Moriah's Mutiny

“You’ll be sorry if you do,” he cautioned. “If not tonight, then tomorrow.”

“I never get hangovers,” she told him. She neglected to add that it was because she so seldom drank alcohol.

“A lot of people have lived to regret those words. Especially down in the Caribbean.”

“Do you live here?” Moriah asked with great interest. She already pretty much knew the answer to the question just from looking at him. Tourists were far too easy to spot in their newly purchased vacation clothes, sunburned from head to toe and dead drunk most of the time. Austen was much too comfortable in his surroundings, and his sun-bleached, rebelliously long hair and basic choice of clothes indicated to her that he wouldn’t be flying back to the States for the opening bids at the stock exchange Monday morning.

“Yeah,” Austen responded as predicted. “I’ve been down here about five years. How about you? Do you live here?”

Moriah nearly choked on her drink. Did she live here? In the Caribbean? Really, it was all too funny. What would the other professors in the anthropology department think? “Do I look like I live down here?” she asked in lieu of an answer.

Austen turned her question into an opportunity to give her the once-over again, and he smiled. Moriah kept any comments to herself, as she realized belatedly that she’d set herself up for his ogling.

“No,” Austen answered. “Your sunburn is a dead giveaway.”

“Swell,” Moriah mumbled as she lifted her drink to her lips.

“But,” he hastened to add, “you look like you belong here.”

Moriah gazed at him openly, honestly amazed at his statement. “I do?” she asked softly. A small smile playing about her lips and eyes reflected her genuine pleasure at his compliment.

Austen caught his breath at her expression. She looked even more beautiful than before, her face almost childlike in its innocent delight, as if he had offered her the highest of praise. “Yeah,” he breathed out quietly. “You do.”

Moriah continued to beam. “Thanks, Austen.”

“You’re welcome,” he replied automatically, still entranced by the warmth that emanated from her gray eyes.

For several moments they only gazed at each other as if verbal communication was unnecessary. Then with a start, Austen realized he knew nothing of this woman except that her name was Moriah and she was a damned-nice kisser, and he’d better get his mind in gear if he was going to score any points with her.

“So I guess you’re here on vacation?” he asked lamely, realizing they both already knew the answer to the question. When Moriah nodded as she sipped more of her drink, he continued, trying not to sound like the idiot he must surely appear. “Where are you from?”

“Originally from Newport, Rhode Island,” Moriah informed him. “I grew up there. Now I live and work in Philadelphia.”

“Newport’s a big sailing mecca, isn’t it?” Austen asked, always interested in things nautical.

“There are a lot of big yachts and sailboats up there,” Moriah agreed distastefully. “But boating is something I was never much into, personally,” she added with an edge to her voice, remembering all the nightmarish occasions as a child when the family had gone out on their seventy-two-foot yacht, Teddy’s Toy. Her father had always been determined that his four daughters would be perfect sailors and flawless nautical hostesses, and he’d spent each excursion impressing them with the severity of a drill instructor. Naturally Morgana, Mathilda and Marissa had all passed the tests with flying colors and enjoyed the trips immensely. Moriah, on the other hand, had struggled for years with motion sickness and vertigo, for the most part losing her lunch over the leeward side while her father looked on, shaking his head in disappointment.

Austen detected the bitter note in Moriah’s voice and incorrectly surmised that it was there because she harbored a distaste for people who could afford big yachts and sailboats. Therefore he didn’t pursue the topic, wanting instead to reestablish their earlier humor and ease of communication. “So what do you do in Philadelphia?” he asked in an effort to change the subject.

“I’m a teacher,” Moriah responded proudly, sitting up a little straighter in her chair.

Austen couldn’t help but grin at her, so obvious was her love for her job. It seemed like an appropriate profession for her. He got the impression Moriah was the type of person who would take pleasure in giving something of herself to others. She was probably great with kids, too, he suspected, and with her abundant good humor and self-confidence, she must be a great inspiration to her students. They probably loved her. If he’d had a teacher like her when he was in school, he definitely would have been inspired. Not to mention in love.

“What grade do you teach? What subject?” he asked her. Then impulsively he rushed on. “No, wait. Don’t tell me. Let me guess.”

Moriah sipped her drink slowly and told him, “I’m the most obvious candidate for my position in the world. You’ll guess in a second.”

Austen looked at her once more, taking in not just her gorgeous body this time, but the carefree clothes that encased it, the tumbling wildness of her dark gold hair, the laughing fire in her huge, beautiful eyes. “You have to teach either art or music,” he decided, not sure if the widening of her eyes meant he was right or wrong. “And probably the seventh or eighth grade. Am I right?”

Moriah’s laughter erupted uncontrolled from deep inside her, full and rich and uninhibited. Austen thought it the most wonderful laugh he’d ever heard.

“What?” he demanded with a chuckle. Her mirth was highly contagious. “Am I right?”

His question made Moriah laugh even more, the image of her doing something creative and beautiful just too, too funny to imagine. It was true that there was an abundance of artistic genes in the Mallory DNA, but they’d all been used up by the time she’d come along. She had to be thankful that she’d gotten more than her share of the intellectual ones, though, she ceded, Marissa having been shorted a bit there.

“Oh, Austen,” she finally managed to say through her giggles. “That’s pretty humorous.”

“I guess you’re trying to tell me that my assumption was a little off target.”

“Actually, the only way you could have been further off would be to have placed me at the head of an elementary schoolroom.”

“Look, are you going to tell me what you do for a living, or am I just going to sit here looking like a fool?”

Moriah smiled sweetly at him as she announced, “I’m a professor of cultural anthropology at a Philadelphia university. I teach upper-level and graduate classes in primitive South American cultures, and right now I’m studying different tribes of the Carib Indians, trying to discern their original migration routes from one island to another.”

“Oh,” Austen muttered. Then after a thoughtful swallow of his planter’s punch, he added, “You don’t look much like an anthropologist.”

Moriah’s genuine look of bewilderment told him she thought he was out of his mind. “Of course I do,” she said simply.

“No, you don’t,” he insisted. “I always pictured anthropologists as dry and humorless.”

“I am dry and humorless,” Moriah told him simply.

The realization that she actually believed that struck Austen like a freight train, but his consequent shock prohibited him from coming up with the proper denial. Instead he demanded, “How come you don’t have your hair pulled back and wear glasses like anthropologists are supposed to? Where’s your gray flannel suit and starched white blouse and sensible shoes, hmm?”

Moriah shrugged, and her reply was matter-of-fact. “Actually, I do usually pull my hair back, but after all the salt-water and wind and humidity at the beach today, it just refused to be contained. And I only wear my glasses for close-up work. As for the suit and sensible shoes, well, that’s kind of an outdated fashion statement even for anthropologists. Besides, they’re terribly inappropriate for field study.”

She didn’t seem angry or resentful when she made her statement, Austen thought after she concluded. But there was something, some almost undetectable glimmer in her eyes that indicated she was somewhat resentful about the life she led. She’d delivered her words without malice or defensiveness, just plainspoken, unadulterated fact. But somehow he felt that hers was a hollow, inappropriate description, that the way she did live wasn’t the way she wanted to live. That the person she described herself to be was in fact just a facade to disguise who she really was. What he didn’t understand was why she would want to deny herself that way.

Before he could verbally pursue his suspicions, a shutter suddenly fell over her eyes, and he wasn’t altogether sure that the look he thought he’d seen was ever there. Instead he only said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“No apology is necessary,” Moriah told him honestly, wondering why he should think one was. Everything he’d asserted about anthropologists, save the flannel suit, had been right on the mark as far as she was concerned. And she was every bit as guilty of following the stereotype as her colleagues at the university. She did dress modestly, and she did lack a sense of humor. She knew that because her sisters always complained about her colossal lack of fashion sense and because every time she tried to make jokes among her family or her peers, she was met with either blank stares or condescension. As a result she’d given up just about any attempt to describe the humor she still found in situations, because evidently what she considered funny simply was not.

Austen was silent for a moment, contemplating the puzzle of this beautiful woman, more curious about what made her tick than any person he’d ever met. And in the five years that had passed since he’d moved to the Caribbean, he’d met dozens of strange and wonderful characters. He watched Moriah drain her glass of the sweet pink liquid it held, entranced by the slender length of her throat, inevitably letting his eyes fall to the neckline of her shirt and the subtle swell of her full breasts. A cultural anthropologist. My, my, my. Perhaps if he’d majored in that instead of business he would have wound up a more satisfied man.

But thoughts of the past were behind him now, and as he gazed lustily at the woman beside him, his future was looking brighter. Particularly his immediate future. When two sunburned dancers wearing matching striped rugby shirts fell drunkenly against him with a giggle and a gasp, he turned to Moriah with an idea.

“It’s getting awfully crowded in here. What say we go someplace else? Someplace where there aren’t so many fods.”

Moriah eagerly licked the last of the planter’s punch from her lips and offered him a mild grin, beginning to feel the effects of the mysterious concoction. “Fods?” she asked, drawing her brows down in confusion. “What are fods?”

“Fods are all those tourists you see dressed identically alike so they won’t lose each other in a crowd,” he informed her, trying to ignore what the motion of her tongue did to his body. “It’s a widespread, imported phenomenon down here.”

“I see.” Looking around, Moriah did detect the presence of a number of couples wearing identical sportswear. “It would appear that these fods breed like rabbits,” she noted.

Austen smiled at her culturally anthropological observation. “Virtually overnight,” he concurred. “Come on, I know a better place. There are still a lot of tourists, but they’re cool tourists. They like to hang with us locals. You’ll like it.”

“Gee, I don’t think so, Austen,” Moriah hedged. “The rest of my family is coming down tomorrow morning and I should meet them at the airport.”