While I’m glad Cecily made sure my teenage employee won’t be on her own, I get caught up on the first thing she said, nearly tripping over the doorway on the way out. “You mean solidify my marriage, right?” This marriage won’t be lasting long enough for it to ever need saving.
My stomach twists.
In true Cecily fashion, she doesn’t say a word until we reach the surf shop. Though King is in the middle of a conversation with a girl who looks like she was born to surf—long, strong legs, glowing bronze skin, silky blonde hair running down her back in a thick braid—Cecily makes an announcement to the whole shop in her loudest voice. “Kingston, your next lesson is here!” Then she shoves me forward.
I squeak at the same time King’s eyes go wide. “What?” I gasp.
King swallows. “I thought you wanted to learn, Cecily.”
“Why would I want to learn how to surf? The ocean is terrifying.”
“Something we agree on!” I complain.
Folding his arms, King glances at the girl next to him and then to the open doors, like he’s considering running away. He doesn’t need to worry; it’s not like I’m ever going to get on a surfboard, no matter what Cecily says. “Lacey,” he says to the girl, “maybe you can take this one?”
Lacey eyes me with a raised eyebrow. “Don’t you want to teach your wife, King?”
“That would be a bad idea,” he says at the same time I say, “I don’t want to learn.”
“Too bad,” Cecily says behind me. “This is your next counseling session, and Mr. Vanderman was curious about how things are going and wanted to watch this one.”
King swears under his breath. I’m starting to wonder why he’s so opposed to this. He’s not the one who will be fearing for his life.
I need to find a way out of this. “I don’t have a swim—”
Cecily holds a polka-dotted piece of fabric in front of my face. “And yes, it’s in your size.”
“It’s also in two pieces,” I point out. I’m all for women expressing themselves with fun swimwear, but this baker’s body prefers to be a little more covered. “I have one at home. I can go—”
“Run and hide?” Cecily stuffs the suit into my hands and pushes me toward the changing room on the left side of the shop. “It’ll just be you and your husband out on the water, Georgie. You’ll be fine.”
“My husband and Mr. Vanderman, apparently.”
“Like the old man’s going to be able to see you from the shore.”
“But—”
“Georgie,” King says, cutting through our argument. “You can pick anything on the rack. It’s fine.”
Releasing a breath of relief, I scurry to the rack of swimsuits before Cecily can keep trying to push the bikini. While I’m sure King would have appreciated seeing me in something more revealing, which was likely Cecily’s reasoning, I can’t help but love how easily he offered a better option. I’m not especially self-conscious—I love butter and sugar too much to worry about my figure—but I’m going to need to be as comfortable as possible for this. Grabbing the first suit that I find in my size, I hop into the changing room and do my best to ignore the fact that I’m going to have to go out into the ocean to save my bakery.
That logic seems questionable, but nothing about this whole thing has made a lot of sense.
As I change, I listen intently to the conversation happening outside the door, since King and Cecily aren’t trying to keep their voices down.
“If she doesn’t want to learn, I’m not taking her out there,” King says. “No matter if Vanderman is watching.”
“You agreed to make macarons,” is Cecily’s argument, which isn’t the same at all. “So the least she can do is—”
“Almond flour isn’t the ocean, Cecily. I never pushed Georgie to go surfing because the last thing I want to do is put her in danger.”
I press a hand to the changing room door as warmth spreads through me. He’s a good man and always has been. I don’t know if I could ever find a better man than him.
“You’re not going to let her get hurt,” Cecily says. “I know you won’t. I also know how Georgie can be, and while most of the time it’s easier to let her steamroll and blaze her own trail, she needs to learn that she can’t go through life alone. Sometimes she needs to relinquish her control and trust that someone else can lead the way.”
King doesn’t have a reply to that, which settles like a rock in my stomach. I know I’m headstrong, but… His words from our wedding day flicker into my memory. I can’t get caught up in your orbit just for you to leave me drifting again. That was how my relationship was with Lane. He was always making the decisions and pulling me along with him, ignoring my ideas but taking credit for them when he inevitably presented them as his own. His way was the only way.
I wouldn’t wish a relationship like that on anyone.
It’s that thought that spurs me forward with a new determination. Tugging on the suit, which is one of those sport-types that are meant for function rather than fashion, I hurry back out to the lobby and breathlessly announce, “I want to try it! At least once.”
King gapes at me. It’s like he didn’t in a million years think I would agree, which only makes my guilt worse. Then his eyes slip down over my body, and the guilt is quickly replaced with heat as his expression morphs into thinly veiled desire. Apparently I don’t need a bikini to prove my husband is attracted to me.
“There, you see?” Cecily says, but even she seems surprised that I agreed. Maybe she hadn’t intended for us to go surfing at all and simply thought the argument would count as counseling. “I’ll, uh, go see if Mr. Vanderman has arrived yet.” She wanders out almost in a daze.
“I’ve got the shop covered,” Lacey says, and I’m pretty sure she’s trying not to laugh. Whether she’s laughing at me or something else, I can’t bring myself to care as long as King keeps looking at me with that fire blazing in his eyes. I would let him look at me like this forever.
It takes several seconds before King finally moves, heading for the row of surfboards with a rigidness to his posture that wasn’t there before I put on the swimsuit. Maybe I’m not lithe and limber, but these bread-kneading biceps are clearly doing it for the man I married, and I’m going to take a lot of pride in that fact.
For the next hour, King seems to do his best to pretend I’m just another student, though I notice he rarely looks at me as he goes through his process. When he does look, he tends to lose his train of thought, so I get it. He walks me through how to stand up and balance while still on the sand, and he describes the general mechanics of catching a wave’s momentum. He asks me multiple times if I’m sure about going out on the water. I’m not, but I also know that if he’s out there with me, I’ll be okay.
I want him to know that I care about the things he cares about, even if they scare me.
“Watch this one,” he says, pointing to a surfer who starts paddling to catch the wave. “She’s going to paddle until the wave starts moving her faster than she’s going on her own, and then…”
The woman jumps to her feet and turns her board so it goes in the opposite direction of where the wave is curling over.
“I’m guessing I’ll need to pay attention to the way the wave breaks,” I say, gesturing vaguely at the wave as it crashes and dissipates. The movement brings me close enough to King that our arms touch, and a thrill runs through me when he doesn’t pull away. It’s not like I haven’t touched this man—we’ve kissed twice since getting married and shared plenty of hugs—but something about today is different.
