Tattered Innocence Read online

Jake barked a bitter laugh. “Corporate work sucked me dry. I should have gone into business with Gramps after college,” when I promised. The regret that chased him twenty-four-seven pitched him to his feet.

  Rachel had a knack for splitting him open, and he’d already said more than he wanted.

  Rachel took the hand Jake held out to pull her up from the pine shaded tip of the island. She stilled, locked onto Jake’s light brown eyes inches away. Short ringlets fell across his forehead. She unclenched her fingers from his hand with a start and bent to retrieve her shoes.

  Jake took off at a run. “Race you back to the dinghy!” Sand kicked up from the heel of his shoe—into her face.

  “Hey!” Rachel blinked, but the sand stayed lodged in her lower lid. She turned away from the wind and tugged at her eyelid—no use.

  She plodded across the sandbar, around the island, and up to the dinghy.

  “What took you so long?”

  “You kicked sand in my eye.”

  “Sorry—”

  She climbed into the stern. “I could drown in all that sympathy.” She hated being attracted to a guy who wasn’t interested. One who hadn’t paid enough attention to her looks since she came aboard to have formed an opinion about whether she was pretty or not.

  Ten minutes later she bent over the sink in the aft head splashing water into her eye. “Jake!”

  Silence.

  “Jacob Murray!” she yelled louder.

  Feet pummeled the deck at her shoulder. Jake popped into view. “What?” He breathed hard, climbing down the ladder into the cabin.

  “I’ve rinsed my eye over and over, and I can’t get the sand out.”

  “I thought you were dying in here.”

  Rachel poked out her bottom lip. She didn’t care if she sounded childish. “It’s your fault.”

  He tilted her chin down with his thumb. “Here.” He tugged first at her upper lid, then the lower. “Hmmm.”

  His breath smelled like apple.

  She studied the green rim around the brown of his irises.

  Don’t even go there! A couple of hours ago he said he wanted Gabrielle back.

  He leaned past her, his shoulder brushing her arm, and soaked a washcloth in the sink. “No wonder you can’t wash it out; you’ve got a sandbox down there.” He started to bring the washcloth toward her face.

  “What are you doing?”

  Jake huffed. “Cleaning out the sandbox.”

  Rachel jabbed her finger at the washcloth. “With that?”

  “Trust me.”

  Jake’s hand cradled Rachel’s jaw while he trolled the cloth through her lower lid the way he’d seen his mom do with his kid brother. But all he thought about was how her skin felt under the pads of his fingers. He wondered how her lips would taste if he kissed her.

  He dropped his hand from her face. “Rinse.”

  Rachel cupped water into her eye, raised her head from the sink, and blinked several times. “It’s fine. Thanks.” Water dripped off the ends of her lashes and her chin. Her lips pressed together as she stared at him.

  What was he thinking? He tore his gaze away from Rachel’s lips and slapped the washcloth into her hand. He’d convinced himself he’d never get over Gabs, and less than three months after she rejected him, he fixated on physical contact with Rachel.

  His eye caught on the silver heart that lay against her pink T-shirt below the collar. He’d seen it so many times he doubted she ever took it off. Had the guy she had gotten mixed up with given it to her? Another reason to keep his distance.

  He dredged the half-eaten apple from his pocket, jammed it into his mouth, and hiked up the ladder. Anything to get his head back on straight. He felt like he’d betrayed Gabrielle.

  After a final salute to the sea camp director, Jake threaded the Queen through the buoy-dotted inlet to open water.

  With a wary eye on Nigel at the wheel and Keenan manning a sheet line, Jake scooted onto the aft cabin with his rope splicing supplies.

  Rachel paused beside him. “You’re going to chew your bottom lip off. The boys can sail the Queen. You taught them well.”

  Jake shot her a yeah-right look.

  Rachel shook her head. “I can see you riding shotgun teaching your kids to drive. It won’t be pretty.”

  Jake grunted. Rachel longed for kids, but he didn’t want to think about them. If he and Gabrielle had stayed together, children would have been part of the deal. Dad’s death had carved a chunk out of him. He’d been eight, way too young to lose his father. Having kids of his own would have filled in the hole somehow.

  Rachel stepped up behind him on the cabin and jammed her knuckles methodically into the flesh across his back and into his shoulder blades.

  He tensed.

  “I used to do this for the swimmers before a race.”

  He sat mannequin-still, her thumbs rubbing flash fires of desire into his muscles.

  He wanted Gabs. Not Rachel. For an instant, as if his brain stuttered, he couldn’t remember Gabs’ face.

  “You’re not cooperating. You’re supposed to relax.”

  Jake shook off her hands. “You don’t know everything the boys could do wrong.”

  Rachel glared down at him. “Yes, I do.” She swatted him in the ribs and turned back to the jib she had been mending. “Fine. Give yourself a migraine.”

  Rachel didn’t know which skewered her more, that Jake might think she was coming on to him or that he wouldn’t let her take care of him. His rejection stabbed her like the thick needle she pierced through the sailcloth of the jib. She had only been trying to help him relax, not seduce him. She took care of people better than she did anything else.

  Wound too tight, Jake needed to relax. Laugh. Both her strong suits, but he didn’t want her help.

  Even Hall, who had always needed her, had inched away from needing her through his teen years. And she’d widened the gulf by stepping toward Bret.

  The coarse thread slipped from the eye of the needle, and she poked it back through, dragging a memory with it.

  Hall had been three, and Rachel nine, when the tip of his pinky had nearly been severed in the hinge end of a door. Granny wrapped his hand in a clean dishtowel and rushed them to Bert Fish Medical Center emergency room, then the hand surgery clinic in Daytona Beach.

  Hall’s sweaty body smashed against her in the back seat. “Hurts.” His eyes pled with her to make the pain go away.

  She patted him. “It will feel better soon. We’re almost there.”

  Hall still clung to her, no sign of the three doses of knock-out medicine taking effect, when the rumpled doctor entered the operating room.

  The doctor’s eyes darted at his watch, to Hall, then stopped on Granny. “I can’t give the little guy any more meds, and I’ve got a nurse out today. Can you hold him still while I reattach his finger?”

  Granny blanched.

  No one had told them Hall’s finger had actually been cut off.

  “I can do it,” Rachel piped up.

  “Rachel,” Hall said, his good hand tightening into a death grip around her wrist.

  Rachel pushed her shoulders back. “I can do it. Really. I delivered him—in the kitchen.”

  Granny nodded, reaching for the arm of a metal chair to steady herself. “It’s true.”

  The doctor let out a huff of frustration. “Okay, fine. Ma’am, why don’t you take a seat in the waiting room. Get a drink of water.”

  Granny squeezed Rachel’s hand and wobbled through the doorway.

  The doctor pinned her with a look. “You’re sure? I can’t have you fainting when I’m in the middle of stitching up your brother.”

  “I’m sure.” She jutted her chin toward him as if her stomach weren’t already churning with pictures of Hall’s delivery.

  Repulsed and fascinated at the same time, Rachel’s gaze darted from the deep gash at the quick of Hall’s nail to his frightened eyes. She held his free hand, turned her back on the doctor swabbing the finger oran
ge, and leaned across Hall. Her body shielded Hall from seeing the needles laid out on the tray and gave her leverage to hold him down if needed.

  “Hall, the doctor is going fix your finger, but it’s important that you keep very still till he’s finished. Okay?”

  Hall nodded.

  She smiled to reassure him, while underneath the word reattach marched back and forth. Behind her, she sensed rather than heard the doctor’s small movements under the canopy of breaths moving in and out of his lungs.

  “You’re doing great, Hall,” she whispered as if her voice would disturb the doctor’s concentration.

  Hall’s eyes flicked across her face, wide, trusting, filling her with the euphoria of being needed.

  The doctor cleared his throat and startled her. “How are you, sissy? Holding up?”

  What? Did he think she’d faint like Granny? “I’m fine.”

  Hall squirmed, and she pressed her ribs against him. “Just a little longer. Think about riding your Big Wheel down to the corner. We’ll do that when we get home.” Love for him washed over her, and she wanted to feel like this always.

  She kept Hall distracted by reciting The Cat In the Hat from the arsenal of books she’d memorized before her dyslexia diagnosis.

  “Okay, that does it.” The doctor’s voice seemed to bellow over hers.

  Rachel stood up straight and beamed at Hall. “All fixed.” She spun around and saw that the doctor had casted Hall’s arm to the elbow. Her eyes widened.

  The doctor smiled. “Just so he doesn’t disturb the finger. Good job, sissy.” He shook her hand as if she were an adult, shooting warm feelings in every direction.

  Rachel sighed, the carbonation of memory bursting and dying, as she glanced at Jake yanking rope through a pulley. Tomorrow she’d track down Hall. They were long overdue for a heart-to-heart.

  Rachel kicked a pine cone with the toe of her sneaker. It tumbled across her brother’s path on the church camp athletic field. She darted an uneasy glance at him.

  Hall scooped the cone up and drop-kicked it fifteen feet onto the laundry steps. “So, what-up? I haven’t seen you all summer, then you text you’re stopping by.” His voice was subdued, so unlike Hall’s extrovert personality.

  Rachel sank down onto the weathered board steps of the laundry feeling like she wore a T-shirt with I had sex with Bret Rustin silk screened across the front. “A big blow last week made me think about what’s important.”

  Hall sat on the top step, so she had to twist and look up to see him. He quirked a brow, his blue eyes somber, intense.

  “You. You’re important to me,” she said.

  Until Bret, Hall had been the most important person in her life. Taking care of him had given her purpose. She’d made a point of seeing Hall every day at the high school, but when things heated up with Bret, she saw her brother less and less, afraid he’d sense what was going on.

  Hall dropped down beside her. “What’s really up?”

  His gaze bore into her and she chewed on her bottom lip. Did he find out somehow? Small town. Small school. Hall’s school.

  Behind her, washing machines thumped, a button or zipper clinked in a dryer every few seconds. She glanced over her shoulder through the open door into the empty room. She dragged in a breath. The fresh scent of dryer sheets contrasted with her sin. “I did something I’m not proud of, something I don’t want to tell you about.”

  He stared at her, his expression unreadable. “And you’re here because?”

  “It’s the reason I’ve stayed away. Even last semester when I was still working at the school, I backed away from you. I’m sorry.”

  Hall gathered a handful of pine needles off the porch and tossed them onto the ground. “Sorry for what you did or because you’ve been a stranger?

  “Both,” she blurted. “I asked God to forgive me. I quit…doing things.”

  Hall blew out a long sigh and dropped the remaining pine needles to the ground. The tightness around his mouth softened a fraction. “Good.”

  “You’ve always looked up to me. I didn’t want to give up that position.

  “Then, you shouldn’t—never mind. It doesn’t matter now.” He stood. “I have to get back to my cabin. The kids will be coming back from arts and crafts.”

  He knew. He had to know. She and Bret had been so careful. How did it get out? She pushed up off the step and reached for Hall’s arm. “Hall, I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?”

  Hall pulled away. “You don’t even know what you’re apologizing for. Look, I don’t have time to get into this now.”

  Pain seared through her ribs and knifed her stomach. She and Hall had never been separated like this. And it was her fault. “Then tell me what I need to apologize for.”

  Hall’s jaw clenched as he stared at her. “Things you do affect other people. You could have thought about how this was my senior year. How gossip flies around this town. You think I liked overhearing in the locker room that my sister is a ho?”

  Rachel clutched her stomach and sucked in a breath.

  “A married man—with kids. What were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t.” The croak came from the back of her throat. She folded her arms and held his gaze. She was the older sibling and she’d act like it. “Anything else I need to apologize for?”

  “You’re the spiritual one. Made me memorize Bible verses. Told me to pray when I hit a rough patch. Were you bogus?”

  “No! You know I wasn’t.” Her fingers dug into the flesh of her arms. “Will you forgive me for embarrassing you in front of your friends at school—for letting you down?”

  Hall stared hard at her.

  On the far side of the athletic field, kids moved in clumps, taller counselors dotting the groups. Shouts and laughter filtered across the grass.

  Hall shook his head. “I gotta go.” He turned away from her and took a step.

  “I quit seeing him in May.”

  Hall paused, then dug his hands into his pockets and kept walking.

  Rachel bent over a tray, arranging cold cuts for this afternoon’s cruise, asking herself why Hall hadn’t come to her for the truth. The oscillating fan she’d parked in the cockpit blew puffs of heavy, eighty-seven-degree air at her. She mopped her forehead with the crook of her arm and glanced across the finger pier at Leaf napping in a muscle shirt and bike shorts under the shade of his Bimini.

  Would she have let things go as far as they did with Bret if she’d known how Hall would be hurt? Usually, he wasn’t a grudge holder, but who knew how long he’d been tormented by the gossip. Had Hall defended her pathetic honor with his fists? He’d obviously believed the rumors.

  God had forgiven her. He sat beside her in time out. He loved her. She was going to get through this.

  Movement on the finger pier caught her eye, and her gaze panned upward. Almost-colorless angel hair curled on muscular legs. Tanned hands slid into the pockets of Dockers shorts, belted and topped with a snug polo. A nearly-buzzed head topped milky blue eyes leveled at her.

  Her breath caught in her throat. Blood siphoned from her face and she folded her arms over the clench in her stomach.

  Bret.

  Chapter 11

  The storm had shredded the mainsail and Jake’s resistance to Rachel. He cranked open his window, downed the last two inches of cold coffee from the Circle K cup, and tried to tear his mind away from her.

  He eased off I-95 onto the New Smyrna Beach exit ramp. The back hatch window thumped against the protruding sail. Thank God he’d bagged the used sail from Second Wind Sails in Fort Lauderdale for under a thousand dollars.

  Rachel was another matter altogether. Ever since she cried in his arms he’d been putting out brushfires of desire. Well, he’d stop-drop-and-rolled more than once, and he had a list of reasons to keep it up.

  For starters, he wasn’t doing anything to screw up their working relationship. Rachel was into some toxic guy. And he still felt singed from Gabs. If he couldn’t have the woman
he loved, maybe he’d look for a girl from her world.

  He could almost see Gramps shaking his head, a smirk on his lips. “See how that works for you, boy,” he would have said.

  Jake wheeled into a marina parking slot and slammed the Explorer door a little too hard.

  Rachel squinted at Bret from under the tarp, her breath coming in soft gasps.

  “Hello, Rachel.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Bret took the gangplank in two strides. “I couldn’t get you out of my head.” He stepped over the coaming into the cockpit—too close—and dropped his duffle on the bench.

  Rachel’s mind reeled; her stomach flopped like a fish on a cleaning table. “You’re sailing with us?”

  The back of his fingers trailed across her cheek. “Yes, I am.”

  She jerked away from the current that ricocheted between them. “And you told Sheri what?”

  His gaze fell to his tennis shoes, and his ears tinged pink. “Going diving with the guys.”

  He sat across from her, propping his forearms on his knees. His eyes lasered into hers. “You can’t know how much I’ve thought about you.”

  “You could have found me.” Rachel bit her lip and broke away from his gaze. Across the finger pier, Leaf dozed in his cockpit slumped against the cabin.

  “Obviously.”

  “Three months too late.” Great. Now he knew she’d wanted him to come after her.

  His eyebrows lifted. “You still care.”

  Not if someone had asked her fifteen minutes ago. Oh, God, help me. Please.

  Bret reached out and tugged on the chain around her neck until she felt the heart pull away from her skin and slip out over the neck of her T-shirt.

  Her skin tingled, flashing anger through her. She didn’t want to respond to him, didn’t want him to know she still wore his locket.

  The thumping of wheels on the dock caught her attention.

  Jake parked the dock master’s golf cart at the Queen’s bow and climbed out. He grunted as he strained to haul the sail from the bed of the cart.