Bachelor Dad, Girl Next Door

‘Sure.’ He levered off his runners and hooked his fingers into the heels. Sand sifted between his toes in a soft caress. When Terri moved away, he fell into step with her.

The gentle sibilance of the waves filled a small silence. He felt an odd mixture of relaxation and intense awareness of every move that she made.

‘You said something important to me that night.’ Her voice was deliciously husky, easy to listen to.

‘Now I am worried. Wisdom brewed in a beer bottle.’ He grimaced. Should he be embarrassed or pleased that she apparently remembered something after all? ‘What pearl did I drop?’

‘That one of the hardest lessons is not being able to save everyone.’

‘Ah. Yes.’ An echo of his harsh feelings trickled through his memory. Such bitterness and anger at the senselessness of his cousin’s death. What chance had Terri had to soothe his pain? Yet she’d tried after he’d pushed everyone else away. And she’d succeeded to a degree. Their kiss had distracted him. It was that he remembered most clearly about that night, not his grief.

‘You were right. Failure can be hard to live with.’ She sounded sombre. Was she thinking about her husband? Had she tried to save him after the explosion? He was trying to frame a diplomatic question when she said, ‘You were talking about Kevin, weren’t you?’

A shadow darkened his mood for a moment. His cousin had been young, full of promise, full of male bravado—a reflection of himself. ‘Mmm. I was still pretty raw.’

She tilted her head to look at him. ‘You were very close?’

‘We grew up together.’ The simple sentence couldn’t begin to describe their relationship. His throat grew thick. ‘Mum used to say that we were more like twins than cousins.’

They reached the rocks and silently turned to retrace their steps.

She stopped to throw the shell into the water then scrubbed her hands together. When she turned her gaze met his. ‘Dad said you were working on Kevin when he arrived at the scene.’

He’d forgotten that her father had been the local police sergeant at the time. It’d been her father who had pulled him away from Kevin’s body when the paramedics had arrived. A band of stiffness tightened around his larynx. He cleared his throat. ‘It wasn’t enough.’