Chapter One
Jay
I may have been the fisherman, but from the second I saw her, I was hooked.
I was just finishing up a long day at sea and tying up my boat at the docks when I saw her. She took my breath away. A long flowing dress of sea-green, heaps of light brown curls draped over her delicate shoulders and a face that would have put Helen of Troy to shame. I literally tripped over my mooring line as I made my way up the dock to shore.
She obviously wasn’t from around here. Green Harbor was a working-class fishing town. The local girls wore Carhartt jeans with sweatshirts, not something that looked like it had just come off the rack of a Paris fashion show—not that I knew what any of that fancy stuff looked like anyway.
Even if her clothes hadn’t given away the fact that this girl dined at Michelin-star restaurants and came from a private school, the black Mercedes behind her sure did. It was brand new and looked like something a mob boss or rapper would drive.
Some of the fishermen around here had nice trucks. They didn’t know how to save their money. Every year after a good season would go blow their earnings on something new and shiny and then spend all next season working to pay their bills.
A car like that parked in a place like this screamed one thing: this girl was not from my world.
That would have intimidated a lot of guys I knew. They were used to folks who were a little more rough around the edges, “down to earth” as they put it. But when I laid eyes on the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, I wasn’t going to let any of that crap stop me.
I walked right up the rocky beach to where she was sitting on an old upturned rowboat and didn’t even try to hide the look in my eyes.
And neither did she.
“Nice car,” I told her. It was a simple enough statement, but around here, we both knew what it meant.
“Dreadful color,” she replied. I glanced at it and raised my eyebrows.
“It’s black.”
“Exactly,” she laughed. “What am I? A mafia wife?”
I smiled. “What color would you have preferred?”
“Well, white would be better,” she thought. “Or maybe green like my dress.”
“Not pink?” I suggested, which drew a frown.
“I may not be a mafia wife, but I’m also not Paris Hilton, thank you very much.”
Thank God.
“I’m Jay,” I said, extending my hand. “Jay Cousins.”
“Rachel,” she replied. “Rachel Banning.”
She took my hand and my whole body went tense. My hands were fisherman’s hands—rough and callused from years of working the sea. Rachel’s, on the other hand, were soft and cared for, delicate like a doll’s.
“Nice to meet you,” I nodded as my body began to respond to hers.
Don’t get hard, idiot, I told myself, but my body was fighting me. Her dress may have been long and loose, but the wind was blowing in from the sea, causing it to hug every inch of her incredible body, making her look like a Grecian statue that had been carved from marble and placed on the beach to give the sailors something to smile at when they came home every night.
Her skin was white like cream, a complete contrast to my working boy’s tan, and her pronounced collarbones framed the modest amount of cleavage her dressed allowed to be seen.
I started salivating and felt the bulge in my pants beginning to grow, but focused as hard as I could on keeping it from getting any bigger—or at least big enough for her to notice.
I didn’t want her to think I was just some scumbag fisherman looking for a quick fuck from the rich girl. There was something intriguing about this girl, something that made me want to know her more that I could not ignore.
“So what’s a rich girl like you doing in a place like this?” I asked, opting for a cheesy bullshit line to see how she’d react. I wasn’t one of those guys who didn’t mind his girls having no personality. Thankfully, she saw what I was doing and tossed her hair dramatically and sighed in a way that caused her chest to heave distractingly.
“Oh, you know,” she replied. “Just getting away from the pressures of my overprivileged life. Parents, school, expectations. You know?”
“Oh, sure,” I nodded. “And I’m just working hard to support my sick, aging mother after my father died.”
Rachel smiled, enjoying our little joke, but I held my expression firm. After a moment, she frowned.
“Wait, really?”