Right Place, Wrong Time (11 page)

He was relieved to have recognized that essential fact before it was too late. He wished Kim could accept the truth and share his relief. But she’d really, really wanted him to buy her a ring, duty-free.

She’d just have to come to terms with the reality that marriage, commitment, the whole till-death-do-us-part thing was never duty-free.

W
HEN THEY ARRIVED
back at Palm Point, Alicia wanted to watch TV. So, unfortunately, did Kim. “I am not going to shut myself up in the bedroom,” she said imperiously, once she’d returned to the living room after dumping all her purchases in her and Ethan’s bedroom. “We’re paying just as much as
they’re
paying for this apartment.”

Everyone was paying zero for the apartment, but Gina didn’t mention that. The fact was, her watch read nine-fifteen, and no show appropriate to a seven-year-old would be on at that hour anyway. Tugging Alicia away from the television set, she said, “How about let’s let Kim watch TV and I’ll polish your nails for you?”

“With my new nail polish?”

“With whichever of your three new nail polishes you want.”

The promise of a manicure was enough to entice Alicia. She raced eagerly down the hall ahead of Gina, ceding the television to Kim.

Gina and Alicia ended up in the bathroom, which wasn’t huge to begin with but seemed even smaller with the two of them in it. It contained what Gina needed, though: bright lighting, water and hard surfaces to lean on. Since she hadn’t brought any bubble bath to St. Thomas, she improvised, fetching a large bowl and some
liquid dishwashing soap from the kitchen and creating a warm pool of suds for Alicia to soak her hands in.

“I want the polish that turns from purple to blue,” Alicia requested. “On my toes, too, okay?”

“Claws and paws,” Gina confirmed. “You’re getting the works. You were such a good girl today! I was getting cranky by the end, but you were a champ. Didn’t you feel tired?”

“No,” Alicia said, settling herself on the floor and removing her sandals. “Shopping’s fun.” She looked much more comfortable than Gina felt on the unyielding tiles. The bathroom was humid, the air tinged with a vaguely familiar scent.

Ethan’s shampoo, she identified it. She hadn’t been aware of sniffing his hair—but damn it, she couldn’t help noticing things about him. Like the way his eyes had constantly sought hers during dinner, and the way his mouth had twitched as though he was struggling not to smile while she ran old man Hamilton through the wringer. Like the way he’d stabbed his food with his fork, and the way he’d held his wineglass. Like the way he’d helped her fit the seat belt around both Ali and her, his hands smoothing the band over her hip…and the scent of his hair.

Alicia appeared as fixated on shopping as Gina was fixated on Ethan—and neither was a healthy fixation. “I liked the way the stores smelled,” her niece babbled. “Except that store with the straw hats in it. But the other stores—some of them smelled like perfume. Remember the store that had all that crystal in it, and there were rainbows in all the glasses? It smelled like perfume. Maybe I should’ve gotten perfume for Mommy.”

Perfume was the last thing Ramona needed right now—or maybe it was the second-to-last thing, the last
thing being a shirt that changed color in the sunlight. “Perfume can be hard to buy for other people,” Gina told her as she pulled the cuticle stick from her manicure travel kit and nudged Alicia’s cuticles. “Sometimes a perfume smells good in the bottle, but then it doesn’t smell good on the person.”

“That’s silly!” Alicia giggled.

“No, it’s true. A perfume that smells just fine on one person will smell bad on another. It has to do with body chemistry.”

Through the closed door, she heard muffled voices. Kim and Ethan, arguing. “I bet Ethan would know about chemistry,” Alicia said. “He’s so smart.”

“I’m smart, too,” Gina boasted, although her knowledge of chemistry was pretty much limited to paints, dyes and solvents. She dried Alicia’s hands off, then smoothed her short nails with a file, more for show than because they needed to be shaped.

Another swell of voices rose from the living room again. The words were muffled and muddled, for which Gina was grateful. She didn’t want to hear what Ethan and Kim were quarreling about—especially if their fight concerned Gina’s needling of Kim’s father throughout dinner, and Ethan’s tacit encouragement of her.

“They don’t like each other very much, do they?” Alicia said in a deafeningly loud whisper that echoed off the glossy tile walls.

“I think,” Gina whispered more softly, “they’re just having some problems.”

“Like Mommy and Daddy?”

Gina busied herself shaking the bottle of purple nail enamel. Ramona and Jack were having some problems the way Placido Domingo had some voice. But she wasn’t going to tell Alicia that now. She wasn’t going
to spoil Alicia’s manicure—or her vacation. “Your parents are married,” she noted. “Ethan and Kim aren’t.”

“I don’t think they should get married,” Alicia said somberly. “I think Ethan should marry you.”

“Me?” Gina laughed, but for some reason her laughter got stuck in the vicinity of her diaphragm. “Ethan and I have nothing in common.”

“You both like to snorkel,” Alicia pointed out.

“So do you. Why don’t you marry him?”

“I’m too young.” Alicia’s frown conveyed that she considered her aunt extremely foolish even to suggest such a thing. “But you’re old. You should marry him.”

“I don’t want to.” Gina tried to force another laugh, but it wouldn’t come. She busied herself dabbing polish onto Alicia’s nails, one finger at a time.

“Why not? I bet he’s rich.”

“See? There you go—he and I have nothing in common. He’s rich and I’m not. Now, hold that hand flat and don’t move it. Give the polish a chance to dry.”

Alicia laid her hand carefully on her knee and extended her other hand to Gina. “If you married him, you’d be rich, too.”

“Why are you so eager to marry me off?” Gina asked, pretending indignation. “I like my life fine the way it is. I don’t have any room in it for a husband. I don’t have any room in my apartment for a husband, either.”

“You could get a bigger apartment,” Alicia suggested.

“Big apartments are too expensive.”

“If you married Ethan, you’d be rich.”

Gina painted a final dot of polish onto Alicia’s pinkie, then capped the bottle. “Let them dry, and then I’ll do a second coat,” she instructed Alicia, then leaned back
against the wall and shifted her butt so it wouldn’t go numb. “I’m in no hurry to find a husband. And in any case, I don’t want you mentioning to Ethan that you think he and I should get married. He’s got to work things out with Kim, and we should mind our own business.”

“But—”

“And even if he and Kim don’t work everything out, he’s all wrong for me, Alley Cat. He’s too fancy. Know what I mean? He’s a Connecticut kind of guy. And I’m a New York kind of girl.”

“He could learn to like New York.”

“Sure, he could. But it wouldn’t be in his blood, the way it’s in yours and mine.” Hearing herself say the words convinced Gina of their resounding truth. Ethan might be handsome. He might have a subversive sense of humor. He might be breaking up with Kim. He might even be flirting with Gina, if she was willing to let her imagination stretch that far.

But he wasn’t her kind of guy.

A
N HOUR LATER
, Alicia was sound asleep, her fingers and toes tipped in shimmering purple polish. The fighting between Ethan and Kim had long since ended, and when Gina emerged from her bedroom, after telling Alicia her own version of “The Ugly Duckling,” making it about a Bronx pigeon’s egg that wound up in a suburban robin’s nest, and fumbling her way through the song “Under the Sea” from
The Little Mermaid
—“because that movie is like snorkeling,” Alicia had explained—the TV was off and the door to the master bedroom was closed.

Gina should probably go to bed, as well. But she was too wound up. All day long she’d deferred thoughts
about her sister’s disintegrating marriage. Now, without Alicia to distract her, worry and anger inundated her.

She’d liked her brother-in-law at one time. Jack Bari had been staggeringly handsome, and he’d doted on Ramona, and he’d called Alicia his princess. He’d also been kind of a jerk, laughing too loud at things that weren’t funny, like the Three Stooges or broadcasts where they showed baseball players getting hit in the groin by line drives. He’d been lazy around the house, tossing his jacket onto a chair rather than hanging it in the closet, and leaving dirty dishes in the sink rather than stacking them in the dishwasher. He’d insisted on his nights out with the boys—although, in retrospect, Gina wondered whether some of those nights out might have been spent not with the boys but with his sweetie pie.

Yet he’d seemed like a pretty typical guy. Gina had yet to meet a man who was diligent about cleaning up after himself. Her father was truly one of the best men she knew, but he never managed to get his dirty laundry into the hamper, and the concept of making a bed was alien to him. Kyle used to keep his uniform impeccable, but the minute he took it off he turned into Officer Slob, dressing in frayed jeans and torn T-shirts, splattering coffee all over the counter and never bothering to wipe the spills. She recalled the overall tidiness of the master bedroom that morning when she’d taken Ramona’s phone call, but for all she knew, Kim picked up after Ethan.

What was she going to tell Alicia? How was she going to break the news to her magnificently manicured niece that King Jack had deserted his princess and abdicated the throne for a little extramarital nookie?

Maybe some fresh island air would clear her head. She padded barefoot through the silent living room to
the sliding-glass door—and saw Ethan seated out on the terrace by himself. Just as he’d found her last night.

She pushed open the door. He glanced around and his face broke into a spontaneous smile. “Hey,” he said softly.

“Mind if I sit out here awhile?”

He gestured toward the empty chair next to him. “You’re paying as much as I am,” he joked, then lifted the beer bottle he had in his hand. “Would you like one?”

“No, thanks. I’m stuffed from dinner and tanked on wine. Thanks so much for treating us, Ethan. That was awfully generous of you.”

He shrugged. “If you can get tanked on a glass and a half of wine, you must be a cheap date.”

All right, she wasn’t tanked. She didn’t want a beer, though. She didn’t want anything more than what she had right at that moment: the starlit sky above her, the murmur of the ocean below her, the tangy air around her. And Ethan beside her.

She shouldn’t want that.

He, too, was barefoot, his feet propped onto the railing. The hems of his trousers slid up just enough to expose his bony ankles. The breeze toyed with his shirt, causing it to ripple against his chest. His hair was mussed, his forearms tanned, tendon and muscle tapering down to his large, strong hands.

She shouldn’t want this
.

Neither of them spoke for a while. Ethan sipped his beer. She leaned back in her chair and listened to the wind and the water. Finally, he broke the silence. “So, what was the phone call about?”

She might have been annoyed that he’d reminded her of that unpleasant subject, except that she hadn’t really
needed a reminder. Concern about her sister and Alicia was stuck like a piece of food in her throat. She was going to have to swallow it down or cough it up if she didn’t want to choke on it.

She decided to cough it up. “My sister kicked her husband out of the house,” she said. “He’s going to be gone by the end of the week. I’m supposed to explain all this to Alicia before we get back to New York, so she’ll be prepared.”

“Ouch.” Ethan reached over to pat her hand, which rested on the arm of her chair. He left his long, warm fingers draped over hers, a gesture too casual for her to read meaning into but too comforting for her
not
to read meaning into. She moved her hand experimentally, but he didn’t draw his away. His touch felt good, so she relaxed and let herself accept it. “I gather you haven’t told Alicia yet,” he said.

“How’d you guess?”

“She’s too happy.” He sipped some beer. “Is she close to her father?”

“She thinks he makes the sun rise. God, he’s such a bastard.”

“These situations are never simple, Gina. There may be good guys and bad guys, but no one is ever all good or all bad.”

Was he giving her moral instruction? Or perhaps working through his own “situation” with Kim? “The son of a bitch stepped out on my sister,” she grumbled. “Are you going to defend him?”

Ethan eyed her and laughed. “And turn you into my enemy? No way.” He held up both hands in surrender.

Gina laughed, too, although she wished he hadn’t removed his hand from hers. It was just as well that he
did. The more she desired the contact, the more she ought to avoid it. “You make me sound dangerous.”

“I saw what you did to Kim’s father this evening. You
are
dangerous.”

“I wasn’t really that bad, was I?” She’d only been teasing the guy, trying to pluck some of the stuffing out of him.

“You were great. I was cheering you on the whole time.”

“Is Kim mad at me?”

“Kim is mad at the world right now.” He sighed and let his hand settle back over hers. Maybe this time he was seeking comfort rather than giving it. She arched her hand so she could slide her fingers between his, and he responded with another gentle squeeze that sent a charge through her. She’d never been turned on by holding a guy’s hand before. And she wasn’t really holding Ethan’s hand—and she wasn’t really turned on. But…
damn
. The heat of his palm, the protective curve of it and the strength in those fingers…It all felt much, much too good.

“I bet it’s just you she’s mad at,” Gina said, as if to convince herself that she shouldn’t like him, that maybe
he
was one of the bad guys. “You broke her heart.”

“I don’t think it’s broken.” His thumb moved lazily along the outer edge of her pinkie and he stared out at the horizon. “Kim’s a terrific woman. I like her. She’s going to make some man very happy someday.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, I’m not that man.”

“You told her that?”

He pondered the question for several long seconds. “Pretty much,” he said.