Powdery white sand stretched out before them as they trudged further inland, heading for the shade of the clustered palm trees. Because of the reef and surrounding rocks, they had taken an inflatable motorized dinghy to the most accessible part of the shore.
Aaron carried the cooler containing the lunch that they planned to have on the deserted island.
“Who owns this spot?” Valerie asked, scanning the horizon.
“The Belize government. Environmentalists and divers visit on occasion, but tourists rarely come out here. Nothing to interest them.”
And so here she was, alone on a deserted island with the man she’d been pining after for two long years, and the only thing they intended to do was talk and eat. Could it be possible that Aaron had set her up deliberately, knowing that very few women could resist such a setting? She busied herself with the food in order to avoid looking directly into his eyes, lest she see something presumptuous and diabolical lurking there.
Being in such close proximity to each other and in such a relaxed environment, Valerie could no longer avoid looking into his eyes. First, she studied him as he half reclined, his upper body partially propped up by his elbows. Breathtaking. She swallowed hard and moved her focus up, and what she saw in his eyes both unnerved and allured her. In place of the cold, hard edge, she saw warmth and passionate desire.
“Aaron, what are you thinking?”
The wistfulness in her tone seemed to shake him out of his reverie. “The same thing you’re thinking,” he replied.
Valerie shook her head incredulously and laughed. “That’s exactly what I was afraid of. Perhaps it’s time to abandon paradise.”
“Why? We don’t need anyone’s permission to enjoy the moment.”
“That’s true to a degree, but we are accountable for our actions. I’m not interested in regrets later.”
His eyes studied her in that now-familiar intense way, and for a moment she saw a glimmer of humor lurking. How could he possibly find what she’d just said funny?
“So, then, you have no more questions about my life?”
His abrupt return to their earlier discussion, the reason for the outing in the first place, almost made her laugh with relief.
“I still have more. Let me think a moment. Let’s see. You and Noah own one of the largest courier services in the world. Jasmine told me how the company got started but…” She hesitated for a moment, trying to gather all her thoughts. “You have alluded to your military background, but how involved are you right now? What were you doing when you got shot?”
Aaron glanced at the sky. “We’re known as troubleshooters. A team of us were in Somalia when we came under fire. I was shot while trying to protect someone who had gotten careless. Other than that, I can’t go into detail.”
She frowned, exasperated that he wasn’t going to tell her the exact purpose for the mission in Somalia. “Well, were you able to save this person?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s all you’re going to say about it?”
“Yes. But I won’t hide it from you that Avian International has another branch, which operates secretly under a different name. Some of its backing comes from U.S. security forces and international special interest groups.” He paused as though censoring his words. “Myself and the men involved are engaged in rooting out terrorists and doing what we can to maintain a level of world peace. Sometimes if our goals are the same, we work along with the CIA, Mossad, and others, but again I’ll emphasize, they do not own us. More specifically they do not own me.”
“That’s mind-boggling. How can any organization do such a thing as maintain world peace?”
“We can’t, but we do try, and while we like to think of ourselves as the good guys, it often depends on what side of the fence you’re sitting on.” He took a deep breath. “We don’t always win, but someone has to speak and act for those who are powerless…those who have no voice.”
She flinched because she wanted badly to say that the One who created the universe would one day act for the meek, the humble, and the downtrodden, but again, the timing wasn’t right. Her duty was to keep quiet and listen. “And you’re still actively involved in this organization?”
“Not as active as I once was, and I’m seriously considering retirement, at least from field agent status. Noah and I have enough to do just running the commercial end of Avian International.”
Valerie wondered if he heard her sigh of relief when he said that. Of course she wanted him to do much more than just consider retirement, but at least what he’d said was a start down the right road.
“It’s your turn to talk now,” Aaron said.
Her turn to talk? She was still absorbing everything he’d just told her, and anything she might say positively paled in comparison to just one tiny episode of his life. She stretched and smiled wanly. “What could you possibly want to know about me? Yesterday you pretty much summed up my whole life in five seconds.”
“Ahh, but you told me that those so-called five seconds were statistics. For starters, why did you marry a forty-year-old college professor when you were only eighteen?”
She groaned inwardly. “I was afraid you were going to ask that. And for the record, he wasn’t forty.”
Aaron ignored her reticence. “He was thirty-eight. A moot point, don’t you think?”
His bluntness still disconcerted her, but she might as well get used to it. “My reasoning at the time was incredibly stupid,” she said slowly. “I suppose I can begin by saying that I was really close to my father, and when he died so suddenly, so unexpectedly, I felt lost. And if that wasn’t bad enough, no one seemed sympathetic to my pain. Friends and family were all telling me that I would have to leave college and come back home to take care of my mother, which was the last thing I wanted to do. Harrison Porter was a sympathetic friend and he asked me to marry him. I saw it as an excuse to remain in Ohio.”
Aaron studied his wine glass. “Couldn’t you have made the decision to stay without marrying?”
She sighed. “I could have, but guilt made it difficult. You see, I figured if I had my own family and lived in Ohio, no one would expect me to make all those sacrifices.”
“So why did your mother need so much care? Surely she didn’t have Alzheimer’s back then.”
Valerie clenched her teeth upon hearing that he knew all about the Alzheimer’s, too. “No. She didn’t have it then. But my mother was…was…How do I even begin to explain her? She was the most helpless, weak, clingy person you’d ever want to meet. She couldn’t make even a simple decision without asking my father, and whenever my brother and I needed something, she always told us to ask him, too. If the house needed repair and my father couldn’t do it himself, he was the one who had to call the plumber, the roofer, whatever, and he always had to be at home if business people came in the house.” Valerie paused, annoyed by her own revelation and hoped Aaron wouldn’t want to hear more.
“Why?” he asked, disappointing her.
“Because…because she was nervous around strangers. She didn’t even want Greg and me to have friends over…not that we would have anyway, since she embarrassed us. The only friend my mother didn’t mind having around was Jasmine. She was just so weird. Even when we had problems at school, my father was the one who had to go speak to the teachers and whatnot.”
“Go on,” Aaron said when she hesitated.
“I really don’t want to bore you with this nonsense.” Valerie twined her fingers through her hair. “I’m not a teenager anymore, and I know that there are no perfect families.”
“If I were bored, I would be asleep by now,” Aaron said.
Valerie sighed. “My mother wasn’t a mother. I never understood her. She was always telling me not to do certain things, but she never explained why. Do you realize that it was my father who told me the facts of life…my father who explained to me the things a mother is supposed to tell a young girl. My God, Aaron, whenever I asked her something she always looked at me with this vapid expression. If a head of cabbage had an expression, that’s how she looked, and she’d say, ‘Ask your father.’ No. Not like that, she was from the South and she had this really obvious Southern accent. She’d say ‘Ask yuh fahthuh.’ ” Her voice rose. “ ‘Ask yuh fahhhthuh…ask yuh fahhh— ’ ”
She stopped because he was laughing and she hadn’t even been aware of how melodramatically she’d been speaking. Her first reaction was embarrassment that he was making fun of her, but then she realized it was the first time she’d seen him laugh outright. His deep baritone chuckle along with his blazing smile, was so incredibly sexy it took her breath away and she had to laugh, too.
“You’ve got a bit of the actress in you,” Aaron said.
“I tend to get carried away when it comes to discussing family dysfunctions,” she replied, trying not to stare at him because her attention had suddenly focused on a silver dog tag dangling against his chest. She fought the urge to reach out and grasp it.
Aaron sat up straighter and the tag slid mercifully from sight. He glanced out to sea at the boat rocking on the waves. “And so your marriage ended in a year. Who divorced whom?”
“It was a mutual divorce, actually. No hard feelings. I know now that I didn’t love him, and he just married me to have children. After I had a miscarriage, it was over.”
“The fact that you even got pregnant is amazing considering that the man was gay,” Aaron said.
Oh, God, he knows that part, too. “More specifically, he was bisexual,” she said, embarrassed but trying not to convey her emotions. “And I didn’t know that when I married him.”
“I never suggested you did,” Aaron said.
Valerie fought to control a grimace as she remembered that a few years after the divorce, she’d learned that Harrison had moved in with his same-sex partner. “Look, it was humiliating, okay? And you seem to know the whole story anyway.”
He shrugged. “So after the divorce you ended up returning to your mother’s house.”
“Yes. I left Ohio University, gave up my dreams and went to a local community college and became a nurse.”
“Was becoming a nurse such a bad thing?”
“No. Just the fact that I let circumstances get in the way of my original goal.”
“Why did you go back home when your mother managed to survive a year without you?”
“She didn’t survive on her own,” Valerie said ruefully. “Her sister Marilyn was going through a divorce and she came to live with her during that time. Aunt Marilyn is nothing like my mother.”
When the conversation finally lulled, Aaron shaded his eyes with his hand and gazed out to sea. “It’s time to go,” he said. “There’s a boat coming, and I’m not interested in company.”
Valerie didn’t see anything beyond the endless blue, but she helped him gather their things and they made their way back to Saniyah II.
***
Once she was back on land and alone in her room, Valerie wondered why Aaron’s first question about her personal life had been about her sham of a marriage. There were so many other things he could have started with. Could it be possible that he was concerned over whether or not she had actually been in love with Harrison Porter? If that was the case, he definitely had nothing to worry about.
But there was no point in trying to analyze him because caution and common sense had eluded her. He was the most unique person she’d ever met, and good or bad, right or wrong, she knew there was no way she was ever going to be able to simply return to her life without including him in it.
Jasmine had left a message on her cell and Valerie felt guilty that she didn’t want to hear from her right now. The truth was she did not know exactly what to say. How was she going to logically explain the constant delays in her departure from Belize?
“Get a grip,” she mumbled aloud. “You’re a grown woman who doesn’t have to give an explanation to anyone.”
She knew Jasmine had good intentions and that her warnings about Aaron actually did have some validity, but her best friend simply refused to acknowledge that she could feel the same intense desire for Aaron that Jasmine felt for her own husband, Noah.
Sometimes God allowed disparate people to come into each other’s lives for a reason, and no way was she going to just turn aside and let her window of opportunity slam shut, even if the person at the window had led an extraordinarily harrowing life and faced a precarious future. She was convinced that Aaron Weiss was redeemable, that he wasn’t some crude, calculating warmonger, but a human being with needs, wants, and vulnerabilities, a man who maybe could use a little joy in his life. She recalled his captivating smile and his laugh. He didn’t reveal that side often enough, but maybe she could encourage it.
Yes, he could be her diamond in the rough. With a little refinement and polishing, the possibilities were delectably endless.
She listened to Jasmine’s message.
“Val, if you don’t get back to me tonight, this is the last time I’m calling because I’m headed for Dallas on business tomorrow. You’ll probably be back before I am. Your mother is all right and I had your car fixed. Oh, and your brother called me because he couldn’t reach you. I told him you were on vacation in Belize, but I didn’t give him any details. You might want to call him. Ciao.”
Her brother called? This surprised her because, aside from a holiday greeting card, she hadn’t heard from Greg in nearly a year. She keyed Jasmine’s number and waited until she responded, sounding slightly out of breath.
“Valerie?”
“Yup, it’s me. What are you doing? You sound winded.”
“I was playing with Diego, kind of chasing him around the house to get him to bed.”
Valerie laughed, visualizing Jasmine’s overly energetic stepson. “You said Greg called you. Did he say or give any indication what he wanted?”
“No. He didn’t sound upset or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. Call him. Maybe he’s just realizing that he hasn’t heard from his sister in a while.”
“I’ll call him when I get back home,” Valerie said nonchalantly.
She thought about how she and her brother, despite his being much older, had been very close as children, but around his late teen years, when he was about to go away to college, he’d had a mysterious disagreement with their father and went on to alienate himself from the whole family, including her. The cold war lasted several years until Greg met and married ex-beauty queen Lisa Allen in Chicago. He’d felt no guilt whatsoever about leaving his sister with the total responsibility of their mother, so why should she be so quick to get back to him?
“I guess you’re still not ready to come home,” Jasmine said, sounding a bit cautious. “And don’t worry, I’m not going to give you any more unsolicited grief about Aaron.”
“Thanks for that, and I’ll definitely be home by the end of this week.”
“I’m holding you to that.”
***
Aaron had opted to spend the rest of the night on the boat. He sat on the deck watching the swells in the black water. He welcomed and embraced the solitude and distance, even though the alien being who’d possessed his heart wanted to be as physically close to Valerie as possible. He definitely needed this night out on the water to think.
From the first day he’d met her, Aaron had known that Valerie spelled trouble. For over two years his clandestine line of work and deliberate avoidance of her had made his heart accept the reality that he should remain single, but the week and a half spent in close contact with her had given him more than a glimmer of what he had been missing, especially now that he was ready to enter a different phase of his life, a more sedate and less harrowing phase that did not directly include a group called Global Defense Force.
Valerie had nearly torn down his wall of resistance and made him desire what he’d never desired before, namely warmth and companionship from another human being. He thought about the way she had mesmerized him on the private island with her understated, earthy beauty—beauty made even more apparent because she seemed so casual about it. He’d wanted to reach out and pull her body close to his—to possess her heart and soul and to lie there devoid of all physical and mental restrictions, the two of them sated, at peace, and breathing as one.
However, even though he considered his desires a weakness, he was becoming convinced that as long as she held no romanticized illusions about married life, and she agreed to a few rules, they might actually work as a couple. If she said yes, the steel doors that had slammed shut around his heart just might swing wide open, leading him into emotionally stormy skies, uncharted waters, and a set of challenges perhaps even more daunting than his current lifestyle.