Moriah's Mutiny. Elizabeth Bevarly

intimately entwined bodies.

      “Oh,” she said in a very small voice.

      “It’s okay,” he reassured her. “I never leave home without one.”

      Moriah was confused again, and Austen’s strange desire to have a conversation right now was really making her sleepy. “Without one what?” she wanted to know, successfully stifling the yawn she felt threatening.

      But Austen had already started looking for the essential square, foil-covered packet that he always had tucked away in his wallet. As he pushed aside an assortment of business and credit cards, dumping a collection of bar receipts and hastily scribbled phone numbers onto the bedspread, he began to panic. He knew he had one in there, but where had it gone? Yanking out the contents of one of the wallet’s many compartments, he discovered an old photograph that he thought he’d lost, one of his father standing proudly beside the old man’s fishing boat. He smiled warmly and briefly at the picture, then remembered the task at hand. Dammit, where had he put it?

      “Aha!” he cried triumphantly when he finally uncovered the small packet beside a torn, yellowed clipping from the Miami Herald that his mother had sent him some time ago, one about his ex-fiancée. “It’s all right, Moriah, I—” he turned quickly to Moriah, brandishing his find like a trophy “—I found it.” His shoulders drooped in comical defeat.

      The woman who had lain so eagerly and anxiously at his side, the woman who had made him feel giddier and more aroused than he’d ever been in his life, the woman whose dangerous curves had promised the most enervating, exquisite, enlightening road to heaven, was now snuggled up against him like a child, fast asleep.

      Chapter Three

      When Moriah awoke the following morning, it was because a boisterous wrecking crew was slamming a big concrete ball with aching and annoying regularity against the tender membrane beneath her already-shattered skull. In addition to that, something furry and poisonous and foul had found its way into her mouth and died there, rotting away into some sort of linty gelatinous goo that had oozed all over her teeth and tongue. She opened her eyes slowly and painfully, wincing at the stabbing white light of early dawn that pierced her pupils, recoiling at the lurching, nauseating swells that washed up and down in her stomach. This was not a good sign, Moriah thought glumly, wondering where in the hell she was and how she had managed to sleep through the night while all of these terrible things had been happening to her.

      It took her all of five minutes to finally inch onto her back so that she could gaze up curiously at the ceiling. Little by little she took in her surroundings and realized she was in a hotel room, and quite a nice one at that. From the sound of the quiet surf that met her ears through the open French doors to her left, Moriah brilliantly deduced that she must be at the shore. But she hated going to the Jersey shore, she remembered with a puzzled frown. Especially in the summer when it was so crowded. It was summer, wasn’t it? Yes, she was certain that it was. Hadn’t she been planning a vacation a short time ago? she wondered, her muddled brain beginning to function a little more clearly now. She vaguely recalled buying some sunscreen at the cosmetic counter in Wanamaker’s. Heavy sunscreen. Because she was going to be vacationing in…the Caribbean! Yes, that’s it! The Caribbean, that must be where she was. She was supposed to be meeting her sisters on St. Thomas at her hotel on Bolongo Bay Beach. That’s where she was all right. She remembered everything now. Sort of.

      The prospect of seeing her sisters again in the very near future filled Moriah with a new kind of nausea and dread, and as her stomach revolted once more, she realized she had better haul herself up and out and get herself pulled together before they arrived and did it for her.

      With a muffled groan she wrenched her stiff, aching body out of bed, then covered her burning eyes with both hands and stumbled into the bathroom. She leaned her forehead against the cool white tiles of the wall while waiting for the sink to fill with cold water, begging whatever was sloshing and spinning around in her stomach to stay there. When the water reached almost to the rim of the sink, Moriah took a deep breath and then dunked her head into its icy depths, trying to ignore the overflow that swept onto her bare feet. After that, with the assistance of a big glob of blue toothpaste she squeezed weakly onto her toothbrush, she scrubbed away the last remnants of death from her mouth and swallowed three aspirins with a very large glass of water.

      The hot sting of the shower’s spray chased away a good deal of what was left of her hangover, and by the time she had towel-dried her hair, knotted the sash of her pale yellow terry bathrobe around her waist and called room service, Moriah felt almost human again. Of course her sisters were going to be highly perturbed when she wasn’t at the airport to meet them, but they were perfectly capable of finding their way to her hotel. As any civilized woman knew, when one awoke with a severely debilitating hangover, one simply had to get one’s priorities in order. And one’s first and foremost priority was to bring oneself back among the living.

      A knock at the door alerted Moriah to the arrival of priority number two: a very large carafe of extremely black coffee. As she slowly sipped the dark, pungent brew, hoping to absorb even more caffeine by inhaling the fragrant steam, she finally began to relax, feeling for the first time that morning as if there was probably a chance for her, after all. She strode lightly and cautiously across the room to open wide the French doors so that nothing stood between her and the fresh Caribbean morning. Clutching the white china mug of coffee to her heart, Moriah breathed deeply the warm air and let her eyes rove appreciatively over the pearly beach and clear, sapphire ocean. It was going to be a gorgeous day. The sun hung in the sky like a beacon, children frolicked outside her room in the twinkling surf, her coffee tasted rich and smooth and delicious, and—

      And she had picked up a strange man in a bar last night and brought him back to her hotel room so they could have sex.

      The sudden, shocking realization hit Moriah squarely and blindly in the brain like a great big bag of wet sand. Oh, my God, she thought silently, gasping as hot coffee spilled onto her fingers when they trembled on the handle of the mug. Had she really done that? Had she actually been sitting in a bar last night and met a man with whom she’d spent the entire evening and at least part of the night? Moriah shook her head slowly as if trying to clear away the fog that had settled over her memories. She tried to retrace her steps of the previous evening, tried to remember exactly what her actions had been.

      She recalled feeling restless after returning to her hotel from Magen’s Bay yesterday, so she went to The Green House to have a beer, one of her students having told her it was the place to go on St. Thomas. She remembered having had some problems with a group of obnoxious divers there, then being rescued by a very gallant and handsome man, leaving to go to another bar with him, dancing, walking along the beach, and then something about a steel band…

      Austen. That had been the man’s name, and he had been very funny and pleasant to talk to and, she recalled with a warm feeling in her midsection, incredibly sexy. He’d brought her back to her room last night, and then… Moriah felt her flesh grow hot when memories of what followed came rushing over her like a boiling river.

      “Oh, dear,” she said quietly. She also remembered that she had agreed to meet up with him on St. Vincent in two weeks before she was to fly back to Philadelphia. Well, that was certainly one appointment Moriah had absolutely no intention of keeping—even if Austen had been charming and wonderful, and even if she had enjoyed herself more with him than any man she’d ever known. There simply wasn’t any future in taking up with a beach bum who didn’t know the first thing about responsibility and probably couldn’t even hold down a decent job.

      For a moment Moriah stared wistfully out to sea, thinking about warm, brandy-colored eyes and laughter that rumbled up freely and easily from a brawny, sun-browned chest. She thought about his reckless, confident masculinity and the urgency of his need to claim her, so much more exciting and tumultuous than the tentative fumblings she’d known from other men. Then reluctantly she forced herself to push thoughts of Austen away. She didn’t even know his last name, she realized sadly. And now she would never see him again.

      She drained her coffee mug of its quickly cooling contents, then refilled it from the carafe on the table.