Life Is A Beach: Life Is A Beach / A Real-Thing Fling. Pamela Browning

advice and, probably, help. But then, Okeechobee City was a small town. Miami Beach was not.

      He turned his attention back to the woman in the water. She was floating amid the flotsam, including but not restricted to a tangle of dirty fishing line, and assorted fish parts. “Um, ma’am?”

      “Yes?”

      “Did you really say that you don’t have on anything but your underwear?” he asked.

      “Do we have to keep talking about it?” she said.

      He was sure that this was a rhetorical question, so he decided to change his tack. “You can’t stay in there forever.”

      “Wait and see,” Karma said, and he thought she looked kind of comical in her determination. The key parts of her anatomy that he could see under the surface of the water looked nicely shaped and tan. Why they were tan, he could only speculate. Maybe she did a lot of topless sunbathing, like some of the models he and his companions of the night before had seen on South Beach yesterday. He tried not to think about Karma with no top on, but the image stuck in his mind.

      As if she could read his thoughts, Karma hugged the life ring to her chest, covering up what was interesting him. “I’ll come out when it gets dark. I’ll slink away into the night. Look, why don’t you forget you ever met me? I’m sure you can find another matchmaker in this town.”

      Slade had no interest in shambling through the whole dating service sign-up process again. It was embarrassing enough to have to enlist help to find a wife in the first place. Besides, at the moment he was fascinated by Karma O’Connor, though he couldn’t quite figure out why. Mascara was running down her cheeks in rivulets, and she’d lost an earring. But with her hair plastered to her head like that so that he wasn’t distracted by her wealth of curls, he could better assess her beauty. And Karma was beautiful. Her complexion was pink-and-white and flawlessly textured; her nose was aristocratically narrow. She also had very white and very straight teeth. As a connoisseur of horseflesh, he knew you could tell a lot about an animal by its teeth.

      This, however, was a woman. A woman in distress. He said as comfortingly as he could, “Don’t go anywhere. I’m going to get a robe and throw it down to you.”

      Karma opened her mouth, then shut it abruptly just prior to being sloshed by the backwash from the propeller of a passing outboard. Before she took it into her head to object, Slade took off at a trot back toward Toy Boat, passing Phifer on the way.

      “Fool woman. Had no business riding a bike on the dock,” grumbled Phifer, who by this time was tossing fish heads to a circling flock of gulls.

      When Slade returned with one of Mack’s monogrammed white terry cloth robes, Karma had moved to the piling and had commenced clinging to a metal ring affixed to the post.

      Slade bundled the robe into a neat ball. “I’m going to throw this down, and you can put it on. Then you can come out of the water,” Slade said.

      Karma said something like “Hmmpf,” and he tossed the robe down. He tactfully turned his back as she put it on, but he heard her splashing around and it seemed to take her an overly long time to get into the robe. “Everything all right?” he called over his shoulder.

      “You must realize,” she said, “that this thing has soaked up a ton of water. Yes, I’ve got my arms through the sleeves, if that’s what you want to know, but I think it’s going to pull me under. Like an anchor.”

      Slade turned around. She was suitably swathed, but she was now riding slightly lower in the water and her expression was anything but pleasant.

      He knelt down on the dock, held his hand out to her. She grabbed it.

      He supposed that it was some peculiar flight of fancy that tied in with his earlier fantasy about finding the right woman for him, but all the same, he could have sworn that a bolt of electricity flashed through their connected hands. It was so strong that he almost let go.

      But he didn’t let go. He hung on for dear life even as he tried to sort this thing out. He concluded as he gave a mighty heave and yanked her up onto the dock that he had been mistaken. He couldn’t possibly have felt anything. He was out of his mind for thinking so. He wasn’t at all attracted to this woman. She wasn’t his type.

      And yet when she stood dripping in front of him, her eyes searching his face, he did feel something, an emotion that he finally identified as relief. No harm had come to her and he was glad. That was all.

      “I guess I can say goodbye to that bike,” Karma said ruefully.

      “Well, maybe not. I’ll see if the marina manager can do anything about it,” he told her.

      Karma shrugged, sending a veritable Niagara sluicing over his bare feet. “Come on,” he said, shaking his feet to rid them of water. “I reckon we can find you something warm and dry to wear.”

      She walked glumly and wetly beside him back to Toy Boat. “I brought some things,” she said. “They’re at the bottom of the bay along with my bike.”

      He stepped down onto the boat first, handed her onto the deck. “What things did you bring?”

      “Crackers. Spicy tofu-cilantro garlic spread. Things like that.”

      Slade had never heard of spicy tofu-cilantro garlic spread, but it sounded downright unappetizing. He hadn’t thought this was a social call. Wasn’t it supposed to be business? To videotape him so she’d have something to show her female clients as a kind of sales pitch? He narrowed his eyes at her. She was now dripping all over the teak deck.

      “Maybe you could, uh, wring yourself out,” he ventured.

      She eyed the yards and yards of wet white terry cloth doubtfully. She made as if to wring out one side of the robe, but he quickly directed her toward the side of the boat. “Over the side,” he said helpfully. “If you don’t mind. These teak decks take a heap of maintenance, according to Mack.”

      “Who’s Mack?”

      “The cousin who belongs to this boat.”

      “And where is he?”

      “I dunno. He made it rich selling off his share of the family land, used the money to buy this boat and a lot of other things. I expect he and Renee are flying around in his Lear jet.”

      “A Lear jet,” Karma repeated.

      “Yeah, well, Renee hates flying in it.”

      “That’s why it’s important to find the right wife,” she said. “That’s why you came to Rent-a-Yenta. So that you wouldn’t find someone who isn’t suited to you, that is.” She reached up and fluffed her hair, which was already drying in the breeze off the bay.

      Slade thought it was cute that even now, sodden and miserable and annoyed about losing her bike and the tofu whatever, this woman could still inject a plug for her business into the conversation.

      “Let’s go into the master stateroom. Mack’s wife’s clothes are there. Maybe some will fit you.” He realized when she shot him a skeptical look out from under her eyelashes that this might sound like a come-on. “You can go in there alone. I’ll stay right here on deck like a gentleman.”

      She looked heartened by this statement. “No funny business?” she asked.

      “No funny business. I’ll even leave the boat, walk over to the marina office and see if I can rustle up the head honcho around here, ask him about your bike.”

      “That might be a good idea,” she allowed, and so as she made her way through the salon, scattering a narrow path of water droplets on the woven-to-order rug, Slade went to find the marina manager, who might know what you had to do to salvage sunken bicycles.

      WOW, KARMA THOUGHT AS HER eyes popped at the sumptuous master stateroom. Slade Braddock certainly wasn’t slumming. The boat looked like a picture right out of an upscale travel magazine, the kind of publication she’d read maybe once in her whole