woman was of little consequence to Margo. But she was aware that money would give her freedom to choose how to live the next chapter of her life.
On the sixth day out of Miami, the day everything would change, the ship had sailed from Cartagena just before five. The sky that evening was a vivid blue streaked with pink the colour of flamingos. The wind had gone down and a gentle breeze touched the warm air.
Margo had convinced her steward to set up dinner at her special place on the deck. She had decided on pink champagne to accompany her Dover sole. It felt right, somehow. She felt right too; finally at peace with her memories.
After dinner she lay down on her lounge chair to watch the light leave the sky. She had certainly not intended to fall asleep.
Margo would never be quite sure what had awakened her. Was it the soft ‘clunk’ she heard, or thought she heard? Or was it the rumble of an engine, different, somehow, to the slow thrumming of the cruise ship’s giant turbines? She didn’t move a muscle. Whatever was happening, she sensed she wasn’t supposed to witness it.
Then, suddenly, he was in front of her. It was a toss-up as to which of the two was more startled.
‘Don’t scream!’ he said quietly.
‘I wasn’t going to scream,’ she said indignantly, when she was able to speak.
He smiled at her. ‘You don’t look like the screaming type.’
‘I am, however, thinking of hitting you over the head with this champagne bottle.’
It was hard to sound fierce looking into those intense blue eyes. He was ruggedly handsome and was wearing a very unseasonable trench coat that appeared to have lots of mileage on it.
The man had some hard miles on him as well, she decided.
Also, there was something else she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Pain? Sadness? She wasn’t sure. But she knew immediately there was more to this man than met the eye.
He eyed the champagne bottle she had threatened him with. ‘Is the bottle full?’ he asked.
‘Half.’
‘Using it as a club would be a terrible waste of good champagne.’ The man’s eyes crinkled when he smiled. ‘At least, I would assume everything on this ship is good, given the price of my ticket.’
‘Your ticket?’ she said, eyeing him.
He took her glass from the table, filled it, and handed it to Margo. He emptied her water glass over the rail and poured some champagne for himself. He raised his glass. ‘Bon voyage.’
She never took her eyes off him. ‘Bon voyage.’
He drank down the glass in one gulp. ‘Warm.’
‘Had I known you were coming I would have ordered more ice.’
For some reason she was not the least bit afraid of this man who appeared out of the night in the middle of the sea. ‘And if you actually did buy a ticket, you got cheated on the embarkation. The rest of us boarded via a wood-panelled gangway rather than scaling the side of the ship on a rope. Plus, there were hors d’oeuvres.’
‘I’ll ask for a refund,’ he said, taking off thin leather gloves and stuffing them into the pocket of his coat. He took a lethal-looking knife from another pocket and cut the rope, which was still hooked over the railing. He let it drop to the sea below. Margo heard the splash when it landed.
‘I guess I should introduce myself since I drank most of your champagne. Jack. Jack McCarthy.’
‘Margo,’ she replied. ‘But I’m not telling you my last name until I find out if you’re some sort of a pirate.’
‘Just a scientist, I’m afraid, a dull man with a dull job. I overslept and missed the sailing, so some friends gave me a lift.’
Margo studied him, wondering how much of what he was saying was true.
‘Now, if you’ll allow it, I’d like to buy you a real drink at a proper temperature. How do you feel about Scotch?’
Margo decided she didn’t care if he was telling the truth about himself or not. ‘Crazy about it,’ she said. ‘Single malt, neat.’
‘Done,’ he said.
He removed his raincoat and stuffed it into a lifeboat suspended nearby. Under the coat he was perfectly dressed for an evening in the Caribbean.
He offered his arm. Margo took it with a grin and they headed across the deck toward the lounge.
Jack McCarthy appeared to be another passenger out for a moonlit stroll, not a mysterious stranger who had just scaled the side of a moving ship in the middle of the night.
The airplane was in turbulence but to Margo it felt like the gentle rocking of a ship at sea. The sound of the purser’s voice warning the passengers to check their seatbelts awakened her from her dream. Half-awake, she checked her phone again, hoping that she might find an explanation from Jack waiting for her. She tried to hang onto sleep, loath to leave behind that first magical night with him. Their meeting had happened a little over a year ago, exactly the way she had just dreamed it.
She smiled, remembering. The two had been inseparable since the night of his unorthodox arrival on the ship. There was a logical explanation for it, of course. Jack had been in Colombia on an assignment for his company, the Worldwide Water Project. When he missed the ship, one of his friends who owned a cigarette boat had given him a lift. He’d done plenty of rock climbing in the course of his work, he said, so when they caught up with the big lumbering ship, he simply threw a line over the leeward side, shimmied up a rope and met the woman of his dreams.
That’s what Jack had told her, and that’s what Margo decided to believe.
Days later, when the ship docked in Puerto Vallarta, they got off. This time they’d used a gangway to disembark. While the ship departed without them, they sat in a café drinking Carta Blancas and deciding to get married.
Margo pushed the memories away. She sat straight up in her seat and checked her watch. It was less than an hour until the plane was scheduled to land. She refused the food and wine the flight attendant offered; she knew she would need all of her wits about her in the next few hours.
Margo pulled out the photograph she had brought along to surprise Jack. Billy had taken it in Puerto Vallarta on their wedding day, one year ago tomorrow. They had been married by the mayor with only Billy in attendance.
No force on earth could have kept her lifelong friend and champion away from Margo’s wedding, even if it involved chartering a plane, which it did.
Billy and Margo had grown up living next door to one another in two big apartments on Lake Shore Drive. After reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe they had even bribed one of the building’s handymen to open a wall between the two apartments. The passageway was masked by large cupboards on either side. That way, when they were under house arrest, which was a good deal of the time, they were able to move back and forth without even going into the hall.
Except for mostly absent parents and a gaggle of nannies, they were the only family each of them had.
Until Jack. When she called to tell Billy about Jack, he cautioned her that a shipboard romance should be confined to a ship. But when he realized how happy Margo was, he made a decision. While he never quite overcame his scepticism, he kept quiet about it. For Billy, who had an opinion on everything and a burning desire to share it, this was a supreme act of love.
He had appointed himself major domo, attendant, and father of the bride. The couple had planned to wear bathing suits but Billy wasn’t having it. From the plane he had managed to procure a vintage, hand-embroidered Mexican wedding dress that fitted Margo perfectly.