Paul didn’t like sailing. He’d rather be doing anything else. Anything that didn’t involve the sea, that is. Sailing wasn’t his hobby. It was his obsession.
His relief was huge when he turned Marianne into Trenick Bay ahead of the storm rolling up the south Cornish coast behind him.
It had been a bit of a gamble. Two hours earlier he’d considered finding shelter to drop anchor for the night, but after sailing solo for three weeks he wanted to get home and breathe easily with his feet on solid ground.
The sea was getting angrier by the minute, as onshore winds gusted ahead of the storm and clashed against the ebbing tide.
It had been a different world two days earlier, when he was sunbathing under a big blue May sky, at anchor off the Scilly Isles. That’s why he’d run for home when the weather warning aired.
He licked salt from his lips and stroked the engine start button. He wasn’t a confident sailor, and certainly didn’t enjoy rough weather, but still preferred to stay under sail if possible.
He didn’t push the button.
What would a psychologist call it? Aversion therapy? Exposure therapy?
Only his determination and Marianne’s fifty feet of fine mahogany planking stood between him and his lifelong fear of deep water. His stomach always betrayed him when the sea got nasty, but he couldn’t let the fear beat him.
A flash of sheet lightning silhouetted his house on the cliff top. The crescent-shaped town ahead of him bustled with lights and life as shops closed up and people headed for home, but the old orphanage above it stood stark and silent like a lonely tooth in the sky’s gaping mouth.
Bob and Mary Thorne’s little cottage showed a warm light in their front room. That’s where the life was, up there on the cliff. That’s where it had been for years.
Paul located Marianne’s pink mooring buoy in the distance and aimed to the right of it.
He remembered the first time he and Bob had swum all this way out from the beach at the end of a long summer of perseverance. He’d been the only non-swimmer in his age group and was suffering for it, until Bob took him to the water and helped him to face his fear.
The couple had worked as caretaker and housekeeper at the orphanage when Paul was one of the boys there. The cottage went with their jobs.
So when he’d got accidentally rich and bought the empty old orphanage for his home, offering them their cottage back in return for looking after the place was the most natural thing in the world.
Most of the time he probably needed looking after more than the house did, but Bob and Mary seemed happy to do both.
They’d got him through Sarah’s death seven years ago. Her diagnosis had come out of nowhere, and within weeks she was gone. He didn’t like to think about where he might have ended up without Mary and Bob’s steady support in that dark time.
He turned Marianne into the wind and dropped her sails from the cockpit in a single clattering spray-splattered movement, picked up the buoy with a boathook, passed the mooring rope through the buoy’s steel eyelet and tied up to it, baring his teeth when the sea slapped him in the face with a big wet one.
A glance over his shoulder confirmed what he thought he’d seen while turning. He wouldn’t need his inflatable tender. Karen was rowing out to meet him, with dozens of friendly seals swimming alongside her wooden boat and playing in the agitated waves.
“You all right?” She was panting after her long pull into the wind, which tore tendrils of dark hair from her ponytail and whipped them about her face.
“Fine.” Paul leaned over to grab her gunwale with one hand and take her painter with the other. “You?”
“Yep.” She clambered aboard Marianne and took a corner seat in the cockpit, tucking her long legs out of the way.
She was tall, although not quite his six foot two, and she’d never found the knack of blending into the confines of a boat the way he had.
“I phoned Mary when I saw you coming in, so there’ll be hot water by the time you get home. Where did you go this time?”
He tidied the cockpit around her. “Up to Bristol, then back down to the Scillies. Made a night run from Ilfracombe to Lundy Island last Thursday, navigating by the stars, tacking against a south-westerly and passing between two tide races off Morte Point. That got a bit hairy.”
She gave an impressed thumbs-up. “Good job.”
He’d cried in terror that whole night.
He predicted her next question before the words left her mouth, and stepped down into the cabin so he wouldn’t have to see her expression when she asked.
“Write anything?”
He’d secured the cabin when the weather started turning hours earlier, so there was nothing for him to do down there, but he hoisted himself up to sit on his bunk. The heels of his sea boots bumped against the varnished wooden locker below his bunk as Marianne bucked and rolled.
“Nope.”
“No ideas at all? Did you call your agent before you went away?”
He stepped out on deck to bag and strap the mainsail under the boom and wind the jib tight around its halyard. “No.”
She winced. “He’ll be pissed off.”
Paul dumped his duffel bag in the bottom of her boat, locked the cabin door, and jumped down into the boat. He shipped one of the oars and waited for her to join him.
Nagging him wasn’t going to help.
It hurt that his epic series, which had famously promised the world a ten-book storyline, had written itself to a full stop in nine novels, two decades later.
It certainly wasn’t his idea of fun to have his publisher lose faith in him. Or to have ex-fans abusing his name all over the world. He hadn’t opened an email in three months.
Tamass the Fearless had won his long war and married his soul mate Nandi, and that was that. The well had run dry and Paul couldn’t dream up any decent ideas to dig it deeper.
Or write anything new.
He was a one-trick pony.
Karen climbed down beside him and shipped the other oar. The wind took the boat and they skidded sideways across choppy waves away from Marianne.
They picked up the stroke together, with the strong wind boosting their efforts.
Several seals appeared again, thrusting their powerful tails to roll heavy but impressively agile seven-foot-long bodies all around the boat in chaotic play that thrashed up the already agitated water.
Sometimes, Karen’s connection with them seemed almost magical. She was a marine biologist who’d arrived in town five years ago to study this colony, but her relationship with them went way beyond that now. He thought she probably talked with them when no one else was around.
She stopped rowing, and stroked the nearest seal’s big sleek head.
Paul recognised the markings on his head and powerful shoulders. Karen called him Duke. He was the old man of the colony, and when he gazed at her his eyes shone with gentle intelligence.
She turned her face away, but Paul caught her distraught expression before her ponytail whipped across his vision.
He leaned on his oar and waited.
“My job’s gone.”
Had he heard her right? The wind was whistling across the waves, drenching them with cold salty spray, and he hoped he’d heard wrong. He shouted over the weather, “Your job?”
She turned back to him. “Gone. The university pulled the plug. Funding ends next month.”
They stared at each other. Her brown irises contained flecks of gold.
“What will you do?”
She shrugged. “I’m looking for something in the town. Bar work. Anything.”
Shit. “You’re staying here?”
“I’m not leaving my friends.” Her eyes filled with tears and she blinked rapidly.
Her seals. “Have you contacted other universities to ask for funding?”
“The whole time you’ve been away. Three of them offered me positions.”
Well, they would. He didn’t know anything about her career before she’d come to Trenick, but she was a PhD, and he’d had always got the impression from visiting marine scientists that she was highly regarded in their world.
“Nothing you fancied?”
Duke barked once, blew out all his fishy breath, and sank smoothly with his gaze fixed on Karen. His colony followed him below the choppy waves and disappeared into the depths.
“Nothing here.” She started rowing again. “They have their own projects. None of them are interested in taking on the funding for this one.”
He matched her stroke. “You sure about this?”
“Yes.” She hauled savagely at her oar.
He’d never heard her sound so fierce before.
They rowed without words and caught the final wave to crunch up hard and high on the pebble beach. Paul grabbed his bag and waited while she tied her boat to the nearest stanchion.
“Dinner at mine?”
“Okay.” She re-secured her ponytail with a deft twist.
“We’ll take the tunnels.”
Two hundred years before it became an orphanage, Paul’s house had been home to smugglers who’d carried French and Caribbean contraband through a complicated network of tunnels leading from cave entrances dotted along the cliff face to their cellar beneath the house.
Sometime in the nineteenth century, the orphanage people had blocked the tunnels to prevent children exploring their dangerous depths, but once he’d bought the place Paul had persuaded Bob to open up a couple of them again.
Bob hadn’t been impressed with the idea, but he’d repaired the old brick walls where they needed it and fitted lockable steel doors to prevent people gaining access from the beach.
“Got my car.” Karen led the way to her battered old Morris Minor Traveller.
Paul folded himself into the passenger seat. Inside the car was quiet, and smelled of neoprene. Her wet suit was spread across the back seat.
“Are you really going to work in a pub?”
Her jaw was strong against the glowering sky and the first big raindrops splatting on her side window. “I’m not leaving my friends.”