Erin McCarthy
Lady of the Lake
From When Good Things Happen to Bad Boys Anthology
One
Violet Caruthers had known that Frank wasn’t the most attentive of boyfriends. But if she had been asked, she would have thought that even he would have noticed that his girlfriend had fallen off the back of his fishing boat.
She would have been wrong.
Violet coughed as the shock of cool lake water splashed over her face, and she flailed her arms in panic to keep herself afloat. “Frank!” she screamed at the back of the retreating boat.
The churning motor, the spraying surf, and the obnoxious laughter of the fool she was having sex with drowned out her cry.
She hated dating.
Hated flirting, and posturing, and all the awkward accompaniments of sharing an intimate relationship with a man. She was painfully shy, always had been, and if it wasn’t for one deep, driving urge, she wouldn’t be forcing herself to do it at all.
Except she wanted a baby.
“Frank!” she shrieked again as the enormity of the situation smacked her like the rocking wave from the boat’s wake. “Oh, this is bad, this is really, really bad.”
Frank was too busy chatting with his buddies, boasting over his walleye-catching prowess to even notice that she had lost her grip walking to the cooler for a bottled water. Before she could even blink, she’d fallen right off the side of the boat like some lackwit in a Steve Martin movie.
She wasn’t athletic, but she’d never thought of herself as a klutz before. But that was neither here nor there because she was covered in briny lake water, her glasses dripping from the spray, and she was in the middle of bleepity-bleep nowhere.
Surely he would notice. Seriously. In just a second or two. Any minute now. After all, she was his girlfriend. They had been dating for four months, having sex for weeks and weeks now. They were in a committed relationship. All because she had thought he was just quite possibly nice enough, intelligent enough, and egotistical enough to agree to her plan to have him father a child.
If he was a little geeky, unaware of fashion, and a bit preoccupied with his computer software and fishing hobby, she had been prepared to overlook it. She was no prize herself-leaning towards geeky, unaware of fashion, and a bit preoccupied with her job as a kindergarten teacher. The important thing was he was a good person, with a kind heart. And Frank had seemed like the type that she could lay her plan out to in all its logic. She would appeal to his biological need to reproduce his high IQ in a child, and assure him she expected nothing of him in return. No money, no involvement with the child or her, no nothing.
It had all made complete sense. Before she’d found herself floating in Lake Erie like refuse fallen off the back of a garbage truck and kicked into the water.
The whine of the motor was receding and the boat was going bye-bye and she was going to drown. In a bikini, of all things. She’d never worn a bikini in her life and she’d let her friend Ashley, and the force of her desire to be a mother, talk her into one. That had an American flag pattern with a star right over her nipple. All because she’d thought it might attract Frank’s attention, focus his eyes squarely on her, and inspire unmitigated lust, which would be used to her advantage when she suggested forgoing the condom.
Too bad she had been painfully uncomfortable in the micro-bathing suit, wrapping her arms over her not-so-small chest. Bent over at the waist, she had held a hardback book spread open in front of her so neither Frank, nor his two pals Jay and Shack, would notice that she was virtually naked. She’d spent her entire post-puberty life de-emphasizing her big breasts, and she couldn’t get over that in an afternoon.
Violet treaded water, her legs already straining.
Bikinis were not her.
And now she was going to die in one.
Dylan Diaz smoothed out his sail and pondered that he was such an ungrateful bastard.
Here he had a life some guys would kill for-major baseball career, money, chicks throwing themselves at him-and he wasn’t happy. Tipping back his water bottle, he took a swallow and shook his head at himself in amusement.
What did he want? A flippin’ parade? A street named after him? Endorsements?
Hell, now that he thought about it, he already had those. He didn’t need them, didn’t care about them.
Focusing on a funny spot bobbing in the water, Dylan felt the frustration and discontent roiling inside him. The problem was that he was lonely. The money, the minor fame, none of it mattered when he was surrounded by fakes, hangers-ons, and plastic people.
He missed his family, most of whom were in Miami, while he spent the season both on the road and in Cleveland in a furnished apartment. He missed feeling comfortable around people, trusting they liked him for himself, not for his status or for his money. He’d been a goofball of a kid, loud and mischievous, always having fun. He wanted that back-being just Dylan, instead of Diaz, number twelve,.299 batting average.
“Yeah, they’d be standing in line to feel sorry for me, wouldn’t they?” He scoffed at himself and leaned forward a little.
What was that brown speck? It was kind of big to be a bird. A flip of the tiller and he headed a bit upwind in that direction. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular anyway. He was just sailing around trying to clear his head before he left on a four-game series in New York, yet the only thing he was clearing was his nostrils.
He could never quite get used to the smell of Lake Erie. It was cold, stark, and fishy compared to the saltiness of the Atlantic Ocean.
Six o’clock on a Friday night and he was ready to pack it in for the night. Grab some wings and eat them in front of the TV. Alone. Nice way to spend his twenty-seventh birthday.
“Lame-ass. Whiner. Douche bag.” Insulting himself didn’t make him feel any better, and he narrowed his eyes as he scanned the horizon.
If he didn’t know better, he’d think that brown spot was a head in the water.
He tilted his head, narrowed his eyes. It was a head. With hair. Bobbing.
Ah mi Dios. Oh my God, he’d found a dead person.
With a grimace, he put his water down in the cup holder.
Well, nothing like a floating corpse to make him feel even worse for griping. Ungrateful was an understatement. Here he had life by the balls-he was young, strong, healthy, loaded with cash. This person was dead. It couldn’t get much rougher than that.
Unless the dead guy’s eyes had been pecked out, too. He shuddered. There was a nasty thought.
He’d been hoping for a little excitement, something different for his birthday. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
Dylan reached for his radio to call his find into the coast guard when the head lifted.
It was wearing glasses.
He scrambled back a foot before letting out a “Yaahhh!” like a kid in a haunted house. Shit, it was alive.
Then his momentary shock gave way to relief. Alive was good. Better than dead. Unless the person was injured, which was not so good. “Are you okay? Damn, hang in there! I’ll help you out of the water.”
He stood straight up, rocking the boat, and leaned over, reaching out. “Lift your arms, I’ll pull you up.”
The head was actually a woman, with chattering teeth and long hair trailing in the water like seaweed as she stared up at him through waterlogged glasses. He couldn’t see her eyes, but he thought she was in shock. She didn’t move, didn’t speak, and Dylan pawed through the water, locking his grip on both of her wrists.
He pulled hard, and she ripped out of the water towards his boat. But in his eagerness to get her to safety, he misjudged the distance. There wasn’t enough room for clearance and her lower half collided with the hull.
A soft moan carried to him as he winced. Then he pulled again, this time sort of scraping her up the side of the boat before she cleared it. His shoe slipped, he went down on his ass, and she fell right on top of him since he was still holding onto her wrists.