The Runaway Heiress

Chapter 16: Almost

The morning after the storm, Port Delmar smelled like salt and pine and second chances, and Elena woke with the memory of the dance pressed behind her eyes like a bruise she kept touching on purpose.

Gus was in a fine mood — power back, chowder on for Sunday, the sun doing its best to pretend the night before had been nothing. Elena worked the breakfast rush on autopilot, refilling coffee she couldn't remember pouring, and every time the bell over the door jangled she looked up too fast and then pretended she hadn't.

Rhys didn't come in for breakfast.

He was down at the marina. Tessa told her that, sliding into her usual booth at eleven with her sunglasses pushed into her hair and a knowing look Elena wanted to throttle. "He's got the Callahan — no, somebody's boat pulled out of the water with a busted prop," Tessa said, and Elena's stomach did a small traitorous flip at just the mention of his name. "Rhys has been down there since dawn, apparently. Didn't even come up for coffee. Suspicious behavior, if you ask me. Very 'man avoiding a woman he danced with in the dark.'"

"I didn't tell you that," Elena said.

"You didn't have to, sweetheart. It's written all over you in candlelight."

"He fixes boats," Elena said. "It's what he does."

"Mm." Tessa ordered pie. "And what is it you do, exactly, around him? Besides look like a woman deciding whether to jump."

"I dance with him in the dark," Elena said before she could stop herself, and Tessa's eyebrows went up so high they nearly left the room.

By two o'clock she couldn't stand it anymore. She told Gus she was taking her break, and Gus took one look at her face and said, "Take the afternoon, kid. The lunch rush is dead and you're useless anyway," which was Gus for I see everything and I'm choosing pie over commentary. She walked down to the marina with her apron still tied on, the sun hot on her shoulders, the harbor glittering like it hadn't spent the night trying to tear the town apart.

And found him under the hull of a sailboat on the repair slip, all shoulders and concentration, a wrench in one hand and a streak of grease along his jaw that made her want to do something deeply inadvisable.

The sight of him — sleeves rolled, forearms corded, completely absorbed in his work — did something to her chest that the dance the night before had only started. This was Rhys Cole as Port Delmar knew him: the man who fixed what the sea broke. Her fingers found the sea-glass necklace, cool against her collarbone, and she held it a moment. Run toward, not away. She was done standing still.

"Rhys," she said.

He slid out from under the boat and just looked at her for a long moment, the wrench hanging forgotten in his hand, and the air between them went strange and charged the way it had gone in the diner the night before — like the exact second before lightning.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey." Elena twisted the sea-glass necklace around her finger. Run toward, not away. She was so tired of being afraid of this. "Last night—"

"Yeah," he said, and stood up, and took a step closer, and then another, until she was backed against the piling with the whole marina bright and ordinary around them and nothing ordinary about any of it. "I've been thinking about last night."

"Me too," she whispered.

His hand came up — not to her face, not quite, hovering near her jaw like he wasn't sure he was allowed — and Elena leaned into it, a fraction, an invitation, and his thumb brushed her cheekbone and she forgot how breathing worked. His eyes dropped to her mouth. Hers did the same to his. The distance between them closed to nothing, to the width of a held breath, to the space where almost becomes yes—

The wrench hit the concrete with a sound like the world ending.

It clattered, bounced, spun, rang out against the hull like a bell, and Rhys jerked back with a startled laugh that turned into Elena's laugh, helpless and shaking, both of them staring at the wrench lying between them like an accusation.

"I dropped —" he said. "It just —"

"Your hands were busy," Elena said, and then covered her face because she couldn't believe she'd said that, and his laugh went warm and low and wrecked.

"God, Elena." He leaned his forehead against the piling beside her head, close but not touching, and she could feel the heat coming off him. "I'm trying to be a gentleman about this."

"Stop," she said, laughing, crying a little, not sure which. "Please, stop trying."

He turned his head and looked at her, and the laughter faded out of both of them, and the almost was still there — unbearable, exquisite, stretched between them like a wire humming in the wind. He was a breath away. A heartbeat away. Everything in her said yes, and everything in him said yes, and the wrench lay forgotten on the concrete, and the sailboat creaked on its blocks, and the gulls went on arguing over nothing.

"Soon," Rhys said quietly, and it wasn't a promise so much as a confession. "Elena. Soon."

"Is that a threat or a promise?" she asked, breathless.

"Both," he said, and stepped back, and picked up his wrench, and grinned at her with grease on his jaw and her whole heart in his hands.

Elena laughed — couldn't help it, the laughter just bubbled out of the wreckage of the moment — and reached up and wiped the grease from his jaw with her thumb, slow, deliberate, her eyes on his the whole time. His breath caught. The air went strange again, instantly, like neither of them had learned a thing.

"You missed a spot," she whispered.

"Elena Voss," he said, low and warning and wanting all at once, "you are going to be the end of me."

"Maybe," she said, "that's the point."

She walked back up the hill to the diner with the sun on her face and her pulse in her throat, past the gallery where her mother's painting waited half-restored in the afternoon light, past the window where the lighthouse stood white against the sky — and she knew, with a certainty that settled into her bones like sunlight, that it was only a matter of time.