Moriah's Mutiny. Elizabeth Bevarly

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СКАЧАТЬ because a boisterous wrecking crew was slamming a big concrete ball with aching and annoying regularity against the tender membrane beneath her already-shattered skull. In addition to that, something furry and poisonous and foul had found its way into her mouth and died there, rotting away into some sort of linty gelatinous goo that had oozed all over her teeth and tongue. She opened her eyes slowly and painfully, wincing at the stabbing white light of early dawn that pierced her pupils, recoiling at the lurching, nauseating swells that washed up and down in her stomach. This was not a good sign, Moriah thought glumly, wondering where in the hell she was and how she had managed to sleep through the night while all of these terrible things had been happening to her.

      It took her all of five minutes to finally inch onto her back so that she could gaze up curiously at the ceiling. Little by little she took in her surroundings and realized she was in a hotel room, and quite a nice one at that. From the sound of the quiet surf that met her ears through the open French doors to her left, Moriah brilliantly deduced that she must be at the shore. But she hated going to the Jersey shore, she remembered with a puzzled frown. Especially in the summer when it was so crowded. It was summer, wasn’t it? Yes, she was certain that it was. Hadn’t she been planning a vacation a short time ago? she wondered, her muddled brain beginning to function a little more clearly now. She vaguely recalled buying some sunscreen at the cosmetic counter in Wanamaker’s. Heavy sunscreen. Because she was going to be vacationing in…the Caribbean! Yes, that’s it! The Caribbean, that must be where she was. She was supposed to be meeting her sisters on St. Thomas at her hotel on Bolongo Bay Beach. That’s where she was all right. She remembered everything now. Sort of.

      The prospect of seeing her sisters again in the very near future filled Moriah with a new kind of nausea and dread, and as her stomach revolted once more, she realized she had better haul herself up and out and get herself pulled together before they arrived and did it for her.

      With a muffled groan she wrenched her stiff, aching body out of bed, then covered her burning eyes with both hands and stumbled into the bathroom. She leaned her forehead against the cool white tiles of the wall while waiting for the sink to fill with cold water, begging whatever was sloshing and spinning around in her stomach to stay there. When the water reached almost to the rim of the sink, Moriah took a deep breath and then dunked her head into its icy depths, trying to ignore the overflow that swept onto her bare feet. After that, with the assistance of a big glob of blue toothpaste she squeezed weakly onto her toothbrush, she scrubbed away the last remnants of death from her mouth and swallowed three aspirins with a very large glass of water.

      The hot sting of the shower’s spray chased away a good deal of what was left of her hangover, and by the time she had towel-dried her hair, knotted the sash of her pale yellow terry bathrobe around her waist and called room service, Moriah felt almost human again. Of course her sisters were going to be highly perturbed when she wasn’t at the airport to meet them, but they were perfectly capable of finding their way to her hotel. As any civilized woman knew, when one awoke with a severely debilitating hangover, one simply had to get one’s priorities in order. And one’s first and foremost priority was to bring oneself back among the living.

      A knock at the door alerted Moriah to the arrival of priority number two: a very large carafe of extremely black coffee. As she slowly sipped the dark, pungent brew, hoping to absorb even more caffeine by inhaling the fragrant steam, she finally began to relax, feeling for the first time that morning as if there was probably a chance for her, after all. She strode lightly and cautiously across the room to open wide the French doors so that nothing stood between her and the fresh Caribbean morning. Clutching the white china mug of coffee to her heart, Moriah breathed deeply the warm air and let her eyes rove appreciatively over the pearly beach and clear, sapphire ocean. It was going to be a gorgeous day. The sun hung in the sky like a beacon, children frolicked outside her room in the twinkling surf, her coffee tasted rich and smooth and delicious, and—

      And she had picked up a strange man in a bar last night and brought him back to her hotel room so they could have sex.

      The sudden, shocking realization hit Moriah squarely and blindly in the brain like a great big bag of wet sand. Oh, my God, she thought silently, gasping as hot coffee spilled onto her fingers when they trembled on the handle of the mug. Had she really done that? Had she actually been sitting in a bar last night and met a man with whom she’d spent the entire evening and at least part of the night? Moriah shook her head slowly as if trying to clear away the fog that had settled over her memories. She tried to retrace her steps of the previous evening, tried to remember exactly what her actions had been.

      She recalled feeling restless after returning to her hotel from Magen’s Bay yesterday, so she went to The Green House to have a beer, one of her students having told her it was the place to go on St. Thomas. She remembered having had some problems with a group of obnoxious divers there, then being rescued by a very gallant and handsome man, leaving to go to another bar with him, dancing, walking along the beach, and then something about a steel band…

      Austen. That had been the man’s name, and he had been very funny and pleasant to talk to and, she recalled with a warm feeling in her midsection, incredibly sexy. He’d brought her back to her room last night, and then… Moriah felt her flesh grow hot when memories of what followed came rushing over her like a boiling river.

      “Oh, dear,” she said quietly. She also remembered that she had agreed to meet up with him on St. Vincent in two weeks before she was to fly back to Philadelphia. Well, that was certainly one appointment Moriah had absolutely no intention of keeping—even if Austen had been charming and wonderful, and even if she had enjoyed herself more with him than any man she’d ever known. There simply wasn’t any future in taking up with a beach bum who didn’t know the first thing about responsibility and probably couldn’t even hold down a decent job.

      For a moment Moriah stared wistfully out to sea, thinking about warm, brandy-colored eyes and laughter that rumbled up freely and easily from a brawny, sun-browned chest. She thought about his reckless, confident masculinity and the urgency of his need to claim her, so much more exciting and tumultuous than the tentative fumblings she’d known from other men. Then reluctantly she forced herself to push thoughts of Austen away. She didn’t even know his last name, she realized sadly. And now she would never see him again.

      She drained her coffee mug of its quickly cooling contents, then refilled it from the carafe on the table. The clothes she had been wearing the previous evening were folded and stacked neatly on a chair beside the bed, Moriah noted, and she smiled a little regretfully that even in her drunken state she had been her usual tidy self, having awakened in her regular sleepwear. But when she went to retrieve her clothes to pack them, she noticed for the first time a sheet of hotel stationery that was folded in quarters and tented on top of her shirt. In a bold, masculine script, her name was scrawled across the side that faced her, and her heart began to dance when she picked it up gingerly, cradling it in both hands. She opened the white vellum paper slowly and carefully, as if it were some ancient manuscript that might dissolve into timeless dust. Unwittingly she held her breath as she read the words contained within.

      Don’t forget: St. Vincent on the fourteenth at 5:00 p.m. at the botanical gardens. Don’t stand me up, Moriah, please. If you can’t make it, CALL ME. My number on St. Thomas is 9653. Don’t disappoint me, lady. I have to see you again, and I don’t even know your last name. If you leave me without saying goodbye, I’ll never speak to you again.

      Austen

      Moriah was touched that he had taken the trouble to leave her a note, then remembered, of course, that Austen must have been as drunk as she was last night. She realized somewhat sadly that he had probably left it behind thanks to the same state of inebriation that had made her do things that she would normally never do. More than likely he was somewhere right now regretting the evening as much as she, worried that the troublesome woman he’d met at The Green House last night was going to be dialing his number this morning and putting СКАЧАТЬ