Chapter 4

“Yo, Tag!” called Jock as the ten foot wave thundered onto the beach, sending a cloud of spray skyward. “Surf’s up. Let’s go.”

He raced into the water where his brother was hovering on a Jet Ski to take him out to the reef where even larger waves were breaking. Jock was so damn happy. It hurt to look at him.

Chill, he reminded himself. You came to Kauai to have a good time and do some extreme surfing, riding waves bigger than you’ve ever seen.

His brother had turned surfing into a lucrative career, Tag thought as he hauled himself up on the back of the Jet Ski. He tucked his surfboard into the compartment beside his left foot and kept his arm securely around it for the choppy three mile ride out to the reef known as Jaws.

“Let’s roll,” Jock called as he gunned the motor.

Two years ago Jock had won the XXL Big Wave Award. It had come with a $60,000 check for riding the largest wave—sixty-six feet—ever documented by a photograph. Jock had taken the money plus the huge bonuses from his sponsors Volcom, Rip Curl, and Reef. He’d partnered with another surfer to build the EXtreme Surf Resort in the Hanalei area of Kauai.

Jock had extreme surfed in the James Bond thriller, Die Another Day. He’d appeared in Blue Crush and Liquid, doing outrageous aerial stunts on his surfboard.

Taking tremendous risks.

He made damn good money, which wasn’t something anyone would have predicted when Tag had won a scholarship to Harvard. Jock had stayed behind, supporting himself by bartending at night so he could surf all day.

A loser, everyone said.

Think again.

The years they’d been separated had changed them both, Tag realized. He liked to surf, sure, but he didn’t live to surf. He wouldn’t be here now except he felt compelled to reconnect with his younger brother.

He had to admit surfing had become much more challenging. Now surfers were obsessed with THE BIG ONE. Paddling out beyond the breakers to hover in “the line up” waiting for the next good wave didn’t cut it. Extreme surfing was the hot ticket now.

Someone drove the Jet Ski with the surfer far offshore to where the larger waves were cresting. The surfer would jump on his board and have the driver pull him with a water ski rope until his speed was at least thirty miles an hour. Then the surfer would release the rope and catch a wave.

The surfer’s speed combined with the velocity of the wave often reached close to seventy-five miles an hour. It was a legal high, if ever there was one, Jock had assured him. This was Tag’s first try at extreme surfing.

“Okay, this is it, bro,” Jock yelled over the roar of the crashing waves.

He watched the killer sets of surging waves three stories high. Uhh-ooh. I’ll be damned, he thought. My brother does this for a living.

“Are we having fun yet?” he asked.

“You’ll be so stoked.”

“Yeah, right.” He could get himself killed—not that he cared.

“Just stay out of the impact zone.”

He put his feet in the straps on the pointed surfboard used for extreme surfing, attached the Velcro leash to his ankle, and hit the water. The board was shorter and heavier, designed to cut back and forth across the waves with more maneuverability than the longer boards.

Jock towed him in wide circles, gaining speed. He hammered the throttle and whipped Tag up onto a huge oncoming wave. He dropped the tow rope and stood up, knees bent and arms out as if he intended to throw a javelin. He headed down the face of the monster wave, the lip just beginning to curl behind him.

“All right!” he yelled, adrenaline coursing through his body. “All right!”

He rode the wave, charging down it so quickly the wind burned his eyes. Hands out, scrunched down, he ripped along going faster and faster.

The wave suddenly stopped. He pitched forward, arms flailing. Sound abruptly ceased.

The wave had suddenly turned into a floater. It stalled as if frozen in place. He whiplashed and nearly wiped out, saving it at the last second.

He stood up a little, adjusting his balance to the stalled wave. After a few seconds, the water began to move again.

“Way to go!” Jock screamed in the distance.

He coasted along, neurons in his brain snapping and giving him a rush so unreal he might have been taking a controlled substance. He instinctively headed toward flatter water. Then he toyed with cutting back into the pocket—the curl of the wave.

With smaller waves that broke on shore, cutting back into the pocket would have been safe. Here in the middle of the ocean, where there was no shallow water to blunt the wave’s speed, it was a death wish.

And he knew it.

“What have you got to lose?” he yelled to himself over the roar of the ocean.

He fanned the tail of his surfboard and cut back into the pocket. To the thirty foot plus wall of vertical water, he shouted, “Show me the green room.”

The green room, or shacking, was a surfing orgasm. As perfect a ride as a surfer ever hoped to get—in a lifetime. A rush like no other except sex.

And sex, extreme surfers claimed, finished a poor second.

He ripped along on the largest, fastest wave he’d ever caught, and a Zen-like calmness came over him. This had to be the green room, he decided.

The ultimate badass ride.

A ride terrifying not just for the speed. Should the gargantuan wave collapse, you could die or be very seriously injured. It was so awesomely scary that something inside clicked and you experienced a peacefulness that was damn near a religious experience.

He’d heard the extreme surfers talking about it last night at dinner. Now he knew what they meant.

He was inside the tube, the wave barreling around him in a smooth circle of green-blue water.

This was living.

The internal fog that had weighed him down unexpectedly lifted. He hadn’t been happier in two freaking years.

Without warning the rogue wave clamshelled on him, the curl breaking unexpectedly. The thirty foot wall of water exploded, pummeling him down far beneath the surface. The ocean Maytagged, churning him relentlessly in circles, first one way then another.

His surfboard conked him on the head. Once. Twice. Three times.

Dazed, the swirling water disorienting him, Tag fought his way upward, then realized he was heading down.

Turning, he undid the leash, freeing the surfboard, so he could swim more easily. Kicking with all his might, he used his arms to fight the raging sea, the desperate need for oxygen scorching his lungs.

He broke the surface and gasped in one short gulp of air. The next wave clobbered him. An avalanche of salt water plunged him even deeper beneath the surface than before.

Aw, hell!

He was in the impact zone his brother had warned him about, the spot where the offshore waves clam-shelled with bone-crushing intensity. In the zone a freight train of waves broke so rapidly that making it to the top would just invite another wave to batter him.

Or the killer sea could slam him into the razor-sharp reef known as Jaws. Either way, he could drown.

No. He was drowning.

His vision blurred from lack of oxygen, but he refused to give up. Fear knotted his gut as he fought the sea, swimming toward what he hoped was the edge of the impact zone where he stood a chance of surviving.

His head popped above the water a second before his lungs exploded. His brother was there—right where he was supposed to be—grabbing his forearm and hoisting him onto the Jet Ski.

“Gnarly, dude, gnarly,” his brother yelled as he twisted the accelerator and shot out of the impact zone just as another wave took aim at them. “You’ve got major huevos to go back into the pocket like that. It almost got you killed.”

Okay, maybe he didn’t have a death wish. Maybe he was just dead inside. The real kicker was that while he was underwater, staring in the teeth of eternity, some small part of him had wanted to live.

Either that or it was oxygen deprivation.

Jessica read the program, her eyes zeroing in on ‘the Surfing Divas.’ She’d surfed a little when she’d lived in Los Angeles to attend UCLA. Maybe she should enroll in this class at the EXtreme Surf Resort.

She picked up the extension in the small bungalow with the thatched roof. Overhead a ceiling fan circulated the breeze from the trades coming in through the windows opened to Hanalei Bay. She gave the accommodations high marks even though she would rather be back home with Jason.

“I’d like to take the Surfing Divas class tomorrow morning,” she told the guy who answered the telephone with a smile in his voice.

“You got it.”

She waited while he took down her name.

“You’re missing the welcome party down at the pool. Free Mai Tais and pupus. Jock’s giving an extreme surfing talk before the luau.”

“I’m going down right now.”

She had planned to spend the evening writing a column on the incredible popularity of surf wear for women, a craze that had begun with board shorts. It had swept from the West Coast and invaded areas of the country like the Midwest that wasn’t anywhere near the ocean.

With it had come a new generation of female surfers in a sport that had been dominated by males. Surf camps for females like the Surfing Divas had popped up on both coasts. They were immediately filled and had waiting lists.

What had traditionally been an all-male sport had suddenly become a coed sport, she thought, getting another idea for a story. There was much more to surfing than she’d realized.

She could write the column later. She wanted to see what Jock Rawlings and his partner who went by one name—Skree—were like. She also needed to assess what type of people came to a resort devoted to surfing thrills so she would know how to gear her article.

She’d thought the guests would be your average rich kids from dysfunctional families who used this as an excuse to drop out and surf. But she’d ridden in from the airport with two couples from Oregon who were successful professionals. Since the resort required a minimum stay of one week, it should be interesting to see who would spend this much time and money to surf on the edge.

She threw on a peach colored dress with bright fuchsia pineapples on it, slipped into sandals the same color of fuchsia, and headed out the door. The trail of crushed shells was banked by dense ferns taller than she was. The sun had dipped below the sea, but soft golden light lingered in the air filled with the heady scent of exotic jungle flowers.

Turn-offs to other bungalows were marked with surf terms like Endless Summer, Wipe Out, Hang Ten, and The Green Room. These names served as room numbers. Hers was Toes on the Nose.

To Jessica it seemed a little over-the-top, but she supposed anyone who spent the kind of money it took to stay here was into surfing. No doubt they got a kick out of the surfing theme.

“Stop being hypercritical,” she whispered to herself.

Leaving San Francisco had been a bitch. Her articles on the serial killer’s displaced anger had created a firestorm of controversy. She almost regretted writing it under Warren’s byline.

Almost.

She knew her father was behind Grant’s pleading with her to write the columns until Warren either recovered or a replacement was found. It wasn’t what she wanted to do, she reminded herself.

She hadn’t wanted to leave Jason either. Their relationship was so new that they needed time together. She wanted to finally put her divorce behind her.

“Aloha,” a young Hawaiian girl greeted her as she walked into the pool area. The girl put a lei over Jessica’s head. “Aloha means ‘hello’ and ‘good bye.’ This is our welcoming party for this week’s guests.”

The lei smelled sweet and the girl’s delighted grin made it hard not to smile back. A trio was playing a slack key guitar, a ukulele, and drums near the thatched roof bar on the opposite side of the pool where a small group was gathered.

The resort specialized in teaching surfing, extreme surfing, and kite surfing. They limited the number of guests so they could have three instructors for every guest. That’s what their brochure and Web site said.

Jessica had been writing travel columns long enough to know resorts often did not measure up to their claims. That’s why she always traveled incognito, never telling anyone she was a travel columnist.

She’d registered under the name Ali Sommers and had a credit card with that name. When she traveled, she pretended to be an ordinary tourist. She wanted the real scoop on a resort.

“Mai Tai?” asked a young man whose bronze skin was as tough as a turtle’s shell from overexposure to the sun.

“Thanks.” She took a drink from the tray he held and looked around, quickly deciding her skin was so pale compared to everyone else that she might be mistaken for a vampire.

Oh, well.

A guy about her age seemed to be holding court at the bar. Walking over to the group, she watched him. Tall and whipcord lean, he’d spent so much time in the sun that his spiked hair was a blinding white.

“Here I am shredding the wave.” He pointed to a video playing on the bar’s television. “That’s what you’ll be doing tomorrow,” he told the man standing next to him.

She stared at the screen. Ohmygod! The waves on the video were as tall as a three story building. Extreme surfing. What did she expect?

The largest wave she’d ever ridden had been about eight feet tall. She’d wiped out so badly that she’d been slammed onto the shore and had sand up her nose.

“Impressive, isn’t it?” she asked the man next to her.

He glanced down at her, then a tight frown furrowed his brow.

Oh, great. This wasn’t the typical male reaction. Jessica knew she was attractive, a fact she’d come to accept long ago. Her father had made certain she wasn’t conceited about her looks—brains were more important.

But she had to admit most men smiled at her. They didn’t frown as if they’d stepped into something disgusting.

“Is that Jock Rawlings?” she asked, ignoring his sullen expression.

For a moment, she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally he spoke. “No. That’s Skree. My brother’s over there beside the musicians.”

It took just one quick glance to see they were indeed brothers. Both were tall with athletes’ shoulders, dark hair, and the same blue eyes.

She ventured another look at the man beside her. While Jock’s eyes crackled with humor, his brother’s were intense, world weary.

She immediately noticed another difference. Jock sported a deep tan and a perpetual squint from looking into the sun while his brother obviously spent less time outside.

She flashed him the smile that usually worked for her. “I’m Ali Sommers,” she said, her voice upbeat. A brother would be a great inside source.

He gazed at her for a split second, then looked back to his brother. She had the distinct impression he was the type who would take you apart for the hell of it, if you crossed him.

Well, he didn’t frighten her. To get a good story, it paid to be tenacious.

She ventured a quick glance at him. He was a man, all right. Macho with a capital M. The broad chest. The determined jawline. The tight buns. He was probably good in bed, too.

No question about it. Jock Rawlings’s brother was the masculine type shallow women flipped over.

“Yo, Tag,” said another man as he walked up to them. “Heard you had a helluva ride today.”

Tag Rawlings, she thought, smiling inwardly. There was nothing like insider information. She recalled what a great article she’d done on Ian Schrager’s Modrian Hotel in L.A. because she’d gotten to know his personal assistant.

A brother was even better.