“Yeah, that would be great, Caroline,” he replied quietly.
His eyes flickered nervously to Sebastian who was acting like a sulky teenager. Okay, maybe he wasn’t acting – he was a sulky teenager. I sighed. He was spoiling our lovely day: it wasn’t Ches’s fault that he’d turned up at the same beach as us. We should just be thankful it was Ches and not any other of his surfing buddies.
Over lunch, relations began to thaw. Sebastian stopped trying to show off, and Ches began to relax. Food was proving to be a universal panacea for men’s ill tempers. I was relieved: the last thing I wanted to do was come between Sebastian and his best friend. And, if things went badly, he’d need all the friends he could get. I shivered at the thought.
After our increasingly enjoyable picnic, Sebastian insisted on returning my board and shortie to the surf shack, and I insisted that he ride to the country club in the van with Ches.
“I’ll see you there soon enough,” I pointed out, cutting off his protest. “Please, tesoro!”
He kissed me hungrily and this time I knew it wasn’t an act. When we could bear to stop, he leaned his forehead against mine.
“Bye, Caro,” he said softly.
I kissed him quickly on the lips and watched him climb into Ches’s van.
He was right about one thing: we were always saying goodbye.
When I arrived at the country club, my grim mood turned into something much darker. A girl in a very skimpy bikini was lying on a sun lounger by the pool.
Brenda fucking Wiseman.
Chapter 15
Brenda looked up and frowned as I settled myself at a table under a sun umbrella and fired up the laptop.
It was clear from her confused expression that she recognized me, she just couldn’t remember from where. I didn’t have any plans on helping her out with that: the less she connected me with Sebastian, the happier I’d be. In fact, the smart thing to do would be to pack up and go home for that very reason.
Even though I’d only just arrived, I should leave: maybe if I could just pretend that I’d forgotten something, I could go without drawing too much attention.
Quietly, I closed the laptop’s lid and slipped it into my shoulder bag even though the poor machine was still grumbling through its start-up routine. I stood up to go but I was ten damn seconds too late. Sebastian was walking towards me in his country club uniform, a huge smile on his face. You would have thought he hadn’t seen me in days, not just a few minutes. I felt exactly the same.
I flicked my eyes towards Brenda then stared at the floor, but he didn’t seem to be able to read my mind, which, at that precise moment, was extremely inconvenient of him.
“Hi!” he said, happily. Then he frowned. “Are you going somewhere?”
I was like a deer caught in headlights from the juggernaut that was Brenda Wiseman – and I was about to get squashed flat. Her eyes swiveled towards us and, from the look on her face, I was pretty darned certain that she had super-powers, probably X-ray vision, the way she was ogling his body.
“Hey, Seb!” she said brightly. “Oh, I love your uniform! It’s, like, so cute!”
Her hysterical cheerleader whine made me want to hold her head in the pool’s deep end and watch until her pedicured feet kicked out a tarantella.
Sebastian’s expression morphed from happy to irritated and then to slightly worried. He was right to be concerned: his acting abilities were even worse than mine. The two of us being in the proximity of the preternaturally observant Brenda, was a sure recipe for disaster. Possibly hers, as I might be forced to rip her tongue out of her head and feed it to the nearest tiger shark as bait.
I still thought that my best plan was to exit stage left at a convenient moment, although that meant leaving Sebastian in the clutches of the harpy. Unobtrusively, I sank back down in my seat and retrieved the confused laptop from my bag.