhead, she’d split, yelling at the top of her lungs. Good riddance.

He was by nature soft-spoken and quiet, and he was well aware that it gave him an advantage to be seen as naive. He’d never thought it necessary to advertise the fact that
he’d graduated from the University of Florida and been a star on the rodeo circuit for a couple of years afterward.

Slade Braddock had seen enough of the world to appreciate who he was and where he’d come from, which was why he knew he wanted to live in Okeechobee City for the rest of his life. Here in Miami Beach, he felt misplaced. Like a fish out of water, so to speak. He didn’t belong here, he didn’t really want to be here. He’d made progress today, though. He was on the way to finding himself a wife.

The marina was bustling with activity as boats came back from fishing trips, people returned to their houseboats from their day’s activities, and fishermen weighed in their catch. The breeze felt good after this typically stifling September day; it wafted with it the scent of the ocean. Across Biscayne Bay, an orange sun cast the skyline of Miami into golden relief, and Slade was momentarily homesick. To his way of thinking, sunset in the Glades was a much more inspiring sight.

He allowed himself to daydream as he thought about the wife he had come here to find, heard her soft voice whispering in his ear. It would be good to have a wife at last, good to have a sweet little cutie to laugh with in bed at night, to cuddle happily for a few quiet moments in the morning before he rode out to check the fences and the herd.

He pictured the Diamond B Ranch in his mind—brilliant blue sky, acres and acres of green grass punctuated by palmetto hummocks, and in the distance, Everglades saw grass shimmering green and yellow in the bright sunshine. It was a special place, that ranch, carved out of the Glades by Slade’s grandfather, built to its present greatness by his father, and he wanted a special woman to share it with him.

Slade spotted Karma O’Connor as she rounded the curve from the parking lot on her bike. Now speaking of women, there was an interesting one, he thought. But quirky. Karma didn’t at all resemble the wife he intended to find—she was
too tall by far, and not fragile. Definitely not fragile. The word he would choose to describe her would be robust. He did have to admit that her hair was much the same color as what he had in mind. It wasn’t straight though, and he had a thing for fragile-looking women with long straight blond hair—Southern-belle type, if possible. On the other hand, on Karma that bouncy mop of curls looked good.

He stood up to get a better look at her, and to his surprise, she didn’t stop pedaling when she reached the grassy strip dividing the parking lot from the dock, nor did she stop on the narrow band of asphalt that passed for a sidewalk. She rode her fool bike right onto C Dock.

He treated himself to another swig of beer as she bent her head down in determination and kept pedaling past the line-up of houseboats, a big Amazon of a woman. The boards of the dock creaked under her bike wheels. That fluttering purple thing she wore scared a lazy pelican off one of the weathered pilings, and the bike’s back wheel clipped a bait box, but still she pedaled on.

Slade couldn’t figure for the life of him what kind of garment Karma was wearing. You could see through part of it, but not any part that mattered—the sleeves and at least the bottom part of the legs were transparent like a nightie. He remembered her legs. He’d gotten a pretty good gander at them when she was walking up the stairs to her office this morning. And her hips, ditto. They’d looked like a couple of melons in a croker sack. Very firm melons.

Then: disaster. Slade saw what was going to happen before Karma did. An elderly guy named Phifer in C-22 was making repairs to his boat, puttering around on deck as he had all afternoon. Phifer must not have seen Karma because he tossed a line toward the dock. The line seemed to hover for a moment before it descended, a kind of slow motion free-fall, and as the rope looped toward her through the air, Slade yelled, “Look out!”

Karma looked up. The trouble was that she looked up at
Slade all the way down in Slip 41, not at the line, which fell neatly over her foot, snagging both it and the bike pedal in a kind of a bungee hang-up. Karma went flying. So did the bike—both of them right into the drink with a huge splash.

Slade was up and off
Toy Boat
in a flash. But by the time he reached the space where Karma had gone in, all that was to be seen of either her or the bike was a circle of purple chiffon floating on the top of the water.

She surfaced right away, sputtering and flinging a tangle of hair out of her eyes.

“I’ll throw you a life ring,” Slade hollered, grabbing one from a hook on one of the pilings and tossing it at her.

She yelled back, “I can swim,” but when the life ring landed beside her, she latched on to it anyway and began kicking in the direction of the dock. By this time, bystanders had gathered. “What happened?” asked the old guy who’d thrown the line.

“She was riding a bike. Lost control of it,” Slade said, not wanting to get into a conversation with Phifer. At present he was much more interested in Karma, who was now treading water directly below him. “Swim over to the piling, I’ll lean down and give you a hand up.”

She looked wary. “I can’t do that. I don’t have on anything but my underwear. That’s my sari,” and she pointed at the purple chiffon, which was being borne away by the outgoing tide.

“What’d she say?” asked Phifer.

“I believe she said she’s sorry,” Slade told him.

“I should think she’s sorry,” huffed Phifer. “Riding a bike on the dock.”

The other
onlookers agreed with him, and one by one they wandered off to their barbecuing or their beer on ice or whatever it was that they’d planned to do. “Me, I’ve got fish to clean,” Phifer said grumpily before slapping off down the dock in his worn old boat shoes.

No one else came over to see what was going on, which told Slade something about how these Miami Beach people lived. Sure, Miami Beach folks lived a laid-back lifestyle, but in his opinion, they should have more concern for their neighbors. In Okeechobee City, this situation would have drawn a bunch of spectators, all of whom would feel inclined to give advice and, probably, help. But then, Okeechobee City was a small town. Miami Beach was not.

He turned his attention back to the woman in the water. She was floating amid the flotsam, including but not restricted to a tangle of dirty fishing line, and assorted fish parts. “Um, ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“Did you really say that you don’t have on anything but your underwear?” he asked.

“Do we have to keep talking about it?” she said.

He was sure that this was a rhetorical question, so he decided to change his tack. “You can’t stay in there forever.”

“Wait and see,” Karma said, and he thought she looked kind of comical in her determination. The key parts of her anatomy that he could see under the surface of the water looked nicely shaped and tan. Why they were tan, he could only speculate. Maybe she did a lot of topless sunbathing, like some of the models he and his companions of the night before had seen on South Beach yesterday. He tried not to think about Karma with no top on, but the image stuck in his mind.

As if she could read his thoughts, Karma hugged the life ring to her chest, covering up what was interesting him. “I’ll come out when it gets dark. I’ll slink away into the night. Look, why don’t you forget you ever met me? I’m sure you can find another matchmaker in this town.”

Slade had
no interest in shambling through the whole dating service sign-up process again. It was embarrassing enough to have to enlist help to find a wife in the first place. Besides, at the moment he was fascinated by Karma O’Connor, though he couldn’t quite figure out why. Mascara was running down her cheeks in rivulets, and she’d lost an earring. But with her hair plastered to her head like that so that he wasn’t distracted by her wealth of curls, he could better assess her beauty. And Karma was beautiful. Her complexion was pink-and-white and flawlessly textured; her nose was aristocratically narrow. She also had very white and very straight teeth. As a connoisseur of horseflesh, he knew you could tell a lot about an animal by its teeth.

This, however, was a woman. A woman in distress. He said as comfortingly as he could, “Don’t go anywhere. I’m going to get a robe and throw it down to you.”

Karma opened her mouth, then shut it abruptly just prior to being sloshed by the backwash from the propeller of a passing outboard. Before she took it into her head to object, Slade took off at a trot back toward
Toy Boat,
passing Phifer on the way.

“Fool woman. Had no business riding a bike on the dock,” grumbled Phifer, who by this time was tossing fish heads to a circling flock of gulls.

When Slade returned with one of Mack’s monogrammed white terry cloth robes, Karma had moved to the piling and had commenced clinging to a metal ring affixed to the post.

Slade bundled the robe into a neat ball. “I’m going to throw this down, and you can put it on. Then you can come out of the water,” Slade said.

Karma said something like “Hmmpf,” and he tossed the robe down. He tactfully turned his back as she put it on, but he heard her splashing around and it seemed to take her an overly long time to get into the robe. “Everything all right?” he called over his shoulder.

“You must realize,” she said, “that this thing has soaked up a ton of water. Yes, I’ve got my arms through
the sleeves, if that’s what you want to know, but I think it’s going to pull me under. Like an anchor.”

Slade turned around. She was suitably swathed, but she was now riding slightly lower in the water and her expression was anything but pleasant.

He knelt down on the dock, held his hand out to her. She grabbed it.

He supposed that it was some peculiar flight of fancy that tied in with his earlier fantasy about finding the right woman for him, but all the same, he could have sworn that a bolt of electricity flashed through their connected hands. It was so strong that he almost let go.

But he didn’t let go. He hung on for dear life even as he tried to sort this thing out. He concluded as he gave a mighty heave and yanked her up onto the dock that he had been mistaken. He couldn’t possibly have felt anything. He was out of his mind for thinking so. He wasn’t at all attracted to this woman. She wasn’t his type.

And yet when she stood dripping in front of him, her eyes searching his face, he did feel something, an emotion that he finally identified as relief. No harm had come to her and he was glad. That was all.

“I guess I can say goodbye to that bike,” Karma said ruefully.

“Well, maybe not. I’ll see if the marina manager can do anything about it,” he told her.

Karma shrugged, sending a veritable Niagara sluicing over his bare feet. “Come on,” he said, shaking his feet to rid them of water. “I reckon we can find you something warm and dry to wear.”

She walked glumly and wetly beside him back to
Toy Boat.
“I brought some things,” she said. “They’re at the bottom of the bay along with my bike.”

He stepped
down onto the boat first, handed her onto the deck. “What things did you bring?”

“Crackers. Spicy tofu-cilantro garlic spread. Things like that.”

Slade had never heard of spicy tofu-cilantro garlic spread, but it sounded downright unappetizing. He hadn’t thought this was a social call. Wasn’t it supposed to be business? To videotape him so she’d have something to show her female clients as a kind of sales pitch? He narrowed his eyes at her. She was now dripping all over the teak deck.

“Maybe you could, uh, wring yourself out,” he ventured.

She eyed the yards and yards of wet white terry cloth doubtfully. She made as if to wring out one side of the robe, but he quickly directed her toward the side of the boat. “Over the side,” he said helpfully. “If you don’t mind. These teak decks take a heap of maintenance, according to Mack.”

“Who’s Mack?”

“The cousin who belongs to this boat.”

“And where is he?”

“I dunno. He made it rich selling off his share of the family land, used the money to buy this boat and a lot of other things. I expect he and Renee are flying around in his Lear jet.”

“A Lear jet,” Karma repeated.

“Yeah, well, Renee hates flying in it.”

“That’s why it’s important to find the right wife,” she said. “That’s why you came to Rent-a-Yenta. So that you wouldn’t find someone who isn’t suited to you, that is.” She reached up and fluffed her hair, which was already drying in the breeze off the bay.

Slade thought it was cute that even now, sodden and miserable and annoyed about losing her bike and the tofu whatever, this woman could still inject a plug for her business into the conversation.

“Let’s go into the master stateroom. Mack’s wife’s
clothes are there. Maybe some will fit you.” He realized when she shot him a skeptical look out from under her eyelashes that this might sound like a come-on. “You can go in there alone. I’ll stay right here on deck like a gentleman.”