Page 6 of Tides Of Your Love (Riviera Shores #3)

“You’re here, what, eighteen hours and you’re already promising to stay?” Walter said .

“I don’t know, Walter. I might. Do you want me to stay?” He looked at his grandfather.

Walter grumbled something that sounded like of course but couldn’t bring himself to actually say it. Yet.

Guilt-tripping Owen felt safer to him than asking him to stay. When Owen’s dad, his second wife, and her kids came to visit before Christmas, Walter asked them to spend the holiday, but they continued to Hawaii and didn’t even offer to take him. Instead, I took him to my mother’s.

“So, this is the famous Finn Brennen, the guy you said you wanted me to be like?” Owen said, jutting his chin toward the swimming instructor when the three of us entered the humid, roofed pool area.

The sound of the seniors getting ready for class mixed with the noise of kids who had just finished theirs.

“I said I wish we had more men like him in our family,” Walter replied.

“Isn’t that the same, Grandpa?” Owen stressed the last word.

“You’re both professional athletes,” I chimed in. “You’re both in Blueshore, and Walter loves you both.”

“Do you, Granddad?” Owen seemed determined to use every grandfather nick and push Walter to finally cave in.

“That’s a silly question,” Walter replied.

“I’ll take it as a yes.” Owen chuckled.

“You two are just going to watch me swim? I don’t need an audience when I do sports.” Placing his hearing aid on the towel, Walter gave Owen a pointed look.

“We’ll cheer you on. It’s more fun that way,” Owen replied .

When Walter left, we took a seat on a bench overlooking the pool. The kids left and the place was much quieter.

“He’s right. Soccer is just twenty-two idiots fighting over a ball. Who wants to see that?” Owen smirked. But underneath the calm exterior, I could see that Walter’s refusal to answer did affect him.

“He loves you and wants you to stay, you know that, right?”

“I know. And I know he’s mad at me, and I get that.”

“He’ll cool down. He’s just scared that you’ll go again, and at his age ...”

Owen glanced at me again. He then took a deep breath and looked away.

We were silent for a while.

“So, what does this Finn have that I don’t?” The relaxed smirk was back on, and Owen once again looked like the poster boy for keeping it together.

I looked over at the gorgeous man guiding two elderly ladies into the pool. “Nothing. He’s just here.”

The you’re-guilting-me-too-now? expression flitted across his face again. “So, you think Walter lacks a male role model?” Owen looked at me with a teasing smile. But despite his well-rehearsed nonchalant, I could see that guilt weighed him down.

“Kinda.” I scoffed.

“It’s true what they say. You go back to being a kid when you grow old.”

Despite the sarcasm, I could tell that Owen understood Walter.

Warmth spread in my heart. Because of these two, and because Owen didn’t even notice how the K stuck in my throat for a second.

Although he still felt like a stranger, my stutter was less pronounced like it did around people I felt comfortable with, as if their presence smoothed out the edges of the words.

Back in school, kids used to mimic me, and most annoying of all—complete my sentences for me. Owen had never done any of that. And he had opportunities, given that I was nervous around him and that his name began with an O.

Finn noticed us and waved. I waved back.

The word in Blueshore was that Finn and Anne, his ex-wife’s cousin, had an affair while he was still married.

But working across the street from Anne’s bakery in Riviera View, I knew that was a crude distortion of the truth.

Besides, Anne was one of the quietest, loveliest people I knew.

I appreciated people who didn’t waste words.

“What?” I asked, catching Owen staring at my profile.

“Nothing,” he said, chuckling, knowing he’d been caught. “I was just going to ask what’s your secret to getting along with everyone, including Walter, but I know the answer, so ...”

“What’s the answer? What’s my secret?” I prodded with a smile so wide my lips hurt.

“You’re Rio Mio.” And there it was—the smile.

I bit my upper lip. “I don’t know what that means.”

Owen pulled up his Henley’s sleeves, and I tried not to stare at the veins or tattoos on his arms. One of them consisted of two lines in calligraphy-style Latin .

“You’ve always been good with finding the right path with people. Even annoying ones.” His accent sort of slipped to British in the word ‘path’.

“He’s not always annoying.”

Owen laughed.

Our thighs and shoulders brushed each other every time either one of us shifted.

Once upon a time, this man had touched every part of me with his hands, with his lips and tongue, his entire body.

“Remember that night—” Owen’s voice startled me. “At the pool?”

For a moment there, I thought he meant the night I was thinking about.

I turned to look at him again. “I remember.”

He huffed a half-chuckle and we both looked away.

OWEN HAD BEEN HANGING in our house a lot when his parents were on the brink of divorce. He joined our family dinners, slept over, even volunteered to help my mom with grocery shopping. Anything to get away from the fighting and yelling in his house.

“You’re like another sibling for these two,” my mom told him.

Sure, a ‘sibling’ I developed a crush on.

“I wish my brother had such hot friends,” Ruby said whenever she came over. “It’s not fair.” She counted the months until her braces would come off and was exasperated over her thick curly hair and acne outbreaks .

Bless her, when I told her about my crush, she said, “I have a crush on so many boys, you can have this one. RiOwen. I ship that.”

The summer I turned fifteen, after begging and finally recruiting my mom’s power of because-I-said-so, Simon agreed to take me and Ruby to the new water park with his friends.

“You two are on your own,” he said in the car on the way there.

His girlfriend, on the seat next to him, twirled her hair while looking at her own reflection in the visor’s mirror.

She popped a bubblegum balloon and nodded vigorously.

I couldn’t have known she’d become my sister-in-law one day and that I’d actually learn to like her.

At the park, which was a local endeavor of two pools, a kiddie pool, and a few slides, Simon and Nicole joined their friends, including Owen, while Ruby and I spent the day standing in endless lines to ride the slides.

In the late afternoon, Ruby was sick after eating one hot dog too many, and her parents came to pick her up. I went looking for my brother but after a while decided to enjoy the shorter lines and half-empty pools.

The sky turned deep purple, and the lights were on everywhere. A few families lingered, but the smaller pool I was in was empty and quiet. Which was great for me to practice my water acrobatics of handstands and somersaults.

Resurfacing after one of my dives, I found Owen sitting on the poolside, shifting his legs back and forth in the water.

“Hey! Where’s everyone?” I asked, kicking my feet to stay afloat and brushing my dripping bangs out of my eyes.

“Simon and Nicole went to grab something to eat and asked me to look for you. Where’s Ruby? ”

“Her parents took her. She was sick. Probably the hot dogs. I had pizza, so ...” I shrugged.

“And you stayed alone?”

“I came looking for you but couldn’t find anyone.”

“We were all over the place.”

Though Owen stayed with us a lot, I’ve never seen him with his shirt off. Now, in dark gray board shorts and bare-chested, he looked like he’d stepped out of one of the Teen Beat fold-out posters I taped on my bedroom wall.

Not knowing what to say or how to act, I leaned back into a floating position, my ears in the water, my arms stretched to the sides, my gaze on the string of lights that hung above the pool area.

At some point, I felt ripples and let my body drift upright, my feet finding the pool floor. Owen was swimming at the far end of the pool.

A few minutes later, he leaned his palms on the ledge and pulled himself up. His biceps and the muscles on his back flexed and water sluiced down his body. He turned and sat on the edge, water gushing down his chest and eight-pack to his lap.

I took another dive, unable to take in more of this male magnificence.

When my head popped out of the water, I was breathless.

I swam toward him and grabbed the edge.

“Need help up?”

“No. I’m just resting for a sec.”

“Listen,” he said, turning his face up to the night sky, lit by the lights all above the park and in the trees .

It was quiet around us except for the sound of the water rippling around me, the rustle of leaves in the trees, and the distant sound of people chatting.

“I’d stay here forever,” he added after a while.

I began pushing myself up now. Owen looked down then grabbed my arms and pulled me out. His upper body strength nearly took my breath away.

I sat next to him in my purple bikini, our feet paddling back and forth in the chlorinated and unnaturally blue water.

Our bodies mirrored each other as we leaned back, our palms supporting our upper bodies, our gazes up at the night sky.

I closed my eyes and listened to the chirp of crickets, the murmur of water and leaves.

I was surprisingly relaxed in his company even though his half-naked presence made my body hum nonstop.

“So, how’s school?” Owen broke the silence.

“Okay, Grandma,” I replied with my eyes closed.

Owen laughed, and that made me smile.

“Sorry,” he said, still chuckling.

“You don’t know what to ask a kid my age, do you?” I opened my eyes. We were smiling at each other.

“Are you always this direct?”

“No. I usually have to look for substitute words so that sort of ruins my directness.” I was looking straight into his eyes now. I wanted to add that it was something about his reaction to me speaking that made me okay with being as direct as I wanted to, but that felt too much.