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Confident that the tears were gone and my reddened face could be dismissed as a result of the salty breeze, I stuffed my book in my bag and followed the path of the server.
The main cabin was littered with the remnants of cheese-and-fruit platters, champagne flutes scattered around, as if the passengers had just vanished. Of course, that was silly—my overactive imagination at work. This wasn’t a Stephen King novel, and the Langoliers weren’t chomping their way to shore.
A door had been propped open on the opposite side of the room, and as I went through, I heard a collective gasp. Turning, I shielded my eyes from the midday sun and saw the passengers standing on the dock, all looking in the same direction—up. I followed their gaze.
Nothing. What the heck were they looking at? I grabbed my sunglasses and put them on, searching the sky for whatever had caught their attention across the brilliant crystalline bay.
Cliffs towered over the northern edge of the resort, and still I saw nothing. Then, at the top of the ledge, a giant bird—no, ahang glider—swept into view.
A man glided off the mountain until he was over the ocean, his body outstretched behind him, his legs encased in a sack, the large white wing that enabled him to soar like a bird glimmering in the sun. Everyone gasped again—and this time I joined in—when the hang glider did a loop, like a roller coaster, over the ocean.
“Idiot,” I muttered asoohsandaahsrolled through the crowd standing on the dock.
“Oh my God, that’s so hot,” a female voice said. A glance told me it was one of the horny honeymooners speaking.
Hot?Stupid show-off, more like it.
“I’ll show youhot, darling,” her husband said, and dippedher over his knee until her long hair touched the dock. Then he kissed her neck up and down while she giggled, “Oh, that tickles!”
I had no idea who the man was, and I wanted to ignore both the extreme sport spectacleandthe PDA coming from the honeymooners, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the aerial show. He swung side to side like a pendulum. Then he pushed forward, arching his back, and the glider went up again.
“How is he doing that?” Amber asked. “Is there a motor on the wings?”
“No,” the honeymooner said, holding his wife close to his side while she gazed adoringly into his face. I didn’t know if her expression was love or lust or witchcraft because it seemed unreal. “It’s physics. He’s using the wind speed plus air pressure plus his momentum to propel his wings.”
His tone sounded like someone who made shit up to sound smart, but I had no other explanation, so maybe he was right. You would never see me do something so dangerously stupid.
The hang gliding idiot smoothly ascended. Then he did another loop and soared toward the rocks at the base of the cliff. The ocean swells splashed high, and I braced myself for his body to hit the boulders with a bloodysplat.
“He’s going to crash!” someone shouted, and a chorus of agreement rang through the group, followed by a collective inhale of breath as the glider pushed his arms straight up and flew parallel to the ocean, out to sea.
“Fool is going to break his bloody neck,” the deep voice of Nelson Stockton proclaimed.
Yep. One hundred percent. The daredevil was going to crash into the ocean, drown, and put a huge damper on the first vacation I’d had in years.
As the gliding man disappeared from view, murmurs continued among the group. Admiring and critical, everyone had a comment.
“Is he flying all the way to St. John?” the bride—who had finally ended her creepy, doe-eyed gaze at her husband—asked.
Uh, no, that’s like more than twenty miles. Maybe he wasn’t the only fool on the island.
“There’s probably a boat out there,” David reasonably suggested.
The doctor. So he wasn’t just a pretty face with an advanced degree. He had common sense too.
A boat would haul him in. Or maybe he really did crash into the ocean, body broken and floating for the seagulls to pick clean. Or dragged down by sharks and devoured. Or shot down by the coast guard, thinking he was a drug smuggler.
Hmm. Maybe I’d been reading too many murder mysteries these days. Might be time to switch over to romance again.
Movement on shore caught my eye. The crew was putting luggage into a van. Next to the van was an electric shuttle, presumably to take us to the resort.
Right now, all I wanted was to get away from the crowd, find the gift shop so I could buy a few books, and relax by the pool with a tall, frothy—and most importantly, strong—drink. From the pool I could check out all the men on the island and identify those who were alone, introduce myself, and hope for that spark between us, thatlook, thatfeeling, that flip-flop in my stomach that sent my libido into overdrive.
But no one was leaving the dock, all looking out to where the man had disappeared across the bay, and I was trapped at the top of the stairs because Amber of the Deadly Yellow Hat blocked my path.
“Excuse me,” I said, and tried to step down.
She didn’t acknowledge me, nor did she move.