Calling Kupid (Kupid's Cove Book 1) (19 page)

Gideon

She may have had a jump on me, but it wasn’t hard to follow her from the hotel onto the beach. What was hard was keeping my feet in check, so I didn’t run to her and shake her silly, then lay her down on the sand and brand her as my own. She was stubborn, independent, and clearly upset. I didn’t talk about my business for the simple reason that I knew she would react the way she did. If I was honest with her about what my true net worth was, she wouldn’t give me the time of day, and that stemmed from what happened to her family.

It only took about fifteen seconds of searching on the internet for ‘Kupid Snowberry’ to find the obituary for her brother, father, and mother. I knew her entire family had passed, but what I couldn’t figure out was how. Nothing in the obituaries indicated how they died. Her brother died first, then just a few months later, her father. He was survived by Katie and her mother, but when I read her mother’s obituary, the only living survivor was Katie Penelope Kupid. That was it. She was the last one. There were no aunts or uncles listed, no grandparents, just Katie. How alone must she feel? While both of my parents are gone, I have a far-reaching extended family that keeps me grounded. Katie has no one but Winifred, and from what she’s told me about that relationship, she has been more like a mother to Freddie over the past years. I knew that meant she would never dump her problems on Winifred.

This wasn’t about how much money I had, I already knew that. This was about how alone she felt, and how scared she was that she would lose me, too. After all, everyone she’s ever loved has died. I knew her brother died in an accident and something tells me her parents’ deaths also weren’t natural or unprovoked. Add to that the fact that I’ve put her in danger, and she’s running scared. I’m sure she can’t even begin to keep everything straight in her mind.

I watched as she waded into the water parallel to the beach. The moon was out and shone so brightly on the water I didn’t need a flashlight to see her. I kept my distance, but my eyes were roaming the beach. Regardless of whether we felt safe here, we weren’t, not until this maniac was locked away for good. I walked closer to the waves and followed her footprints in the sand while keeping an eye on her. She tossed her purse onto the beach and walked out farther into the water, completely oblivious to the dangers the ocean held.

I started to jog towards where she was wading, the water up to her hips now and the waves breaking softly over her thighs. She rested her hands on the water, watching as the ripples played over her skin. The inky blackness of the water made her hands disappear from sight each time a wave came. My memories took me back to the first night we met and my heart went into overdrive.

“Katie!” I called as loudly and frantically as I could. “Katie, don’t go any farther,” I ordered, running full out now, only a few feet from where her purse laid abandoned in the sand.

She turned and fell backwards when I yelled, the wave pushing her towards the shore where I caught her in my arms. I crab walked backwards on the sand just far enough to get out of the breaking surf, keeping my arm around her waist.

When we were far enough away from the water, my other arm came around her and I rested my forehead on her neck. “You scared the daylights out of me, sweetheart.”

“I was just wading,” she whispered, but I knew the truth.

“You were thinking that if you disappeared no one would notice. I told you then and I’ll tell you now, I would notice. I would search for you to the ends of the earth. I would cease to breathe because my heart doesn’t beat right when we’re apart. It’s like it’s on pause, and the only way for it to beat in a steady rhythm is to keep a heavy dose of you in my life.”

She was bent over, her hands braced over the top of her feet and her chest heaving. She was crying, her head shaking as she tried to get control of her emotions.

“You just have to let me go, Gideon. All of this isn’t who I am. I don’t know how to live the kind of life you live. I’m a simple, small town girl who likes to help others. All I’ve ever wanted to do is help others, but I can’t even help myself!”

She took off running through the sand and I saw the disaster that was going to happen if she kept exerting herself while upset. I picked up her purse and went after her, not surprised when she fell to the sand in a matter of seconds. She rested on her knees, her head hanging low.

“Dammit, I can’t even make a dramatic exit,” she said, her voice breathy. She coughed several times, her chest still moving up and down rapidly.

I knelt next to her and dug in my pocket, searching for the pills I had put there earlier. “It seems like the rhythm changes more often now.”

I handed her a pill and she took it, sticking it under her tongue. Her breathing slowed and she shook her head a little, her hair blowing around her face. “I shouldn’t run. Dr. Sawyer warned me about exertion, but I tend not to listen.”

I snorted with laughter. “I can hardly argue with that.”

She rolled over to sit on her butt. “You brought the pills with you?”

I smoothed her hair back from her face and tucked it behind her ears. “I carry them in my pocket now, just in case you forget them.”

“You’re too good for me, Gideon.”

I rubbed her back and kissed her. “No, I’m just a man in love with a girl who sometimes forgets to listen to her heart.”

“Sometimes I’m afraid to listen to it,” she whispered.

“I love you, Katie. All I want you to listen to is my voice. Everything else is white noise, and white noise has no purpose other than to confuse you.” I noticed she was breathing better and her voice was normal. “Is it better now?”

She swiped her hands together a few times to get rid of the sand that coated them. “It went back into normal rhythm, maybe the new drug is finally helping.”

I hugged her to me and kissed her forehead. “I hope so. It might help more if you weren’t so upset.”

“Well, there’s not much I can do about that now, is there?” she asked, all the fight gone from her body.

“Maybe not when it comes to the circumstances of why we are here, but in other aspects you have all the power.”

“I’m too tired to even figure out what that means.”

“I’m talking about the reason why you ran out of the hotel room to start with. The reasons why you think you have to run away from me, instead of toward me.”

She stood and brushed the sand off her body. “We should go back to the room.”

I stood and took her hand to keep her from moving. “I think we should stay here and talk about this. Every time I try to get a straight answer from you something interrupts us.”

She looked around the beach and shook her head. “I don’t think it’s safe to just sit out here when it’s dark and we can’t see anyone approaching us.”

“So it was okay to do that when you ran out of the room and said you would be fine, because no one knew we were here, but now that you’re faced with answering why you ran out, it’s not safe to be out here?”

“You want the truth?” she asked and I nodded. “I have sand in places I don’t like having sand. I have two layers of clothing on that are wet and sticky, so yeah, I want to go back to the room. I want to take these clothes off and get the sand out of every crevice of my body. I want to order room service and eat until the feeling in the pit of my stomach goes away. I want to climb under the covers and try to make this nightmare go away. I want to pretend that we’re a normal couple who are falling in love with each other for who we are, and not for who our family is or…,” she sucked up a breath as she tried to finish speaking, “or, what we do for a living. I want to hide in the darkness of the night and let you make love to me like I’ve never been made love to before.”

I caught her wrist as she tried to walk away, waiting for her to look at me. “And how is that?”

“Like a man in love.”

I settled the phone back in the cradle just as the water went off in the bathroom. I called room service for a late dinner. Very late, since it was almost two a.m., but I was pleased that the resort had no problem fulfilling the needs of its guests. I enjoyed buying properties in the islands because most of them were turnkey operations, which kept my other more cash heavy investments afloat. Besides, my goal was to live here someday. I was tired of the big city life and the more time I spent on the islands, the more I didn’t want to leave.

The door opened to the bathroom and Katie came out, dressed in a fluffy bathrobe and nothing else. Her hair was slicked back away from her forehead; her face was free of makeup. I took her face in my hands, kissing her with all the passion I had pent up from the last week of being with her, but not being with her. She melted into my arms and whimpered as my tongue forced her lips open. I couldn’t get enough of her. She tilted her head to give me greater access, and she rubbed against the front of my pants each time my tongue explored the roof of her mouth.

“Good glory, Katie, I want you so bad right now,” I moaned when I pulled away from her for air. She had my shirt fisted in her hands and bright pink patches stained her cheeks.

I ran my thumbs over the spots and kissed her once more. “You’re so beautiful with no makeup. I wish you didn’t wear it all the time. It hides the way your cheeks turn pink when I kiss you, and distracts from the beautiful tones of your eyes. When I look in them, it’s like looking at the beaches of Honolulu. Soft brown speckled by the colors of God.”

She leaned into my chest. “Make love to me, please.”

I kissed the top of her head and put my arms around her. “If it weren’t for the fact that I called room service like you asked, you’d already be on that bed.”

I felt her shoulders deflate with my words. She sat down, her hands in her lap. “I forgot about that part. I guess I am kind of hungry.”

“Oh, I’m hungry, I’m just not certain it’s for cheese and crackers.”

“Once they deliver it, cheese and crackers can wait. They won’t go bad.”

I pulled her up off the bed and held her by the lapels of the bathrobe, which was dangerously close to showing me the entire prize.

“While that is what my body is telling me to do, my mind, and my heart, is telling me to eat the food, so you can tell me the things that are holding you back from trusting me completely. Once you know I love you no matter what, I’ll make you mine.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

I kissed her softly, just a short uncomplicated kiss of promise. “You say you want me to make love to you like a man in love would, and that wouldn’t be hard for me. I love you regardless of the things you think will keep us apart. However, if I make love to you before I know what those things are I’ll never be able to prove to you that I don’t care about them. Your heart won’t believe that I love you because your mind will try to convince you that everything will change once you’ve told me the story.”

She nodded, looking down so she didn’t have to meet my eyes. “The things I haven’t told you could very well change how you feel about me, Gideon. That’s why I want you to make love to me, at least then I’ll have that to remember you by.”

“You have a very convoluted sense of what is and isn’t important to me, Katie. I don’t know if that’s because someone has hurt you in the past or if that’s because you think that I will only associate with certain people. But whatever you’re thinking, I will prove you wrong.”