Somewhere on St. Thomas: A Somewhere Series Romance (25 page)

After Dad.

I shut my eyes because the grief is back, like a sickness in my bones, draining and cold as I remember my father’s dead ashes on the ocean and nothingness, and I nod and can’t even smile.

Chapter 23

Rafe

It takes ten days to get to Bermuda if all goes well sailing and five more to get to Saint Thomas. A week into the voyage, we’re making good time. The crew and I are glad to be back on the ocean after five years of nothing but summer trips, and though most of them have families and lives now, scattered across the States, they dropped everything to come when I called. Freddie, with his big, bald head, who runs our galley; Sven, my right hand, who helps me with navigation; Fitz, an all-around sailor but who’s in charge of monitoring our lines and sails on this voyage; and Ronnie, who is an engineer in his other life and the official mechanic for the
Maid
; plus an assortment of other hands who are new to me.

We’re busy all day, keeping the
Maid
shipshape, on course, and moving steady, and so far we’re ahead and the seas have been good.

The only person without a real role is Ruby. She sits in a deck chair at the bow of the
Maid
for hours at a time, watching the horizon.

I’m used to a different Ruby. Always on the go, she is usually bubbly and talkative, or serious when she’s reading or studying. But whatever she’s doing, it’s a hundred percent. Now she stares at the far horizon, wrapped in a blanket from the cabin, her expression empty.

I am at a loss as to how to help her. All the guys are worried about how she’s acting, trying to think of ways to cheer her up. We’ve made love a couple more times since the voyage started, but it certainly hasn’t been the sex marathon I’d been hoping for. Even though being with me seems to help get her mind off her loss for a little while, it always comes back, and she hasn’t initiated anything with me.

Sven asked her to play chess, which she usually loves, but she said “maybe later” and never took him up on it. Fitz tried to get her fishing, but she lost interest after five minutes. None of that is like the Ruby we know.

This morning I bring her a cup of hot chocolate that Freddie made for her in the galley. Freddie keeps cooking her little special things in the galley and asking me to take them to her; he always fixes me one, too, as if whatever it is was my idea.

Today is brisk and there’s a feeling of some far-off northern storm in the air, and I’m glad of the rich, steaming chocolate to warm my hands if nothing else. I take it to her in her usual spot at the bow, and I pull up another low webbed chair to sit in beside her. Today she has a journal open on her lap. It’s new, and I hope it’s a good sign.

“Freddie made you some chocolate.” I hand it to her so there’s no argument about whether she wants it or not. She hasn’t been eating much lately either, and I see the sharp wing of her collarbone in the low neck of her shirt. She takes the chocolate.

“Freddie’s so sweet,” she says absently.

I pull part of her blanket over my legs. The wind feels like it’s cutting through my clothes, but I love it out here. The sky and ocean are a broad sweep, as if we sail right into a universe that’s all shades of blue. There’s a tiny glint of flying fish leaping across the surface ahead of us. I’m so used to the endless rocking motion now that it doesn’t even register consciously, and won’t until we’re on land again and I feel it as something I miss.

“You really love it out here, don’t you?” Ruby looks at me, her white fingers wrapped around the mug. Her eyes are a changeable green; today they seem almost turquoise, as if they’ve picked up blue from the ocean.

“Yeah, I do.”

“Has it been hard for you, being a landlubber with me?” She’s been in school the last five years, and we’ve been living in one of our Boston houses, just taking the boat out for short runs in the summer.

“It was time for me to give the businesses attention. It’s been good.” I don’t answer her directly, because the truth is, I have missed the ocean. When I met her, I was at the end of three years of sailing around the world. After we got married, all that ended abruptly—but it was good timing. I don’t regret it. She had college, and it was time for me to pick up the reins of the businesses I’d inherited.

“But you want to be out here more.” She said it as a statement, and her small hand, warm from the chocolate mug, takes mine. She tucks it under the blanket, in her lap.

I’m aware of how close my hand is to her box of secrets, but I just hold her fingers, relishing the fact that she’s reached out to me.

“Tell me more about your dad,” I say. I know she needs to talk about him to begin to let go of the pain inside. “You know I always meant for us to have a whole summer with your family in the Virgin Islands.”

“I know. You always said that, but we never took the time.” She sighs, sips the chocolate. “You knew him pretty well.” I worked for Peter and Kate for a whole season in their vacation-rental management company before Ruby and I married. I’d liked and respected them, my inappropriate attraction to their daughter aside.

“I did know him a bit, but not what it was like having Peter as a dad.” I press her a little.

She doesn’t answer for a long time. The wind fans her hair back, and I see her skin’s begun to go that tender golden shade it picks up, like the beginning of toasting a marshmallow. She has new freckles on her arms.

“Dad was one of those parents who always had time for you. Whatever I had to tell him or show him, he’d stop whatever he was doing to give me his full attention.” Ruby sips, her eyes on the horizon. “He was so clear about everything—what was right, what was wrong. I feel like I’m not sure about anything anymore without him here.”

I squeeze her hand. “Do you think he’d want you to feel that way?”

“No. I know he’d say I’d put him in the place of God, and he was never anything but a guy who tried to live the truth as he understood it.”

The fact that Peter Michaels had been a career missionary was definitely something to do with this definiteness Ruby referred to; I had always been looser in my interpretations of things, but Peter and I had understood each other.

“We never got to have that summer with them. And even though you tried to fly them out to visit us, he never accepted your help.” She was still ticking over all the coulda, woulda, shouldas. I know all about that. My parents died when I was close to her age, and it had thrown me so far off my game, I’d farmed out the businesses and taken to the sea for three years.

I hope it isn’t going to take Ruby so long to grieve the loss of her father, but having been through it myself, I know it might be a while.

“It was what it was, and it will be what it is,” I say, as much to myself as to her.

As suddenly, as if conjured, dolphins erupt around the bow. These are little dark gray spinner dolphins, and they begin water acrobatics as they surf the bow wave, leaping and flipping, spinning as their name implies.

“Oh!” Ruby exclaims, and gets out of her chair. She goes to lie on her belly as far out on the bowsprit as she can, and stretched out there, her red hair flying like a flag, she reminds me of a figurehead.

Ruby loves dolphins. She told me once she thought they were her spirit animal. I know they’ll do much more to cheer her up than reminiscing about her dad.

I stand up, and Sven catches my eye at the cockpit and waves me back to take a look at something.

His brow is knit with worry. “I know we’re not supposed to have heavy weather in September, but there’s a hurricane forming about two hundred miles from us, according to the weather report.”

“How close are we to Bermuda?”

“Still a couple of days out.”

“Let’s put up all the sails and see if we can outrun it.”

“Aye, Skipper.” Sven got on the PA that piped into the interior of the ship. “All hands on deck. Putting up sail to get ahead of a storm. Check with me for assignments.”

I glance up at the bow. Ruby is still lying on the bowsprit, mesmerized by the dolphins below. Let her enjoy them as long as she can.

A hurricane is coming, and we are in its way.

Chapter 24

Ruby

I’ve been out on the deck for a lot longer than usual without a hat. I’ve been doing a little tanning on the voyage, just so I don’t get sunburned so badly when we are back in Saint Thomas, but I can feel my nose getting hot. I can’t stop watching the dolphins.

Dolphins and I have always had a special bond. Growing up on Saint Thomas, I’d go swimming in the ocean and they’d appear, circling around, leaping over me, even letting me touch them a couple of memorable times.

Now I feel them almost trying to tell me something, send me some sort of reassurance. I could swear some of them are leaping up so we can lock eyes with each other. One is a little bigger, and she has a scar on her sleek, gray leather back. She catches my eye, and I hear something in my mind.
“Go fast.”

Did she send me a message? I must be imagining things.

I realize there’s a lot more activity than usual going on behind me.

Rafe and the crew were putting up all the sails. Rafe has tried to teach me all the names and functions of the sails, but I’ve never bothered to memorize them. The front little one is going up, the big main one is being let out, and they’ve even hoisted the spinnaker, a huge balloon-like sail. It seems like they’ve adjusted the heading, too, so we are running downwind.

I look around, but I can’t see anything to be concerned about. The sun shines bright, poufy popcorn clouds dot the horizon, and the sea is calm but for whitecaps generated by the moderate twenty-knot breeze. I am getting better at judging the wind speed, at least, and I don’t usually start getting seasick until it’s around thirty knots.

I say goodbye to the dolphins and scramble backward to see what’s going on.

Rafe’s got the tiller. He’s wearing a nylon ball cap, as much to hold down his shoulder-length hair as for sun protection. Even after he came back to his companies and put on a suit, he refused to cut his long blond-streaked hair. “It’s my rebellion,” he said. “I won’t be a corporate stooge even if I have to go to board meetings.”

I love him for that rebellious streak. I have a little rebellion in me, too—it’s what made me take a chance and get married at a ridiculously young age.

He’s not wearing sunglasses at the moment, and his cobalt eyes are sharp on the horizon, fans of sun creases setting off those eyes. I can see we’re going a hell of a lot faster than before, and the motion of the
Maid
is brisk and efficient as her aluminum hull, tapered for speed, slices the water. The sea peels up and flies back around us, and spray hits my face.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“We’re trying to outrun a storm. Once it hits, I want you to stay below. It’s the safest place for you. Report to Freddie and see what help he needs securing everything belowdecks.”

“Aye, aye, Captain,” I say, and when he glances at me, we both grin at the inside joke.

Sometimes I address his equipment that way in playful fun, and I can see the memory of it turning him on even at this inappropriate moment. I waggle my tongue at him and take off, knowing I distract him, and none of us need that during pre-storm prep.

As I go down to the galley level, I realize I’m apprehensive. I’ve never been through a storm on the
Maid
before, and the dolphin told me to “go fast.” This is going to be a big one.

I’m nervous, but I’m also excited. We have a great ship, an experienced crew, and the fog that’s surrounded me since Dad died seems to be lifting with this new situation.

Freddie has his cupboards open. He keeps his supplies in zippered bags for the most part, but he is pulling up elastic nets inside the cupboards and tucking everything inside so they don’t move.

“Captain told me to report to you to help stow everything belowdecks. Thanks for the chocolate; it was delicious.”

“Good. I need the help. Go do the heads and bedrooms. We have these security nets inside the cupboards and slots for everything, but we’ve been getting lazy with how mellow our trips have been.”

“How bad of a storm do you think this is?” I ask, handing him some items he had piled on the floor.

“I believe the word ‘hurricane’ was mentioned. It’s still two hundred miles away, so we have a good chance of outrunning it. The captain and Sven have done this route and this scenario before. It’ll be a fun story you can tell your grandkids.”

“Hope so,” I say, and go to the crew’s head. Shaving cream and a bottle of shampoo are already rolling around in the shower just from the increased motion of the ship, and I get busy stowing, tucking, and securing.

A story for our grandchildren
. Now, that would be something, I think, tucking a bungee cord around the cleaning supplies under the sink.

And then it hits me.

I stopped taking the pill after I heard the news about Dad. Just clean forgot. And then Rafe and I didn’t do it for a month. And now we had, not once but several times, and I hadn’t even remembered to bring my pills when I’d packed for the trip.

There is a chance I might be pregnant even now.

“Oh damn,” I mutter, rocking back on my heels. “Oh boy.”