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

She sighed. Pushed her shoulders back. ‘Keeping it bound and gagged gives it too much power. Maybe it’s time I started to lighten up about it all. ‘ Take some of the control back. ‘Get back to a normal life.’

‘Fair enough. What will you do now?’ he asked. ‘To make a living? To have that normal life?’

It was a good question. Her dark years were behind her. Her list was done. She had the rest of her future to think about. She blew out the residual tension from their previous question. ‘I have no idea … The past two years has been all about recovery. It’s been a day by day kind of thing.’ She stared at him, blank. ‘I suppose running a bottle shop is out of the question?’

His glare was colder than the water.

‘Sorry. Bad joke.’ Bleakness filled her. ‘I feel like all I’ve done is drink and then not drink.’

‘You have a decade to catch up on.’ He looked hard at her. ‘What about uni? It’s never too late.’

Beth frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Mature aged students are perfectly common now.’

Taverns, parties, temptation. ‘I don’t think I’d be a good fit on campus.’

His mouth tightened as he realised. ‘Online, then?’

Something she could study in the comfort of her own cavernous warehouse. In the silence of her own lonely hours. ‘What would I study?’

‘What do you enjoy?’

She blinked at him.

‘What about your painting?’

She shook her head. ‘That’s something I do for therapy. It won’t earn me a living.’

‘Why not? Maybe you could help others like you helped yourself. Give back.’

Her head came up. Giving back rang all kinds of karmic bells. Art therapy. She hadn’t known such a thing existed until she’d needed it. But it did. And it worked.

Marc shrugged. ‘There’d be no shortage of people needing assistance.’

Purpose suddenly glowed, bright and promising on her horizon. She could give back. Lord knew she’d had her fair share of assistance from others who gave their time. She chewed her lip. ‘I could. That could work. Something simple that will help people.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t want to rule the country any more?’

Alcoholism had taken more from her than just years. ‘If I can just rule me I’ll be happy.’

He stared at her long and hard. Compassion filled his eyes. His voice was low and sad. ‘You’ll get there, Beth. I believe in you.’

A deep sorrow washed through her. ‘You always did.’

Silence fell. Beth shook her head to chase off the blues she could feel settling.

‘What would you change?’ Marc’s voice came out of the dim morning light, tossing her earlier words back at her. ‘If you had the opportunity to do ten years ago over again. What would you do differently?’

Ah. This one she’d pondered plenty and she’d refined it during some of their long silences in the water. She bent to re-soak the blanket and thanked God that she had no sleeve on which to be displaying her heart. ‘I wouldn’t have put so much importance on what others said. I definitely wouldn’t have encouraged Damien’s advances.’

She kept her eyes away from his as she stretched the blanket out across the whale’s back. ‘I wouldn’t have listened to …’ Your mother. But now, more than ever, she couldn’t say that. There was already so much lost between them. Vindicating herself would condemn them. ‘I wouldn’t have shut you out of my life.’

‘You didn’t.’

She looked up. ‘I did.’

He shook his head. ‘I mean you didn’t succeed. I kept a low profile but that didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of everything you did. Where you went. Right up until school ended and I lost you, I was watching.’

Watching. Beth stared. She bled for the near-man who’d been so hurt but still so very loyal. Maybe despite himself. Her voice was tiny. ‘I thought you were gone.’ Present-absent in the way only a teen could be.

‘No. I was still there.’

Her chest tightened. ‘Why?’

He considered her from under lashes crusted with salt. ‘We were friends. Friends don’t abandon each other.’

Beth’s cheeks flamed.

‘I wasn’t having a dig, Beth.’

She shook her head. ‘I know. But it doesn’t change what happened.’ She stared at him. ‘You deserved better.’

You still do. Her tight heart pushed rich pulses of blood around her body and they throbbed past her ears. Her eyes stuck fast to his. She made her decision.

‘I need to tell you something. About my last days drinking.’ She took a second to gather courage by trailing down to the whale’s exposed tail and draping the soaked blanket over it. Water cascaded over the vicious arrow-head wound.

She took a deep breath and then met his eyes again. ‘I forgot you, Marc. When I was deep in the hands of my addiction, I kind of. blocked you out. For years.’

His nostrils flared. His hands stilled.

‘After graduation I thought about you every day. Wondered how you were. What you were doing. Thought about what I had done. I thought about the connection we used to have, the stories we had in common. Every day I tried to recreate with my husband what I’d had with you, and it just wasn’t working. As I slipped further and further into numbness I think I just …’ She swallowed and took a shuddery breath. ‘Remembering you hurt. So I just stopped.’

Those beautiful hands tightened on his towel. Just as they’d tightened in her hair while he’d kissed her. Last night. All those years ago.

‘I can understand that.’ Hurt thickened his already gravelly voice.

She shook her head. Forced herself to continue. ‘One day I woke up and there you were, blazing and persistent at the front of my mind. Like a ghost with a mission. Except I was the ghost. And I realised I’d been. non-existent for so long. I remembered how you used to believe in me no matter what but, this time, instead of that making me sad, hurting, it made me determined.’

She turned her eyes back to his. ‘You gave me strength, Marc. I stopped drinking because of the memory of the boy who had so much belief in me. More than I’d ever had in myself. And because of the goodness in you that I’d always wished was mine. The strength of character.’

His eyes dropped away, which meant she could breathe.

‘I just wanted you to understand the part you played in pulling me out of the morass. I can’t thank you because you didn’t even know it was happening. But I can acknowledge it. And I think I understand it now. What it meant.’

She clamped nervous hands together. ‘Drinking helped me forget how I’d treated someone I loved. How the choices I made snowballed into a lousy life with a lousy husband and a lousy future. That I’d done that to myself. But the memory of my feelings for you saved me when everything was lost. When I was.’

His frown folded his handsome face and his jaw twitched with tension.