Read Online Siren's Storm by Lisa Papademetriou - Free Book Online Page B

Gretchen for not even wanting to go into the bay near their house. Her nanny had frightened her about it when Gretchen was a child, and she maintained a superstitious distance from the calm water. Gretchen remembered the day—she and Will must have been about eight or nine—that they took a rowboat out onto the water. It was a battered old craft that had floated up onto their property from the bay during a storm. Tim had adopted it right away and spent time repairing it. He’d even saved up money to replace the oars that were lost. Before they pushed away from the shore, Gretchen had begged to be allowed to row. So Tim took one side and Gretchen took the other, while Will sat across from them, trailing a lazy hand in the water. Tim was bigger than Gretchen, and their oar strength was unequal. It was soon clear that unless one of them gave up their seat, they would do nothing but row around in circles all day. But Gretchen had refused to give up her seat, and Tim wouldn’t, either, since he had done all the repairs on the boat. The argument escalated until Tim—in a fit of playful frustration—had tossed Gretchen overboard.
    She’d thrashed madly, like a carp on a line, and Tim had laughed until Will shouted, “She means it! Tim, she means it!” Will had held out an oar, butGretchen was so terrified that she batted at it, smacking it away from her with a dull thunk. Her screams were choked back by the salt water, her body white-hot with terror. “Shit,” Tim hissed, just before he kicked off his shoes and jumped in after her. Somehow he managed to get hold of her and wrap his long arms around her, pinning her arms to her side. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” Tim said as Will held out the oar. He pulled them both to safety. When a red-eyed Gretchen had slopped, wet and dripping, into the house, Johnny had called the Archers for an explanation. Tim had sheepishly confessed, and offered a sincere apology to Gretchen. But Gretchen wouldn’t even come to the phone. She didn’t speak to Tim for a whole week—even when, in a fit of desperation, he’d sent Will over to talk some sense into Gretchen. “Tim thinks it’s funny,” Gretchen had told Will. “But feeling scared isn’t funny.”
    Will had made Tim promise not to make fun of her fears, and he swore he would never push her into the water again. And, eventually, that was good enough. After avoiding them for a week, one day Gretchen joined them as they scrounged for wild blueberries at the edge of the property. And the rowboat incident was never mentioned again. The boat washed away in a storm three summers later and wasn’t missed at all.
    Trina laughed, breaking into Gretchen’s thoughts. Gretchen forced herself to smile. “That’s funny,” she said, with no idea what she was talking about.
    “I know!”
    Trina babbled on, and Gretchen squirted a blob of white lotion onto her hand.
    Gretchen’s cell phone buzzed. She wiped the sun-block onto her thigh in a smear and picked up the phone. “Sorry, just a sec.”
    A text:
Need help spreading that around?
    Gretchen looked up, scanning the public beach. She was used to the deserted waters of the bay near her property and so she felt almost overwhelmed by the number of people nearby, even though it was only eleven in the morning and the beach wasn’t very crowded yet. A tall lifeguard chair towered over various groups scattered across the white sand in beach-blanket clumps. Here was a family with picture-perfect children, there were two thick older women in full makeup and gold jewelry stacked up their arms, a rowdy group of extended family, three tan girls in bikinis …
    Finally she saw him. The ice-blue eyes beneath the pale blond, almost white hair. He was tanned, and his defined muscles ripped down his chest, disappearing into a pair of low-slung, baggy olive trunks. Jason was holding a BlackBerry, and he looked just as good to her as he had last summer.
    He was there with a couple of his guy