Chapter Twelve

Gus was hot and sticky when they finally called it quits around eight thirty that night. There was probably only another two dozen rabbits to rescue, and she was confident they’d all be in the bunny farm by the end of the week.

The day had lived up to its promise from earlier, the sun a relentless searing ball in the sky, and the fall of night hadn’t really eased conditions. The Bunnyguards had scattered quickly to their beach, and Gus could hear their whoops of laughter drifting to her on the still night as she climbed the stairs to the cabin. They’d had a long hot day, too, and they deserved the downtime.

She, however, was heading straight for the shower. She couldn’t be bothered getting into a swimsuit and trekking down the path when her need for relief from the heat and stickiness was way more urgent.

Gus was surprised to find the cabin empty. Marshall had been busy inside all day with the adoption side of things, but he’d also been in and out. She wished she hadn’t noticed, but it seemed, after last night, the man had some kind of homing beacon implanted in his ass.

The stuff she’d found out about him, the stuff she’d told him about herself, that strange moment they’d shared. It had accentuated their attraction, accelerated it. Given it a focus.

And made her even more grateful to have signed that contract.

She padded to her bedroom to find the door shut and groaned. Damn it, that’s where he was—the shower. She sighed and grabbed her one-piece hanging on the outside doorknob. She didn’t know how long he’d be in there, but she didn’t want to wait—so the lake it was.

“Don’t look, Thumper,” Gus said as she moved close to his cage, which was out of direct line of sight from the door.

The bunny’s nose twitched, but otherwise he seemed disinterested as Gus quickly divested herself of her clothes and climbed into her one-piece.

“I won’t be long,” she told him as she turned away, stopping only to grab her towel off the back of the dining room chair and slip her feet into her flip-flops before heading out again.

A very slight breeze ruffled the tendrils of hair that were brushing her neck as she fixed the towel around her waist and tramped down the stairs, heading for the pier. Joining the Bunnyguards on their side was an option and something Gus often did, but tonight she wanted some peace and quiet.

The men and women who’d volunteered for Hitchkin were wonderfully engaged in the kind of work they did, and it was inspiring to witness. But they were also full of questions and observations, and Gus was all bunnied out for one day. She just wanted to float on her back and enjoy some solitude.

Picking her way carefully down the track on the moonless night, she slowed even further as her foot landed on gritty sand and her gaze fell on the dark figure she could just make out sitting on the end of the jetty.

Her gut clenched. Marshall wasn’t in the shower…

She knew it was him despite the lack of light. She’d know those broad shoulders and that way he held himself anywhere. Like he was king of all he surveyed.

Although, she supposed he was.

Gus hesitated. Almost turned back. But the fresh summery tang of the lake tantalized her, teasing her nostrils, and fingers of breeze seduced her nearer. The dried sweat on her skin formed a fine crust, itchy and irritating, desperate for the cool wash of water.

What was the matter with her? She could be here with him. Alone. In the dark. Yeah…they were attracted to each other. Sexually attracted. But they were both adults with fully developed impulse control. And if that slipped, there was always the contract.

Taking a deep breath, she walked calmly onto the jetty, his shape becoming more defined the closer she got. If he heard her, he didn’t turn. Not even when she drew level with him and said, “Hey.”

But he did look up. His face was in deep shadow, but she could still make out the brooding line of his mouth, the unshaved scruff on his jaw, and the dark, sleek pelt of his slicked-back hair. Not to mention the broad plains of his bare chest and the wet cling of board shorts to his quads

Sweet baby Jesus.

“Hey.”

Noticing the cannibalized six-pack of beer and the two empty bottles beside him, she said, “Sorry, I didn’t realize you were here. My door was shut, so I thought you were in the shower.”

“It’s okay. Rambo made a break for it a couple of times today, so I thought I’d better shut him in your room when I came down to the beach.”

“Yep. Good decision.”

The last thing they needed was Rambo running off and impregnating any remaining female bunnies that were still bippity-bopping around and hadn’t already been knocked up. But he was so tame and seemed to prefer being in the cabin, so they hadn’t bothered to cage him.

“You going for a dip?”

His palms absently smoothed the boards beside him, reminding her of the roughness of his hands and fine goose bumps prickled at Gus’s skin. “Yeah. It’s been a long hot day.”

He nodded. “The water’s nice.”

Which was all the encouragement Gus needed. Dropping her towel with as much nonchalance as she could gather with Marshall right there, she pulled out her hair tie, took two steps away from him and dived in from the side, ignoring the ladder. Cool liquid enveloped her, and she momentarily shut her eyes at the pleasure of its embrace.

“Oh my God,” she said as her head broke the surface, “that’s so good.”

When no answer was forthcoming, she rolled onto her back, letting the dull silence of the water fill her ears as she stared at the infinite pricks of light in the veil of inky night.

It was breathtaking. She wanted to lie here forever, her hair moving like tentacles around her head, the water lapping at her skin.

Of all the ABL rescue gigs she’d been sent on, this was the most picturesque. Considering the previous one had been in a derelict building on the wrong side of Chicago, it wasn’t difficult to best.

But she was too aware of Marshall’s dark shape on the jetty. They may be mature adults with impulse control, but there was no point testing the boundaries of that control by going all Siren on him in the lake.

Last night, he’d proclaimed he’d been walking around Hitchkin with an almost constant hard-on, and while neither of them had much control over that, probably swimming around in a one-piece—no matter how innocuous—in front of the guy she’d signed a no-kissing contract with on a napkin wasn’t the wisest choice.

Mind made up, Gus ducked underwater a couple of times before swimming farther out, enjoying the silky feel of her hair and the satiny feel of her skin. After ten minutes, she made her way back to the jetty and, using the ladder this time, hauled herself up onto the boards. Water sluiced off her body as she reached for her towel.

Throwing it over her head, she rubbed at her hair. “God, that was so good,” she said into the folds as she dried vigorously.

If he made a comment, she didn’t hear it, and she kept her eyes fixed on the lake as she emerged from the towel to rub briskly at her arms and legs. When she was relatively dry, she secured the towel around her waist.

“I’m starving.” Gus was proud of how matter-of-fact she sounded. They could do this. Ignore their chemistry and act like normal human beings. “Thought I’d poke around the fridge and see what I can come up with. That okay by you?”

It wasn’t official, but they’d been taking turns to cook. It had been a pleasant surprise to find that Marshall was a decent hand in the kitchen.

“Nah. I’m good.” He reached for the six-pack then pulled out the third bottle, cracked the lid off, and took a swig.

“Liquid diet tonight?” she joked.

He gave a half laugh, but it sounded as deep and dark and lonely as a black hole as it echoed around the shore. “I’ll grab something later.”

Gus frowned at the top of his head. Something wasn’t right. It hadn’t been right all day. Since his brother had left. Hadn’t Jeremy said something about them having plans tonight?

Instead of listening to the voice whispering in her ear about how bad an idea it was to stay, Gus sat down next to him. She didn’t know why. In fact, she knew a hundred reasons why she shouldn’t, but something urged her to stick around.

Twisting her hair around her hand, she squeezed out the excess water and shoved it hastily back into a messy bun. “Can I have one of those?”

Without answering, he reached across, pulled out a beer, cracked the lid off, and handed it to her across the short distance that separated them. Ordinarily, she’d clink bottles with someone she was drinking beer with, but that was such a celebratory thing to do, and Gus was pretty sure Marshall wasn’t celebrating.

So she sat and drank in silence with him in the still, dark night. “Is everything okay?” she asked eventually, when it was clear he wasn’t going to make conversation. “You seem a million miles away.”

“Oh…” He stirred beside her, shook his head as if he was just realizing she was still there. “I was thinking about my mom.” He took a sip of his beer. “I’m the same age she was when she died.”

Gus blinked. Talk about morose. She thought back to what Jeremy had said—on today of all days. Was it Marshall’s birthday? “Is it your birthday today?”

He turned hooded eyes on her, a frown furrowing his forehead. “What? No.”

Okay. Not his birthday. “You…think about her a lot? Your mom?”

His head swiveled back to the lake view. “Not really. Here probably more than anywhere I guess. But it’s the anniversary of her death today so…yeah.”

Ah. Now she understood. Now Jeremy’s comments made sense. Now Marshall’s demeanor made sense. Of course this would be a difficult day for him. Gus had been blessed to reach thirty-four with no significant deaths in her family—she still had both sets of grandparents—but in that same time period, Marshall had lost both his parents.

She couldn’t begin to imagine how that would feel. Sure, her mother’s obsession with grandchildren was driving Gus to distraction, but she was grateful every day to still have her parents alive and well.

“How long?”

“Nineteen years.”

“Does it—” She paused. Gus had no idea whether Marshall wanted to discuss it or not. “Sorry. Are you okay to talk about her?”

“Yeah. It’s fine. I don’t mind.”

“Does it…feel that long?”

“Yeah, mostly.” He took another drag of his beer. “Just not today. It feels pretty close today.”

“What happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“She had an aneurysm. In her brain. Nobody knew about it. She used to get headaches. A lot. But they didn’t usually last very long, and we didn’t have any insurance, so she never got them checked out. A few days before she died, she came down with a really bad one. I was worried about her that morning because she kept squinting against the light, and I wanted her to call in sick, but she insisted that she had to go to work and shooed us off to school.”

He took a long swallow of his beer. Some kind of bird called out over the lake, a low, mournful cry, and Gus shivered. A droplet of water from her hair slid down her nape and she wiped it away.

“She collapsed at work. They rushed her to the hospital, but the bleeding had been catastrophic and she never regained consciousness. She died three days later. They switched her off life support and she died.”

Gus’s pulse thudded like a drum through her chest. The darkness of the night fit the sudden bleakness of the mood perfectly. Marshall was still, his face a mask, and he was so obviously back in that moment her heart broke for the fifteen-year-old boy who’d just lost his mother.

She lifted her hand to reach out and touch him but hesitated and dropped it again. “I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “Like I said, it happened a long time ago.”

Maybe. But his mom had been thirty-four years old with two teenage children. That was so freaking unfair.

“I sometimes wonder, you know, if she hadn’t gone to work that day…if she hadn’t worked so hard every day of her life, trying to provide for us, determined that Jeremy and I would get out of the trailer park…” He glanced at her for long moments. “Would she still be here?”

Gus absorbed that morsel of information about his upbringing without comment. Marshall and Jeremy had come a long way from the socioeconomic conditions of their childhood. Their mother’s determination had obviously paid dividends.

She gave him a gentle smile as she slipped into her imaginary white coat. Gus may be an animal doctor, but she knew a thing or two about anatomy and conditions of the brain. A thing or two about second guessing as well.

“A person with a cerebral aneurysm is a ticking time bomb, Marshall.” She spoke quietly, clearly, giving him time to absorb the information. “They can rupture at any time or never rupture at all. If she’d had her headaches checked out earlier, they might have done some scans and found the aneurysm and been able to fix it. But it might have also been inoperable. There’s a lot of variables.”

“I know.”

“I don’t think anyone would have blamed her for staying home that day, though. She must have had one hell of a headache.”

He gave a short, mirthless laugh. “She never missed work. She was still paying off the medical bills from when my father died seven years prior.”

God. There’d been so much loss in his life. Looking from the outside, Marshall was this big, strong, capable guy. Good with his hands. A successful businessman. But he’d obviously overcome a lot to be the man he was today.

“How did he—”

“An industrial accident, at work. He was doing some cash-in-hand work for extra money on weekends, and a concrete slab fell on him, crushed his legs and chest. He was in the ICU for a couple of weeks, it was touch and go for a while, but he seemed to be improving and then one day he developed a pulmonary embolism and went into cardiac arrest. They couldn’t get him back. He was thirty.”

He sounded so bleak. “Oh god,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry.”

Wise or not, Gus did slip her hand onto his arm this time. It was just for the briefest of moments before she pulled it back, but she couldn’t not reach out to him. His parents had both died so tragically young, hamstrung by their financial circumstances.

“Didn’t the company he work for cover his medical expenses?” Why was his mother working to pay that off when it should have been covered by them?

“No.” His gaze dropped to where her hand had been. “It was all under the table. So mom was still stuck with a huge debt along with what they still owed on the bills from the year before when Jeremy broke his leg.”

“But didn’t your…” Gus shut the sentence down. Given the fractious relationship Marshall clearly had with his grandfather, it was probably best not to ask.

His head came up and he pierced her with a look from the dark recesses of his indigo eyes. “Didn’t my filthy rich grandfather step in and help out?”

The twist to his lips and the emotion in his voice packed a powerful punch. “I’m guessing, not?” Which explained Marshall’s Hitchkin motivations further.

His sharp laugh puffed warm air in her direction. “Let me tell you about my grandfather,” he said. “My grandfather wanted my mother to become a debutante and go to law school and follow him into his firm, one of the largest and most successful in New York. His wife, my grandmother, had died when my mom was twelve and she’d become his whole world.”

A stray droplet of water slid down Gus’s neck followed closely by a prickle of foreboding.

“My mother,” Marshall confirmed, “had different ideas. She fell in love with my father, who mowed their lawn, when she was eighteen. She ran away with him six months later when she was pregnant with me. My grandfather offered her all kinds of inducements to return, but when she turned him down, he cut her off financially and refused to have anything to do with her.”

He paused for a moment and drained the rest of his beer. He didn’t reach for another.

“As far as I know, they never saw each other again. Until Jeremy broke his leg. I don’t know why he was in Denver, but she drove to see him one night. She had to take me because Dad was with Jeremy at the hospital and she couldn’t leave me alone. She thought I was asleep in the back when she got out to talk to him. She asked him for a loan, for the hospital bill. Not a handout, a loan. She begged him, actually. He shut the door on her.”

The angle of Marshall’s jaw whitened as he stared out over the lake. His features were tight, intense, his gaze fixed far away as if he was peering into his past.

“I heard her and my dad talking the next morning. He told her it’d be okay. That the hospital would let them pay the debt back, and he’d take on extra work to cover it. A year later, he was dead.”

Gus shut her eyes. “God…I’m so sorry.”

He shook his head. “My mom tried again, though, because now she had a funeral to pay for. She called him this time—I was listening at the door. She asked him for another loan, said she’d go back home, that we’d all go to New York and live with him if he wanted, that she’d study law and work with him at the firm, she was only twenty-nine after all. He hung up. Her husband had just died…and he hung up on her. Can you believe that?” he asked quietly.

He turned to face her, his eyes still hooded, but the burning intensity of them as palpable as his emotions.

“No, I can’t.” Gus shook her head. He sounded like a very bitter, vengeful man. “Your mother must have been devastated.”

“She never said, but…she cried that night in the car. And after she’d hung up the phone. I swore that day if I ever met him I’d punch him right in the face.”

“Did you? Meet him, I mean?”

Marshall shoved a hand through his drying hair, loosening the waves. “He came to the trailer park…the day after she died.”

Gus’s raised her eyebrows. From what she’d already gathered about him, Marshall’s grandfather didn’t seem to be the kind of guy who visited trailer parks. “Really?”

“Yeah. He wanted to bury his daughter. He wanted to take her way from us and bury her in the family plot next to her mother and give her a proper send off.”

“So…you punched him in the face?”

Marshall barked out a laugh that echoed like gunfire around the quiet of the island. “No. I didn’t. But I did tell him what he could do with his family plot and a few other things as well. No way would Mom have wanted to be anywhere else but next to my dad.”

“Did it feel good?”

“It did.” He smiled at the memory. “But it wasn’t very smart. Two years later I had to swallow my pride, just like my mother had done before me.” He grimaced. “And I went hat in hand to him, asking him for money, to put Jeremy—his grandson—through law school. I’d been working construction since Mom died and most of the debt had been cleared through a small life insurance policy she’d taken out years before. But Jeremy had his eye on Harvard and there was no way I was earning that kind of money. I thought he’d see the opportunity he felt he’d lost with my mom. But…he’d taken my refusal over the funeral very personally, told me to get the hell out and never come back.”

“And yet—” Gus frowned. “He left you the island?”

He snorted “No, he didn’t. He left it to Jeremy. He left it all to Jeremy.”