Chapter 11

Kai followed Maddie as she filed along with the other waiting passengers into the lower cabin of the ferry. He exchanged nods with the folks he knew, but declined to engage in conversation. Maddie spied two seats by a window and hustled forward to claim them.

Kai knew she would have preferred to climb up top and ride in the open by the railing; but it was raining both hard and steadily, a relatively unusual circumstance for which neither of them had come prepared. Kai sat down beside her, being careful to leave a polite distance between them. They had spoken little since dinner the evening before. With neither of them having a car, Maddie had been happy to take him up on his offer of a ride to the ferry dock in Lahaina via his cousin’s dilapidated SUV, but Risa’s chatter about her gigs as a wedding florist at the Ka'anapali resorts had left zero space for other conversation.

“Darn this rain,” Maddie grumbled, frowning at the spattered window. “I was hoping to do some more whale watching.” She cast a disparaging glance at her lightweight jacket, which did not appear to be waterproof. “I couldn’t care less if I get soaked, but it would be rude to show up at Nana’s dripping wet.”

“You could reminisce over a dryer cycle at the launderette first,” Kai teased, recalling a litany of childhood complaints about laundry days. He didn’t remember Maddie as a complainer in general, but she had always bored easily.

Maddie threw him a strange look he couldn’t decipher. “I suppose so.” She drummed her fingers anxiously on the back of the seat in front of her, then slumped into her own. “Never mind. I’m sure it will clear up soon enough.”

She turned her gaze out the spattered window again. Kai perceived that she was uptight, and her discomfort had a mirrored effect on him. Why the angst?

He did a quick analysis of her body language. His skills at the art had improved since Haley had begun working with the firm, but it didn’t take an expert to read the message Maddie was sending now. If she had dressed to avoid undue attention last night, today she had dressed one step short of a nun. Her hair was tightly swept into braids on either side of her head, and much of her face was concealed by the brim of a floppy hat. Whatever shirt she wore was completely covered by the jacket, and her legs were obscured to her shins by baggy cargo-style capris. The attempt to hide her assets was so blatant it was almost laughable, because short of putting a bag over her head and suspending a barrel from her shoulders, the quest was hopeless. Her attempt, however, spoke volumes.

Don’t hit on me, okay? Don’t even look at me that way.

Kai found the message disheartening, to say the least. But he also found it sad. Beauty like Maddie’s should be allowed to shine, no matter whom it drove to distraction.

He was definitely among that number. The fact that he had extensive experience in gentlemanly behavior was not helpful in the slightest, because the strictures that had bound him for the last seven years happily no longer applied. He’d been looking forward to his freedom for a very long time now, and thus far, he’d had precious little chance to exercise it.

Still, she had made her wishes clear, and that was that. If there was ever to be anything more between them — and he reserved the right not to lock that door, even if he did agree to close it — the first move would have to come from her. He wanted to tell her that she had nothing to worry about, but they weren’t at a place where that was possible. Despite their shared history, they were still virtual strangers, feeling each other out. Getting back to a place of comfort — and of genuine trust — would take time.

He relaxed into his own seat, careful not to touch her. He could handle this. Really, he could. But why did she have to turn out so ridiculously sexy? Under the circumstances, he felt like the butt of somebody’s joke.

“Was Nana okay with me coming back again so soon?” she asked.

“Of course,” he assured. “She loves having company. You and I aren’t the only ones making use of her spare room. She could charge rent for it.”

“She probably should,” Maddie agreed thoughtfully.

Kai watched what portion of her face he could actually see and wondered what she was thinking. He wondered if she was aware that Nana was one of the few Lana'ians who actually owned her own house. It had been purchased by a prudent ancestor during a brief window in time when doing so was actually possible, and for Nana to own it outright now and be able to live alone was a rare privilege. Over a hundred years ago, one wealthy rancher from Kauai had bought up almost all the land on the island, and it had been concentrated into one parcel ever since. Most Lana'ians were renters, and housing space was at a premium. If Nana hadn’t owned her little house, odds were she would have been displaced from it years ago.

Another silence ensued, and Kai exhaled with frustration. The awkwardness between them, in and of itself, was awkward. Their childhood friendship had been anything but polite. Maddie was just as likely to punch him in the shoulder to get his attention as she was to say hello. They’d had mud fights after a rain. She thought nothing of wearing the same shirt three days in a row and her toenails were always too long. He honestly never even thought of her as female. Good God, they used to go swimming together in their underwear!

Back then he could have told her anything, said something stupid, done something rude, and it wouldn’t have mattered; they would still be friends. He would give anything to be even half so comfortable with her now, but that happy past seemed light years away. Perhaps it would put them both more at ease if they continued talking about their childhoods?

“Tell me more about Kentucky,” he suggested. “What was it like starting middle school there after being on Lana'i? Did the other kids find you exotic?”

Kai could just see Maddie’s lovely gray eyes underneath the brim of her hat. They were swimming with emotion. “I had to finish the fifth grade in Ohio first. That was pretty awful. I remember it seemed so dark all the time. No green anywhere. Just shades of brown and gray. And cold. And wet.”

Kai cursed under his breath. He hadn’t meant to take her that far back. The first few months after her mother died must have been sheer misery, no matter what her father told her.

“I was pretty depressed,” she confirmed. Then she tilted her head and looked him fully in the face. “I wrote you a letter once. Did you get it?”

Kai’s pulse quickened. Her letter. Memory flickered, a stab of guilt. A sense of failure. Of weakness.

Knock it off.

“Yes, I got it.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry I didn’t respond.” He was sorry, but he was not going to beat himself up over it. He was past all that now.

Yet Maddie’s accusing gaze would not let go. “Why didn’t you?” she demanded.

A sick feeling surged. Dammit! He was not going to do this. “I was a kid,” he answered, somewhat more flippantly than intended. “I guess I didn’t know what to say.”

Maddie’s face flashed with hurt. She turned to the window.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t care,” Kai amended. “I did miss you. I missed you a lot, actually.”

Maddie turned back around. “Really?” she said skeptically.

“Yes!” he said firmly. He smiled at her. “Who else would sneak out at midnight to stare at the sky with me?”

She huffed. “Nobody sane. I got bit by so many bugs!”

He laughed. “Nobody thinks Lana'i has a lot of mosquitos except you.”

“They never bit anybody on Lana'i except me!” she protested. “If there was one mosquito on the whole damn island, it would fly the length of it to sniff me out! Speaking of which, I haven’t even been on Maui a week yet, and I’ve got half a dozen bites already, in the middle of winter. I wonder if I could tattoo myself with DEET?”

She lifted her foot and slid up her capris to expose a calf and knee, then suddenly thought better of it. Her reversal of action was just as well, since whatever bites she had intended to show Kai were eclipsed by the shapeliness of her leg.

“I have to admit, though, the bugs were even worse in Kentucky, at least in the summer,” she continued. “And in Alabama. What about Utah? Oh, wait. I forgot. Bugs don’t like you.”

Kai smiled smugly. “Guess I’m just lucky.”

Maddie scowled at him. She looked cute when she scowled. She always had. Her gaze dropped to his arms, and she studied him with a wistful look that made him restless. When she was a child, she used to tell him how much she envied the color of his skin. How smooth and attractive it was, unmarked by the myriad bug bites, scratches, and bruises that stood out so obviously on her own. He wondered if she still felt that way.

He doubted it.

She seemed about to say something, but thought better of it. Her mouth closed and she turned around to pretend to stare out a window obscured by raindrops.

Why was this so difficult?

“You never did tell me about your job,” she blurted suddenly, turning around again. “You asked me all about my life last night, but I didn’t have time to return the favor. So do you like being a lawyer? Living the high life in Kahului?”

Kai had to chuckle at that. “If you call living at my uncle’s house and working like a dog ‘the high life,’ then I guess I like it fine.”

She studied him again. “You never said you wanted to be a lawyer. All I remember you saying you wanted to be was an astronaut.”

“What ten-year-old wants to be a lawyer?” he replied. “Wanting to be an astronaut made me seem weird enough, as you recall. Kind of retro for the nineties.”

Maddie considered. “I don’t even remember what I said I wanted to be.”

“That’s because you kept changing it.”

“Ah, right,” she agreed. “I just knew it would be something exciting. Still, how could I ever have dreamed that one day I would spend weeks at a time staking out dumpsters in rural Alabama waiting for feral cats to come paw through the trash?”

Kai grinned. “At least one of us got to live the high life.”

She grinned back, then stared at him thoughtfully. “You might have said you wanted to be an astronaut, but what you always wanted to do was help the people of Lana'i. You wanted to do something that meant something. You just weren’t sure what. Is that why you went to law school? To find out how to make things happen?”

Kai felt an odd, fluttering sensation in his gut. She remembered that? Not only had she remembered, but she had just effortlessly pieced together what had taken him ages to figure out for himself. He felt laid bare — by a woman he barely knew. The sensation was disconcerting, yet at the same time, it gave him a peculiar feeling of elation.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “Exactly. I knew that politics wasn’t for me, but law seemed to be a good fit. I wanted to make life better for the people of Lana'i and all the islands. Economic opportunity. Social justice. That’s what I focused on most in law school, public policy. I had a couple of prospects for work in Honolulu that would have been more along those lines, but then the opportunity came up with EarthDefense on Maui.”

“And you couldn’t resist,” Maddie suggested.

He smiled at her. “No, I couldn’t. I’ve never wanted to live in Honolulu, and both those jobs had other drawbacks besides. But I really liked the people and the whole mission at EarthDefense, and after being so far away from home for so long it’s great being able to hop on the ferry whenever I want. Environmental law wasn’t my first choice, but it’s growing on me.”

“Oh?” Maddie beamed at him approvingly. “As an ecologist, I heartily approve. Somebody has to preserve the natural resources of the islands, or the economic issues will be a moot point. And if we don’t stop climate change, so will social justice. Get to work, Nakama!”

“Hey, this is the first whole weekend I’ve taken off in a month!” Kai protested. “I usually only get one night in, and lately I’ve spent most of my downtime trying to straighten Gloria out.”

His mind flashed with an unwelcome image of his beloved baby sister screaming profanities at him, and his insides roiled with the sick sense of worry that had become second nature. He shouldn’t have mentioned the topic — he had wrecked his own mood just when he and Maddie were finally getting a light-hearted vibe going. But Gloria was never far from his thoughts.

When he’d first come home last summer she’d treated him like her hero, just as she always had. So when the trouble started and his parents had asked for his help, he’d been certain he could fix everything.

Wrong.

Oh, the carnage.

God help him. He’d made things so much worse. Whatever Gloria thought of him now, he was definitely no longer her hero. They’d been apart for so long, and she’d grown up so much, he had no idea how to relate to her, how to deal with the changes in her. Now his ordinarily happy family was spiraling into chaos. Last weekend his grandmother, whom everybody respected, had seen Gloria’s paramour pawing up another girl behind a neighbor’s house, and Nana had reported the incident to her granddaughter only to be screamed at and called a liar.

“Gloria’s not stupid,” Maddie assured him, looking absurdly confident of the fact.

Kai felt himself bristling. What could Maddie possibly know about the situation? She had been around his teen sister for what, one day? Of course Gloria wasn’t stupid, but that didn’t mean her judgment wasn’t pathologically impaired. Growing up was one thing, but for his sweet baby sister to go straight from wearing frilly princess outfits to being possessed by multiple demons couldn’t possibly be normal! He frowned. “Do you have any idea what a piece of work this guy is that she’s so crazy about?”

Maddie had the nerve to smile slightly. “Love can be blind.”

“It’s not love!” he pronounced. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not that! She’s going to get herself hurt.” He felt his face growing hot. He drew in a deep, slow breath to calm himself. “You know, I could count on one hand the number of times I seriously thought about resorting to physical violence. And every time had something to do with one of my sisters.”

Maddie laughed. But her expression soon turned serious again. “I believe the cracks in this guy’s armor are starting to show, Kai, but you can’t speed that up. You can only slow it down by forcing her to defend him. I realize nobody asked me, but if you did ask me, I’d say just drop the subject. She’ll break up with him soon enough.”

Kai kept his mouth shut. Similar points had been made and rebutted across his family’s dinner table for weeks now. Nana agreed with Maddie, believing that Gloria needed the space to learn from her own mistakes. Kai was more sympathetic with his father, seeing a simpler solution in encouraging the guy to surf solo at Polihua beach, then waiting for his corpse to wash up. Malaya’s views alternated with the wind, but lately she’d been leaning toward the corpse idea.

Maddie turned to the window and rubbed at the condensation on the glass with her forearm. Now that the boat was moving at a faster clip, the raindrops on the outside were being whisked away by the wind, permitting a poor to marginal view of the Au'au Channel in the dimming light of sunset. After a few moments of what was probably a fruitless search for a whale spout, she pivoted back to face him.

“I keep thinking about our conversation last night,” she said in an unexpectedly playful tone. “And I can’t believe how many things I’m dying to know about you that I didn’t ask. So now that I have you captive for a while, I’m determined to run through the list.” Her gray eyes glinted at him with a hint of their old mischief, and he felt an instant pang in his chest that surprised him. Her ability to attract him physically was one thing. But the direct pull she could exercise so effortlessly over his heartstrings was another. How could she be so deeply entangled in his emotions after having been absent from his mind for so long? He wasn’t entirely sure what he had felt for her back then, but whatever it was, it had obviously been strong.

“Knock yourself out,” he challenged.

She smiled. “First of all, where exactly did you go to college? You just keep saying Utah.”

Kai braced himself. Here it came.

He knew that answering even the most basic questions about his life on the mainland would require an extensive explanation, more so to Maddie than to most people, because she was starting out with a false presumption about him. That was entirely his fault, and he was expecting to have to set the record straight — and to suffer the consequences. He just wished he’d put a little more effort, in the last twenty-four hours, into planning how best to do that.

“BYU,” he answered. “Brigham Young University.”

Maddie blinked. “Oh. So, you’re Mormon? Or part of your family is?”

She sounded surprised, but not scandalized. That was encouraging. “No, and yes,” he replied, measuring his words like any good attorney. “That branch of the family are all LDS: Latter Day Saints. I wasn’t raised that way, as you know. The Nakamas are Buddhist and Nana is Catholic and my parents never attended any particular church on Lana'i that I can remember.” All true, he praised himself, technically.

He paused a moment, debating with his conscience. He wasn’t ashamed of the truth. It wasn’t even a secret. Any random adult on Lana'i could probably tell Maddie his entire family history. The truth wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he’d kept it from her before, when it might actually have mattered to her. The more he thought about his selfishness, the more unforgivable it seemed. But he couldn’t bear the thought of making her angry with him now, just as they were on the brink of reconnecting again. And although he had no way of knowing how this Maddie might react to the revelation, he knew damned well that that Maddie would not only have his head on a platter, she’d put the platter on a pike, put the pike in the ground, and then stand there stamping her feet and screaming at his severed head…

Surely it could wait.

“Are we talking about your mother’s side of the family or your father’s?” this perfectly reasonable-looking Maddie asked.

Kai answered evenly and without hesitation, as per his legal training. “My father’s.” Then he added, smoothly linking two unrelated topics, “There are LDS churches all over the islands. They were the first missionaries on Lana'i, you know.”

“I know,” Maddie replied, still looking thoughtful. “So, you said you got a scholarship, and you went to BYU for undergrad and law school. But you don’t consider yourself LDS?”

He shook his head. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Growing up in Lana'i City, he hadn’t thought of the small number of Latter Day Saints in town as being any different than any other church or temple-goers. However, if growing up on a 141-square-mile island was as close as one could get to growing up inside a bubble, spending seven straight years in Provo, Utah ranked a close second. It was not until he had been unleashed onto the secular island playground of Maui a mere six months ago that he had begun to see his family’s religion as others saw it.

He could only assume that Maddie’s having spent most of her life in the Midwest and South would not bode well for him. But he wasn’t going to lie.

“They first invited me to fly out and spend the summer with them when I was thirteen,” he explained. “I have a lot of extended family in Provo, and they were all very warm and welcoming. I really bonded with a few of my cousins, and so I kept going back. When it came time to look at colleges, BYU seemed like a no-brainer. I had the chance to go to school on the mainland at hardly any cost to my parents, and I had plenty of family and friends close by.”

“Weren’t they hoping to convert you?” Maddie asked.

Kai smiled a little. Maturity had changed many things about Maddie. Lack of subtlety wasn’t one of them.

“Well, duh,” he replied in kind. “Of course they were. It’s an evangelical faith, and it’s not like I had anything else going on in that department. Nothing would make them happier than my joining their church, and I did try to keep an open mind. But in the end, I just couldn’t make myself believe everything I was supposed to believe.”

He braved a deeper look at her. She didn’t seem to have drawn any conclusions about him yet, but her interest was definitely piqued. He wondered if she professed any particular religion herself. She didn’t use to, but that could be either good or bad for him.

He took a breath. He might as well get it over with. If she was going to dismiss him as a weirdo, so be it. That would be her problem.

“That said,” he continued, strengthening his voice. “I do admire the way they live. There’s so much strength and support in the LDS community, and the people have a certain zest for life and capacity for joy that’s hard to explain. After a while I realized that the lifestyle suited me better than I would have guessed. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have stayed in Provo as long as I did.” Although, he added silently, the last three years were definitely pushing it.

Maddie sat up straighter. Behind her out the window, Kai saw the distinctive spray of a whale plume in the distance.

“So you don’t have to be an LDS member to go to BYU?” she asked. “Can you be any religion?”

Kai chose his words carefully. “There’s no requirement to profess any certain religion, no. But you do have to agree to abide by the honor code, which follows some of the basic LDS principles about lifestyle and values.”

Kai looked hopefully for any signs of disinterest on Maddie’s part, as now seemed an excellent time to change the subject. Unfortunately, she appeared fascinated.

“Like, not drinking alcohol? Caffeine?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

“So, you went along with that? The whole time?”

“Yes.”

Maddie’s eyes widened slightly. He couldn’t tell if she was impressed or merely amused.

“I didn’t really need to ask that,” she said, flashing him a knowing look. “Your sense of justice would never allow otherwise, would it? If you agreed to it, you’d do it. If you didn’t agree, you wouldn’t sign on and cheat — you’d more likely lead some official protest.”

Kai felt that “laid bare” feeling again. That is, in fact, exactly what he would do.

“So what else was in the honor code?” Maddie pressed. “What else couldn’t you do?”

“Whale!” Kai cried, pointing.

Maddie whirled around. “Where?” she asked with frustration. “I don’t see anything.”

The last traces of white spray had long since floated back into the sea, but under the circumstances, Kai felt no guilt. After all, there was a good chance they’d see another one. In any event, she had forgotten her question. “Keep looking that way,” he advised.

Maddie sat quietly, staring, and he sent up fervent hopes the whale would reappear. It was a lousy time to whale watch. The sinking sun had left both the sky and the waves a dull grayish color, and although the rain had let up, the surface of the water was etched with white chop, making the spouts harder to distinguish on the horizon.

“Oh, there it is!” she cried happily, pointing herself.

Kai looked in the direction she indicated. “I see it!” he replied, gratified. But the whale had moved farther away, and even though Maddie kept her eyes glued to the window for some time, she saw nothing more. Finally, with a sigh of disappointment, she turned back to him.

“What were we saying now?” she asked.

“I was thinking about the whale game,” he answered, launching into the first on a list of diversions he had come up with while she was preoccupied. But when he faced her, he did a double-take. At some point while looking out the window, she had removed her hat. That one small change was enough to make his brain play tricks on him — to convince him for an instant that she was someone he’d never seen before. Even with her hair bound up tight in the juvenile-looking braids, the raw beauty of her adult face was jaw-dropping. Yet if asked last week, he would not describe the Maddie he remembered as pretty, even though he remembered other girls as seeming pretty at the same age. How could he possibly fail to see the potential in her? It had to be there, albeit hidden beneath a rat’s nest of red tangles and perpetually smeared dirt. Was he freakin’ blind?

“I used to win the whale game,” he continued, speaking by rote while his mind wandered, “And you used to accuse me of lying.”

Maddie looked confused for only a second. Then her lips drew slowly into a wide smile.

Such full, sumptuous, rosy lips…

Kai made a concerted effort to redirect his thoughts.

“I remember the whale game,” she said devilishly.

Kai smiled back at her. They would climb to the top of a good lookout during the winter months, most often the cliff across from Pu'u Pehe. She would claim the ocean to one side of the rock, and he would take the other. Every spout sighted was worth five points. A tail fluke or other body part counted ten, and grand prize — a full breach — snagged twenty. But the sighting only counted if verified by someone else, which was a problem if there were only two of you and your opponent refused to look, which Maddie sometimes did when she was in a mood. And if she didn’t see it herself, she refused to acknowledge it, even though she knew Kai wouldn’t lie.

Thinking back on it now, the dynamic seemed bizarre. If Kenny or one of the other guys had accused Kai of lying, he would have been angry, and they would have regretted it. But Maddie did believe him, and he knew that.

“Were you lying?” asked the incredibly kissable grown-up lips which were inches away from his and bore no resemblance whatsoever to anything from his childhood memory.

He swallowed and regrouped. “What do you think?”

The woman smirked. “I knew you wouldn’t lie to me,” she answered. Her gray eyes held his, and for a moment he thought he sensed a message in them, almost a plea. It was as if she wanted something, but didn’t know how to ask. Her look of longing was so piercing it nearly drove him to speak, but before he could open his mouth, her expression changed abruptly. She straightened in her seat and replaced the wide-brimmed hat on her head. “But I hated how you always won the damn game,” she finished, scowling at him playfully again.

Kai’s mind spun with confusion. What the hell was that? What did she want?

He had no idea. The only thing he knew for sure was that her agenda did not include any scenario whereby he would derive any benefit from her newly gorgeous body, which was unfortunate in the extreme.

Because he wasn’t at BYU anymore.

“We’ve got to get back to Hulopo'e Beach sometime this weekend,” Maddie suggested brightly. “Maybe we can have a rematch. I’m dying to get my feet wet again. And swim with the dolphins! Do they still come around when people are in the water?”

Kai tried not to imagine grown-up Maddie swimming in the ocean. He failed.

God help him.