Right Place, Wrong Time

Their friend had told Carole he wasn’t going to use the condo this week. She knew Carole wasn’t lying. Their friend had misrepresented his plans. But Gina couldn’t prove it. So she was stuck.

She and Alicia would survive. She was good at making the best of bad situations. When she’d gotten expelled from Our Lady of Mercy in eighth grade for asking why, if God didn’t want people to use birth control, he’d created human beings smart enough invent things like condoms and the pill, she’d quickly thrown together a portfolio of her scribblings and submitted them, along with an application, to the LaGuardia High School of Music and Art, which had seen enough talent in those scribblings—or enough chutzpah in Gina—to grant her a place in the freshman class. When she’d gotten cited for running a red light in Forest Hills a year and a half ago, she’d not only talked the cop out of giving her a ticket but wound up dating him for more than a year. And when he’d broken up with her, complaining that she spent too much time with all her weirdo friends, she’d phoned Bruno, the weirdest of her friends, and told him he would to have to escort her to every party she got invited to until she reached the point where she could think of Officer Kyle Cronin without either sobbing or cursing. It had taken more than a month, and a lot of truly awful parties, but by the time Gina had stopped sobbing and cursing, she’d talked herself into a job as Bruno’s assistant. She didn’t want to model sandals and mules for the rest of her life, after all. She wanted to create sandals and mules, and working for Bruno would give her that opportunity.

Right now, all she wanted to create was a wonderful week for Alicia. So it wouldn’t be perfect. At least it would be good.

She carried her suitcase into Alicia’s room, ignoring the quartet huddling in the kitchen. Alicia sat on her bed, knees tucked against her chest and arms hugging her shins. “When can we go to the beach?” she asked.

“As soon as I unpack.”

“Are those people gonna leave?”

“Some of them. The older ones, I think. We’ll just have to put up with the younger ones.”

“I don’t like the lady,” Alicia said solemnly. “She’s mean.”

She’s a first-class bitch, Gina wanted to say, but then Alicia would scold her for using bad words. “We can steer clear of her.”

“The man is okay, though. He’s very handsome.”

“Is he?” He was a bit too clean-cut and conservative for Gina’s tastes, his apparel obviously expensive and his attitude reeking of superior breeding and privilege. But she would have had to be blind not to notice how handsome he was. She bet his auburn hair would catch fire with red highlights when the sunlight struck it. And his eyes glinted with curiosity and—all right, call it sex appeal. And intelligence. He looked like the sort of person who spent a lot of time deep in thought.

Of course, that could be a pose. He could be a moron, the blonde’s puppet. They were obviously a couple. Not married, though. Neither wore wedding bands. Besides, if they were married, the blonde’s parents wouldn’t be talking about his sleeping on the sofa.

Then again, Gina knew married people who slept apart. In particular, Ramona and Jack Bari, Alicia’s embattled parents. Neither of them was wearing a wedding band these days.

Great. She’d brought Alicia to St. Thomas to get her away from her dysfunctional parents for a week. Was the poor kid going to wind up spending that week in the company of another dysfunctional couple?

“I’m almost done,” Gina announced, pulling a pair of black jeans and a wraparound silk skirt from the suitcase and carrying them to the closet. She and Gina had both packed light, but they’d managed to fill every drawer in the dresser. “Let me put on a swimsuit, and then beach, here we come!”

“Beach, here we come!” Alicia echoed gleefully, shedding the last traces of her distress.

Gina carried her black bikini across the hall to the bathroom. The powwow was still going strong in the kitchen. Shutting the door, she looked around the small room. Her toiletries and Alicia’s already took up most of the counter space. Well, Ethan and Blondie would just have to make do. They were getting the bedroom with the beautiful view; they could keep their toiletries on the windowsill, and they could admire the ocean while they put on their deodorant. And they’d better not hog the bathroom, either. They’d better not take erotic two-hour showers together. She glanced up at the showerhead and sighed, dismayed to see it was one of those adjustable pulsing spouts. Ideal for lovers, she thought sourly.

Her bikini on, she emerged from the bathroom, carrying two beach towels from the shelf above the towel rack. Ethan was entering the living room from the kitchen, but he froze in midstep when he saw her crossing the hall to her bedroom. She halted and stared back at him. “Something wrong?”

He swallowed. “No.”

“Good.” She continued into the bedroom, then glimpsed her reflection in the mirror above the dresser. Her swimsuit wasn’t the most modest in the world, but everything that needed to be covered was covered. If he couldn’t handle her walking around the condo in beachwear, he could move to the Ritz-Carlton with Blondie’s parents.

“All set,” she announced, tossing Alicia a towel and then pulling from the closet shelf the plastic bucket and shovel she’d remembered to pack. “Beach, here we come!”

“Beach, here we come!” Alicia yelled as she scampered out of the room.

HE’D FORGOTTEN the swimsuit part.

Well, he hadn’t forgotten it. He just hadn’t thought about it. And why should he? He’d gone to beaches before—the sandy Long Island Sound beaches at yacht clubs on Connecticut’s south shore, the pebbly peaceful beaches of the lakes dotting the state’s northwest corner, the high-surf ocean beaches of Cape Cod’s National Seashore. Every beach he’d ever been on had included bikini-clad women among the bathers and sun worshipers.

But seeing a bikini-clad woman on a beach was far different from seeing one wandering around a shared apartment. And seeing any bikini-clad woman was different from seeing a bikini-clad Gina Morante.

Feature for feature, Kim had her beaten by a mile. Kim’s beauty was of a quality that would cause the vast majority of heterosexual men to reel in astonishment. Her gently waving, corn-colored hair, her delicate little nose and softly curving lips, her body round in all the right places—she was a perfect ten.

Gina, on the other hand…Her revealing black bikini had made her legs look almost too long, and her breasts were kind of small in proportion to her hips, and her facial features were too pronounced. Yet if Kim was a beauty queen, Gina carried herself like a real queen, chin high, arms swinging, those wide strong shoulders held straight and proud. She radiated…something. He wasn’t sure if it was confidence or sexuality or—damn it, balls. She was tough. Gentle with her niece but fierce with the world—or at least, with that small segment of the world that had tried to oust her from unit 614 for the week.

When she reemerged from her room with the kid, she had the decency to wear a lacy white cover-up over her bikini. It didn’t hide much, but it distracted him from what was underneath. She sent him a smile that had a hint of teasing in it, and swung a bright green toy pail and shovel and a colorful tote bag as she guided her niece out the door.

“That’s taken care of,” Ross Hamilton announced, joining Ethan in the living room. He looked grim and patronizing, as if he considered Ethan an irredeemable loser, too inept to arrange a sensible vacation. “We’ve got our reservation. What a disaster.”

“The reservation?”

“No—this entire situation. You’ll convey our displeasure to your friend Paul, won’t you?”

“I’ll let him know,” Ethan promised. “Do you want me to drive you and Mrs. Hamilton over to the hotel now?”

“I’d like to look around here first,” Delia said as she trailed out of the kitchen with Kim. “We’re not going to stay here, but we can at least check out the place. Because I don’t know how much time we’ll want to spend at Palm Point when those two—people are here,” she concluded, uttering the word as though it were the worst sort of insult. “You may wind up spending most of your time with us at the hotel.” She seemed distinctly cheered by the possibility.

Ethan couldn’t imagine spending most of his time with the Hamiltons at the hotel. He’d rather hang out with a two strangers than with Kim’s pompous parents. If he did ultimately decide to marry Kim, he’d make sure they never lived anywhere near Chevy Chase, Maryland—unless, of course, the Hamiltons moved to Nova Scotia.

“This bedroom is pretty. This is the one you’ll be staying in,” Delia declared as she and Kim wandered into the master bedroom. “Is it clean? Do they just shove the dust around, or do they do a real cleaning, with furniture polish?”

Not wishing to hear her assessment of the room’s cleanliness, Ethan headed out onto the terrace. A breeze drifting up from the water fluttered the palm fronds and distorted the voices of the people enjoying the beach. Off toward the horizon, a rainbow-colored sail bobbed above the water. Closer to the shore, people waded in the water and floated on the surface, snorkeling gear strapped to their heads.

Ethan’s gaze zeroed in on Gina and her niece as they set up shop in the shade of a palm. He told himself he’d spotted them instantly because of the Day-Glo brightness of the kid’s swimsuit, but in fact Gina had attracted his attention. She’d shed the lacy cover-up, and even at this distance, he could see the curve of her back, the wind sifting through her hair.

“She’s not very respectful,” Ross Hamilton noted, sidling up beside Ethan and resting his hands on the railing. Ethan followed his gaze; it led him back to Gina. “Obviously not well-bred. I don’t like her attitude.”

“She probably just felt awkward,” Ethan defended her. “Her friend screwed up, and she was put on the defensive. She’ll be all right.”

“Well, if it doesn’t work out, we’ll get another room at the hotel. But I must say, I’m not thrilled about this unexpected expenditure.”

“I’ll talk to Paul about it.” And say what? That Paul should reimburse Ross Hamilton for the hotel room? This wasn’t Paul’s fault, any more than it was Ethan’s—or Gina’s.

“Delia seems to be making the best of it,” Ross said wryly. “Give her room service and she’s as happy as a duffer who’s just gotten a hole in one. As for that woman…” He gestured toward the beach, where Gina was now on her knees, scooping up sand with her bare hands. Ethan couldn’t see her smile, but he could imagine it. “I’d keep my things locked up if I were you.”

“You believe she’s a thief?” Ethan laughed.

“I don’t know what she is. Neither do you. Don’t let your guard down.”

Ethan wouldn’t—but fear that Gina Morante would abscond with his money and credit cards wasn’t his primary reason. What he had to guard against was the keen awareness she aroused within him. There was no good explanation for it, other than basic hormones, the typical male response to a woman strutting around in skimpy swimwear.

Gina wasn’t his type. She was too urban, too gritty. He liked his women sweet and refined. Not pliant—Kim certainly wasn’t pliant, but she was genteel. Ladylike. Gracious, except when her dander was up. She was elegant, subtle, the sort of woman who made him feel he was the most important man in the world.

So he had an ego. So he liked the way Kim stroked it. He wasn’t going to apologize for being human.

A wisp of laughter spiraled through the air to the terrace. He had no way of tracing it to a particular person, but he suspected it was Gina’s. Hers and her niece’s. Their heads bowed and their knees touching, they dug in the sand, looking not the least bit elegant or refined or subtle.

They were obviously having a blast. And for one brief, incomprehensible moment, Ethan wished he were down there on the beach with them, digging.

CHAPTER THREE

WHEN GINA AND ALICIA returned to the condo, the country clubbers were gone. “Did they leave?” Alicia asked with what sounded like a combination of hope and dread.

Gina found several suitcases in the master bedroom, implying that the younger half of their group intended to stay at the condo with her and Alicia, as they’d said they would. They were probably gone only temporarily, moving the older half into a luxurious hotel room somewhere. “I think we’re stuck with them,” she told Alicia. “But we’ll just go ahead and have our vacation as if they weren’t here.”

She made Alicia shower to wash off all the sand that dusted her arms and legs and clogged the cracks between her toes, then took a quick shower, too. She hadn’t packed a bathrobe—she hadn’t expected to need one—but when she peeked out around the bathroom door, she saw and heard nothing to indicate that Ethan and the cheerleader had returned. Wrapping a bath towel around her, just in case, she darted across the hall to the bedroom she and Alicia were now sharing. She was used to living alone in her studio apartment in Chelsea, where as long as the shades were drawn shut she could move around her home wearing as much or as little as she wished. Of course, she would have been discreet even if she’d been sharing Carole’s condo only with Alicia. Seven-year-old nieces should never be flashed by their aunts. But wearing a large bath towel was as discreet as she needed to be for Alicia.

She slipped into a light cotton shift, rubbed some moisturizing lotion into her cheeks and her legs and grabbed her purse. “There’s a restaurant at the hotel just down the beach,” she informed Alicia. “You ready for dinner?”

Unlike their housemates, she and Alicia lacked wheels. Fortunately, the restaurant she had in mind was a short ways down a path that was part boardwalk and part brick, lined with beach grass, sand and palm trees. Since she didn’t have to drive home afterward, Gina happily indulged in a tall, frosty piña colada along with her grilled grouper and vegetables. Alicia wolfed down a burger, a basket of fries and a dish of vanilla ice cream with butterscotch sauce. However many cookies she’d devoured before they’d left for the beach, the snack hadn’t interfered with her appetite.

During the early days of Ramona’s marital crisis, Gina’s sister had confided that Alicia wasn’t eating much. The poor kid had lost a couple of pounds during the past spring, and she didn’t have any weight to spare. But her appetite seemed fine right now. Even the invasion of strangers into their condo hadn’t upset her enough to keep her from enjoying her dinner. Gina was grateful for that.

“I like the way it smells,” Alicia said as they strolled back along the boardwalk toward Palm Point. She held Gina’s hand and added a little skip to her step. “It smells hot.”

“It is hot,” Gina pointed out. “I think what you’re smelling is the ocean and all the plants and flowers.”

“This isn’t the ocean,” Alicia argued. “The ocean is gray.”

“Up north it is. Down here it’s turquoise. I guess this is actually a sea, anyway. The Caribbean Sea.”

“The Carrybeaner Sea,” Alicia said. Gina didn’t bother to correct her. “Can we do that thing with the tubes tomorrow? What’s it called? The thing with the masks and the tubes.”

“Snorkeling. Sure.” Gina pointed to a cabanalike building on the pool patio near the beach. “We can rent some equipment there.”

“Is it hard?” Alicia peered up at her bravely. “I want to do it anyway, but is it hard?”

“No. It’s really easy.” Gina had tried snorkeling a couple of years ago, when she and a couple of friends had spent a long weekend at a lakeside inn in the Poconos Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania. The most interesting marine life they’d seen through their masks had been minnows flashing past them and underwater reeds that billowed and danced every time had Gina kicked her flippered feet. It had been fun—and very easy. Alicia knew how to swim; snorkeling would come naturally to her.

Alicia sighed. “I love it here. Can we stay forever?”

Gina might have argued that Alicia hadn’t been in St. Thomas long enough to fall in love. She suspected that what her niece loved was being far away from her feuding parents. “I wish we could stay here forever, too,” she admitted. “No more work, and no more school for you—” a prospect that roused a cheer from Alicia “—and every day at the beach. And dinner at a restaurant every night. I could get into that.”

“Then let’s stay!”

“But we’d run out of money,” Gina pointed out. “And after a while you’d miss your friends.” She didn’t dare suggest Alicia would miss her parents. “And you’d never learn algebra.”

“You can teach me. What’s algebra?”

“It’s a kind of math you have to learn in ninth grade.” And then never use again, Gina thought, although she actually did use math a fair amount in designing shoes. Not algebra specifically, but she supposed all those years she’d spent in high school, learning trig and history and the periodic table, did her as much good as the classes she’d taken in design and sculpture and color theory.

They had reached the Palm Point pool, which gave off a faint whiff of chlorine. The sky stretched salmon pink above them, and the tide carried a constant breeze in on the waves. If Gina hadn’t brought Alicia with her to St. Thomas, she’d probably be only just getting ready to go out now. She’d have located a club where she could stay until closing time, consuming fruity tropical drinks and dancing until she was sweaty and every muscle in her body ached. She loved dancing, especially with people who smiled, laughed and danced as enthusiastically as she did. She never went to clubs to pick up guys. She just wanted to enjoy the music with them.

But strolling through the humid tropical evening with Alicia had its own satisfactions, most of them at least as gratifying as dancing at a club would have been. Maybe she’d teach Alicia how to dance, and they could blast songs on the radio in the condo and dance around the living room.

No, they couldn’t. Not with Ethan and What’s-her-face sharing the unit.

Ethan and What’s-her-face were still gone when Gina let Alicia and herself into the condo. They’d unpacked their things in the master bedroom, though. Gina was going to hate spending her week so conscious of them, alert to their presence and their absence, wondering when they would arrive and when they would depart. Alicia seemed more relaxed about the arrangement, however. She flopped onto the sofa, turned on the TV and flipped through the channels until she found a Spanish-language station. A variety show was on—lots of showgirls in skimpy outfits with fluffy feathers attached in strategic places, everyone speaking machine-gun-rapid Spanish. Alicia giggled. “We get this channel at home,” she said.

“Good. Maybe you’ll learn some Spanish,” Gina suggested, crossing to the kitchen for a can of soda. Swinging open the fridge, she spotted a six-pack of beer that hadn’t been there before—a local brew with Bluebeard the pirate on the label—as well as a red-waxed sphere of Gouda and a jar of olives. Ethan and Blondie must have gone shopping. Their grocery list clearly differed from Gina’s, which had included such gourmet delicacies as cornflakes, milk, peanut butter, bread and bananas.

The beer tempted. What would those people do if Gina helped herself to a bottle? Would they bill her? Short-sheet her bed? Toss her over the balcony?

She’d had enough roommates in her life—starting with her sister, Ramona, and including fellow students at the Rhode Island School of Design, a couple of apartment mates boasting various levels of neatness, consideration and integrity, and six other people one summer when a friend had talked her into participating in a group rental in Southampton. Every Friday, she’d spent two hours on an overcrowded train to reach their overcrowded bungalow three miles from the beach, where she’d slept on a mattress on the floor and argued with a ditzy platinum-blond wanna-be actress who was always leaving her shoes in the middle of the kitchen floor and a junior stockbroker who had loud sex with a different woman every night, and a social-climbing gay couple who bickered incessantly about which parties to crash. She still remembered the scream fest that had erupted when the stockbroker had helped himself to the gay guys’ orange juice. World War Three would not be so cataclysmic.

No, Gina wouldn’t take a bottle of beer. The last thing she wanted Alicia to witness this week was a fight.

She popped open a can of her own Diet Coke, wandered back into the living room, settled on the sofa next to Alicia and kicked off her sandals. She didn’t want to watch Mexico’s answer to the Rockettes, so she flipped through the channels until she found a nature show on yaks.

“This looks good,” Alicia said, snuggling up to Gina.

Gina arched her arm around her precious niece and planted a kiss on Alicia’s silky black hair. “It looks great,” she said, settling back into the cushions and grinning.

ETHAN COULD COME UP with an extensive list of reasons for his insomnia: a strange bed, a strange room, a strange climate. Jet lag—although flying south and losing only one hour shouldn’t have thrown him off that badly. Irritation with Kim’s parents—that was a likely culprit. Irritation with Kim. Guilt over being in bed with her after implying to her parents that he would sleep on the couch. Guilt over being in bed with her and not wanting to make love.

Awareness of Gina Morante.

He felt guilt about that, too. Major guilt. Kim slept soundly on her half of the bed, the familiar scent of her face cream wafting into the air around him. But he picked up a different scent, faint, almost subliminal. Gina’s scent.

Kim hadn’t seemed upset when he’d gently rebuffed her attempt to seduce him. “I’m beat,” he’d explained, a perfectly reasonable excuse. He’d endured a long flight with a ninety-minute layover in Atlanta, the stress of driving on the wrong side of the road, the much greater stress of behaving courteously toward Kim’s overbearing parents, the hauling of luggage to the unit in Palm Point, the scaring up of a suitable hotel room at a resort down the road, more driving, stocking up on drinks and snacks, unpacking the groceries and the suitcases, dressing for dinner, enduring a three-hour meal with the Hamiltons, complete with aperitifs and a fifty-year-old bottle of wine, listening to Ross and Delia describe all the far superior resorts where they had vacationed over the years and bobbing and weaving through an interrogation concerning Ethan’s politics, which were located a good few miles to the left of Ross Hamilton’s. Ethan and Kim had dropped her parents off at their hotel and returned to Palm Point at around eleven. He hadn’t been lying to her when he’d said he was too tired to do anything more than brush his teeth and fall into bed.

Falling into bed was easy. Falling asleep proved a much greater challenge.

He pictured Gina in her narrow bed across the hall. He pictured her niece in the other bed. What kind of woman vacationed with her niece? Gina seemed too funky to be an aunt. Aunts didn’t wear toe rings, did they?

He tried to imagine Kim wearing a toe ring, then chastised himself for comparing her with Gina. They were two different women. Two very different women. Kim was a human resources executive at an insurance company in Hartford. Gina Morante looked like a chichi sales clerk at a SoHo boutique, or maybe a waitress at one of the trendier midtown restaurants. Kim wore tailored suits and dresses to work every day. The only kind of dress Ethan could imagine Gina wearing would be short, sheer or both. To hide those legs of hers would be a crime.

And he was a bastard for even thinking such a thing while his almost-fiancée slept beside him.

He drifted in and out of a slumber until sounds beyond the door alerted him that Gina and her niece had arisen. He remained in bed, thinking he might sleep more easily if they were in the kitchen, at the opposite end of the apartment. But when he closed his eyes, he was kept from sinking into dreamland by a memory of them as they’d looked from the balcony yesterday, digging in the sand, bowing their heads together and laughing.