He stood up, and she took the hand he held out and stood up with him beneath the Ibizan stars, back on the deck where it had all begun. He settled his jacket around her cool shoulders, then pulled her close and kissed the top of her head for a long time. When he stepped back and held both of her hands tight in his, Kara never wanted him to let go.
“You are the fucking coolest girl I’ve ever met, and the craziest, and the kindest,” he said softly. “Go home, English. You’re out of my league. You always were.”
She left him standing there, knowing he was right, wishing he was wrong. She couldn’t stay. Everything had changed, yet he’d given her so much more than she’d come for. He'd restored her self-respect, and he’d set her back on her feet as a woman. So why didn’t she feel whole again?
The thing he hadn’t given her back was her heart. Dylan Day was a man who was going to take a lot of getting over.
Chapter Forty-Four
Kara sat at a small, scrubbed pine table inside the Happy Days Beach Bar nursing her second cup of coffee of the morning, her eyes scanning the sand. The summer crowds had left the island now, leaving the beaches to a different clientele who took Ibizan life at a gentler pace. It was still early as she watched the sunbeds being laid out in ranks across the sands, their padded cream cushions a touch of luxury for the well-heeled off-season crowd.
She couldn’t see the Love Tug from her vantage point, but that was okay. She wasn’t in any hurry.
Dylan strapped Billy to his chest in the cotton baby-carrier that one of the boutique staff from the club had donated to him, along with a box of sleep suits and baby clothes. He’d been astounded by the power of the baby to melt hearts at twenty paces: one look at that shock of hair and big brown eyes and he had them in the palm of his little hand. Dylan hoped for Billy’s sake that his power over the opposite sex never dwindled.
“Come on, small guy. Daddy’s hungry.”
He made his way around the rocky path towards the beach, his path set for the bakery at the far end, his mind set on Kara.
Where was she this morning? Had she gone back to the villa? Lucien was due to go home to England over the next day or two, he’d have been around for her last night. The thought gladdened him. If there was any man he trusted to look out for Kara, that man was Lucien Knight.
Kara tensed as Dylan appeared on the beach. Her breath caught in her throat as she watched him walk by the cafe, barefoot and bare-chested aside from the baby carrier. Even from a distance she could see the baby’s startling shock of hair, and a smile touched her lips.
Dylan walked the beach with the ease of a local, pausing briefly to pass the time of day with the guy who dragged the sunbeds across the sands.
She saw him smile, and wanted his smile to be for her. She didn’t get up. Just watched him, sure of where he was heading.
She caught the eye of the waitress cleaning a nearby table and ordered another coffee, this time to take away.
Dylan walked slowly back along the beach, the warm, scented pastries in a brown paper bag in his hand. He’d visited the bakery as much out of habit as out of hunger; the familiarity of routine had become important in these most unsettling of days.
He chatted inanely to Billy as he walked back towards the boat, even though the baby couldn’t understand a word he said and was half way towards his morning snooze. He didn’t even notice that someone was walking towards him until she fell into step beside him on the sand.
“Hey, Sailor,” she said softly. “You forgot your jacket.”
“You’re supposed to be someplace else,” he said, gladdened beyond belief that she wasn’t. “Anywhere but here with me.”
“I have coffee?” she said, knowing that there was nowhere else in the world she'd rather be.
He held the bag up. “And I have pastries.”
She moved towards a sun-bed set beneath a thatched umbrella close to the azure shoreline and sat down. Dylan sat alongside her, Billy fast asleep on his chest. Kara looked down at him for a few long, silent seconds.
“That’s some hairstyle.”
“I know. I kind of like it.”
“Me too.” She reached out and touched a soft strand of it. “He has a good name.”
“The best,” Dylan said without missing a beat.
She nodded. “Can I still call you Dylan?”
He stroked the baby’s hair and sighed.
“It’s just a name, Kara. I’m still the same man, and for what it’s worth, I was more myself with you than I’ve ever been with anyone else.”
She reached for the pastry bag he’d placed down on the sunbed between them and ripped it open.
“I know that now.” She passed him the coffee, and then teased a warm pastry apart in her fingers. “I couldn’t get on the plane back to England. I tried, I really did. I queued, but when it came to my turn, I couldn’t get on the damn plane.”
He sipped the scalding drink from the tiny hole in the lid, leaning sideways so as not to hold it over Billy’s head.
“You should have.”
“Should I?”
Dylan placed the cup down and accepted the chunk of pastry she held out.
“It would have been the sensible choice.”
“I don’t do sensible. I do full throttle, even though it might break my neck,” she said. “Or my heart.”
“I never wanted to break your heart, English.”
“You put it back together again last night.”
“I broke my own heart too, if it’s any consolation.”
They sat in silence then, man, woman and child.
She screwed up the empty pastry bag, set the coffee cup down in the sand, and sank back against the sun lounger. “Lie with me for a while?”
Dylan swallowed hard. He wanted to lie there with Kara so much that he feared his banging heart might wake Billy. He lay back slowly beside her and offered her the crook of his shoulder. She met his eyes for an uncertain second and then accepted, settling herself against the warmth of his body.
He was so warm. So warm, and vital, and so intrinsically, basically right that she sighed heavily. His arms felt like her home.
“Dylan…” she said.
He stroked her hair. “Ssh. Just for one minute. Don’t say anything.”
And so she didn’t. She closed her eyes and let him stroke her hair, her arm flung across his midriff beneath Billy’s tiny toes.
Little by little she tilted her face, and little by little he dipped his, until his mouth was a breath away from her own.