First Love, Second Chance: Friends to Forever / Second Chance with the Rebel / It Started with a Crush...

‘She’s moving!’ Beth squeezed out unnecessarily. No way would Marc not have noticed. ‘Keep going!’

Adrenalin roared now through her body, warming her and giving her a capacity she never would have believed she had. She leaned hard on the rope and pulled with all her remaining strength, twisting her body and virtually walking—inch by inch—out into deeper water, up around her armpits, towing the enormous beast.

Marc was right there beside her, his neoprene muscles bulging with the force of every pull. Neither of them was suffering quietly and their roars of effort merged with the whale’s to disturb sleeping creatures for a kilometre. The whale suddenly twisted so that she was side-on to the beach, her tail now fully submerged, her body more torpedo-shaped in the water than it had been on the sand. Still rounded where the strap held her firmly. Beth and Marc changed their positions, widened out so that they could contribute to the whale’s slow sideways thrash into deeper water. If the sharks wanted either of them they’d be easy pickings right now. The water lapped at Beth’s breasts.

The whale battered her tail violently, slamming on the water for added purchase. But the miracle of buoyancy meant it was easier to tow half a ton of whale flesh. They did—slowly, painfully. And then—

‘Beth, run!’

Marc dropped his rope and surged away from the manic animal. Beth stumbled and went under as her rope suddenly went slack and Marc hauled her up after him, her throbbing legs pushing against the pressure of the deep water.

The whale twisted and surged and turned the quiet shallows into a spa of froth and bubbles. The rope zinged out of its eyelets with an audible crack and the snatch strap dropped harmlessly away. In the time it took Beth to suck in a painful breath, the whale was free, half submerged, then fully submerged. And then—finally—it sank like an exuberant submarine, surfaced once to grab a euphoric lungful of air and then disappeared silently under the deep, dark surface.

Beth screamed her joy as she ploughed through the water, and then she lurched sideways as something harder and warmer than the whale slammed into her. Marc swung her in a full three-sixty, hoisting her up in his arms and hauling her backwards out of the waist-deep water, whooping his elation. But their momentum and fatigued legs couldn’t hold them and they stumbled down together into the shallows, Marc sinking to his knees and bringing Beth with him.

Tears of pain and exhaustion streamed freely down her face and she pushed uselessly against his body to right herself. But the natural chemicals fuelling her body drained as fast as they had come and left her shattered and shaking. The strength she’d miraculously found just moments ago fled. She sagged back against Marc’s strength, useless.

He collapsed unceremoniously onto his bottom in the ankle-high surf and he dragged an insensible Beth between his wetsuit-clad legs. His hands pulled her more tightly against him. She crawled up into his rubbery shoulder.

‘We did it,’ he repeated hypnotically, as though reassuring a child, stroking her dripping hair and pressing her hard into him. As though she belonged there. Beth squeezed her streaming eyes shut and soaked up the gorgeous feeling of being this close to him. After so many years. She nuzzled in closer. A bad idea, no doubt, but impossible not to. Every accidental touch they’d shared as kids flashed through her mind and she saw, clear as day, how she had evolved from comfortable touching to flirtatious touching and finally experimental touching. Stretching boundaries. Testing boundaries. Testing him.

Their gasping breath was the only thing now disrupting the silence. Marc’s murmurs softened further and started up a senseless whisper against her ear. Not even real words, just sounds. But they did their job; she sagged harder against him and let the trembles come. Elation this time instead of fear or anxiety or—worse—the DTs. A much better kind of tremor.

But they transported her exhausted mind immediately back to a perfect spring day behind the library when Marc had kissed her for the first and only time. His body wasn’t this hard then, or his shoulders this broad, but he’d been on the verge of filling out to the potential she’d always known he had. She’d clung to him then just like this; as if he was saving her life with the hard press of his mouth on hers. The touch of his tongue against hers. And she’d shaken afterwards exactly the same. Except that time she’d been completely alone. The kiss was the last time they’d so much as looked at each other.

The cold water soaking into her body offered a splash of reality. That was a lifetime ago. Before the alcohol. Before she’d abandoned him.

He doesn’t care, she reminded herself. She straightened slightly and went to pull away.

He resisted her pull. ‘God, I’ve missed you, Beth.’

The words were so simple, so brutally whispered hard up against her ear, she wondered if he’d even meant to say them aloud. But he had, and his words screamed for acknowledgement. She let her body sag back into him and wriggled up until her face rested in the crook of his neck, her arm slung around his neck.

He wrapped his arms more firmly around her and just held her, cold and shaking, against his body. Rocking in the icy surf.

It didn’t matter that she’d never been with him like this before—that she’d never let herself be vulnerable like this with anyone—it felt very, very right.

‘I’m so glad you were here,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t have even begun to manage this alone.’

He chuckled but even that seemed to hurt his aching body. It morphed into an amused groan. ‘If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have been here in the first place.’

She lifted her head and looked at him seriously. Eye to eye. Their faces so close. Water still dripped down her skin. ‘I could say the same.’

If not for her treatment of him in that all important final year of school, would he have gone on to study at uni like they’d planned? Would he have been living somewhere other than the remote south coast of the state running a charter company?

‘It is what it is, Beth. You can’t control everything.’

‘Why not?’ she sighed against the warm skin of his throat. Too tired to move and not particularly inclined to. ‘Whose great idea was that? That we have no say in our destiny?’

‘I didn’t say that. Just that sometimes things just. happen. You can’t hold yourself responsible for everything that occurs.’

She crawled in more comfortably. He took her full weight. ‘That sounds an awful lot like you’re accepting my apology, ‘ she whispered.

His broad chest rose and fell beneath her torn-up hands. She held her breath.

‘We were both kids, ‘ he mumbled against her wet hair. ‘We both did things we regret.’

She lifted her head to stare quizzically at him. ‘What do you regret?’

His eyes darkened. Then blanked carefully over. ‘I regret a lot of things.’

Stop talking, Beth. Now! That voice in her head seemed to know exactly where she was going next. She ignored its excellent advice. Her saturated chest heaved. ‘Do you regret kissing me?’

Marc sucked in a breath, and she was too close to him to miss it. She wished she could see his eyes to gauge his reaction. ‘I regret the manner in which I did it,’ he said simply.

Pushing her hard up against the library wall and forcing her lips apart with his? She could see why he might regret that. If not for the fact that she’d been waiting years for him to take the initiative. She just didn’t know it.

The sixteen-year-old tomboy deep inside asked the same honest questions she always had. ‘How do you wish you’d done it?’

His thick voice was strained and it drew her eyes up to his. ‘That’s not a question you can ask me, Beth.’

She lifted her head. But the move cost her. She winced as her over-taxed muscles reacted sharply to the move. ‘Why not?’

‘Because of what you said afterwards. What you made me promise as you pushed me away.’

Don’t ever touch me again. Don’t speak to me again.

She closed her eyes. ‘I was angry. And confused. It never occurred to me that you would actually honour that. ‘ But he had. All damned year.

‘Confused how?’ His tired eyes took on a sharper edge.

‘Because I … ‘ Lord, how to get out of this one. ‘Because it was us. Kissing. It threw me.’

He straightened. ‘Because you hated it? Or because you liked it?’

For all her faults, she’d never been a liar. Not to Marc. But she was proficient at hedging. ‘Are you seriously asking me to rate your kissing prowess?’

‘Do I look like I have any doubts about that?’

Her mouth twisted. ‘No. You always were infuriatingly confident.’

His expression changed in a blink and then was gone. Maybe the moonlight was playing tricks on her, making her see vulnerability that couldn’t possibly be there. Not in that body. Not in this man.

‘It matters to me, Beth. Whether you hated it. Whether I actually damaged our friendship, too.’

Too. Misery came surging back in at the reminder that she’d said the words that destroyed their friendship. Even if she hadn’t set out to. She was only going to ask him to back off for a while. But he’d kissed her and she’d panicked. Those soft lips pressing against hers, forcing hers wider. The hands that had plunged into her hair to hold her captive sent electric sparks through her body and threw her into confusion. The press of his eager body into hers had made her want things she shouldn’t want. The desperate, intense pain in his eyes echoing hers. The thick smoke-like energy he’d been pumping out all around them.

Did she like it?