Page 16 of Sucker For You

Wes craned his chin over his shoulder to gauge her pause. A muscle pulsed in his cheek. A patchy flush crept along his neck. “Right, just—do my calves? If you can bring another bucket of seawater in a minute, I’ll get the rest.”

“Yes.” She squatted, ducked her head. Tried to suppress her tingle of awareness that he was watching her.

“Thanks.” Because he didn’t turn back to face the shower nozzle. Instead, lower lip gripped between his teeth, he observed her while she carded his legs, before clearing his throat. Maybe he was only trying to distract himself from the pain, but he nodded at her plastic and said, “You’re Canadian?”

She shoved the card into the rear pocket of her trousers, beside her phone. The device was vibrating with an incoming call, the fourth since seven o’clock this morning. She didn’t look at the caller ID. She already knew.

Chase.

She let the phone buzz itself to stillness.

Wes’s notched eyebrow cocked.

She escaped his scrutiny into the kitchen to retrieve a bottle of vinegar. She could ignore her fiancé’s attempts to contact her for another few minutes or even an hour, while she analyzed her options—what options, though?—and decided how to respond appropriately to him. Couldn’t she? While she determined how to keep her schedule intact without opening herself to suspicion, that maybe her reasons for marrying Dr. Chase Meyer Jr. weren’t entirely disinterested. . . But for the moment, she had to return to the bathroom’s medicine cabinet over the sink to extract tweezers and cotton balls for a watchful Wes. She’d checked those shelves last night. She always checked. She stepped back into the shower and got to work with the pincers, plucking out the last embedded jellyfish follicles from his shoulders.

Focus.

“I’ve dived off the coast of western Canada,” he said. “Vancouver, Barkley Sound, Bowyer Island, and Porteau Cove, plus the Tugboat 100 wreck. The area’s got a dense marine ecosystem. Harbor seals, nudibranchs, and I even saw a giantPacific octopus. Jellyfish, too. But I didn’t get stung, so. . .Um—have you ever visited? Vancouver or British Columbia?”

British Columbia?

Her breath caught with a hiss through her teeth.

“Isabel, you’re going to live with these people now, instead of in the government home. You’ll like this better. Say hello.”

“. . . hello.”

She hadn’t visited Vancouver. She’d grown up there.

“She’s pretty quiet.”

“Children with backgrounds like hers often are.”

“How sad. Was she a permanent ward of the government?”

“Yes. But the federal homes have been difficult for her. She might do better in a normal family situation. Isabel, shake this nice woman’s hand.”

“We don’t bite, sweetie.”

“Don’t be rude, Isabel.”

“There, that wasn’t so bad. Why don’t you come meet the other children? You’ll share a bunk bed with our daughter, and we also have two boys and a baby. You’ll like living here with us, won’t you?”

“Answer the question, Isabel.”

“Y-yes.”

“Not a big talker. Is she developmentally slow?”

“Not that we’ve observed. But I recommend establishing a relationship with a counselor at her new school soon, and monitoring her sleep.”

“Why? What’s wrong with her?”

Then, later, huddling in a tub with her hair being combed for lice—having refused the other children’s roughhousing to sit alone and study a pamphlet of too-large words about her transition from permanent ward of the Canadian government to trial adoptee—young voices whispered under the bathroom door:

“She’s a weirdo.”

“Freak—”