Page 28 of Seven Rules for Breaking Hearts

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Reservation date & time: July 18 at 1:00pm PST

2-person kayak rental—$17/hour (x4)

3-hour reservation (x4)

Taxes: $20.40

Total: $224.40

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The Sun-N-Snorkels Team

CHAPTER11

“But I booked for five individual kayaks,” I said, holding up my fingers like a toddler who just learned to count. “One double and five individuals.”

The cashier at the rental shack—a kid in a Hawaiian-print shirt, sunburned the color of a cooked lobster—shook his shaggy head. “Double kayaks are all we have left. The reservation says seven people. You didn’t specify the type of kayak. You should have received an email yesterday morning to confirm.”

“I didn’t have reception yesterday morning.” It was a half-truth. There was one point during the hike where I didn’t have any bars, but I also hadn’t bothered to check the email from the rental place afterwards. I was too busy scanning for emails related to the podcast. I glanced at Jo, waiting with Peter and the rest of the wedding party a few yards away while I tried to straighten things out. The plan had been for Jo and Peter to share a kayak but for the rest of us to have our own. That seemed easy enough to finagle. I turned back to the cashier. “Let me speak to your manager.”

After a fruitless argument about their automated form and all the single kayaks being booked up for the day, the manager sent the cashier to the shed behind the shack. I marched over to Jo and the others and filled them in on the mix-up. No one seemed particularly bothered by the news that we’d have to share kayaks. Liv mumbled something about going with the flow and Declan nodded, his expression unreadable behind his sunglasses.

“One of us will have to be alone,” Autumn pointed out.

“I’ll do it,” Lucas offered, his face all scrunched up like he was angry at the sun. Autumn narrowed her eyes at him and he shrugged a shoulder. “Seems like the gentlemanly thing to do.”

I stayed quiet. I wasn’t a huge fan of sharing a kayak with other people. Dad had taught me how to kayak years ago, hauling a pair of single-person kayaks up to Lake Arrowhead or Silverwood in the back of the pickup every summer when I was growing up. And his number one rule for all things outdoorsy: only ever rely on yourself. With individual kayaks, if you tipped over or couldn’t keep up, that was on you. But with doubles, you had to rely on the other person to have steady paddling arms, to pull their own weight, to have a decent sense of balance. And all that was ignoring the fact that I was used to kayaking in lakes, which were a bit more predictable than the ocean. The ocean had sharks, for one. Lakes did not.

I whipped out my phone and Googled are there sharks near Catalina Island? The first result was an article about a nineteen-foot-long great white that patrolled the local waters. Well, that answered that. The cashier was passing out the life vests and demonstrating how to put them on, much in the same way an airline stewardess would demonstrate the whole emergency exit plan: in great detail, covering their asses from getting sued. As though a life vest was going to save me from getting my legs nibbled off by a massive shark.

Jo was obviously kayaking with Peter, so my options were pretty limited. I stole a glance at Declan. He’d set his backpack on the counter at the rental shack and was tugging his T-shirt over his head, revealing broad shoulders and a toned chest with a dusting of coppery hair. I was fairly certain he could pull his own weight, but he also hadn’t made any effort to talk to me after our hike yesterday, and I didn’t really know what to do with that. I was used to leaving a few breadcrumbs, but it was mostly on the guy to actually make a move, and usually they were tripping over themselves to talk to me—at least up until we jumped into bed together, at which point I’d made a habit of ghosting them without a second thought. Still, I didn’t exactly have infinite time to waste making this happen. If he wasn’t going to initiate things, it was up to me. I crossed over to where he was standing by the lockers, tucking his shirt into his backpack and extracting a bottle of off-brand sunscreen.

“Declan. You’re a—” I struggled to describe his build in a way that wouldn’t sound completely objectifying, but the lack of a shirt was making that difficult. Biceps and shoulders and—look at his face, Margo. His face. “Capable-looking guy,” I finished lamely. “You’d punch a shark for me, right?”

He gave me a bemused look, stepping out of the way to allow Liv and Autumn to pass with their own kayak. I didn’t miss the way they cast curious glances in our direction. “What?”

“Speaking hypothetically, if the kayak were to tip over, and if a shark happened to be swimming by—”

“If this is your weird way of asking me to share a kayak with you, then I accept.”

“Great.” I watched him slather sunscreen over a muscled arm, my eyes drinking in the curve of his bicep a little too readily. I needed to focus. “Do you need me to get your back?” I offered, reaching for the bottle where he’d left it on the counter.

He slowed in the middle of smoothing sunscreen across his chest. His expression should have been unreadable behind his dark sunglasses, but the slight downward curve of his lips betrayed his hesitation. “Why?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, there’s this thing called the sun,” I said cheerfully. “And sometimes it can burn you, and we call that a—”

“Okay, I get it,” he said, and—finishing up with his chest—he turned his back to me. Good. I kind of liked him being cooperative. Except now I was faced with a broad, masculine back. His shoulder blades were dotted with freckles, and I had to resist the urge to trace them like constellations, instead squirting some SPF 30 into my palm. It was surprisingly cool in the hot afternoon sun. I frowned, trying to decide where to start. I reached for a shoulder.

His skin was warm and he twitched away from my touch. “Shit, that’s cold.”

“Sorry.” I probably should have rubbed my hands together to warm it up first, but it warmed up as I worked it over his back. A prickle at the back of my neck told me that Jo was watching us from where they were waiting down by the water, but I pretended not to notice. She’d be asking for updates on our little experiment pretty soon, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to tell her—in part because I had no idea whether things were going well or not—so I focused on rubbing sunscreen on Declan instead.

I’d touched my fair share of guys before, but that had mostly been a lot of fumbling around in the dark, a few tequila shots deep, never making an effort to memorize their body. Not that I was making a conscious effort to memorize anything now, but there were details I noticed that I wouldn’t normally have noticed. The indent of his spine. The dusting of freckles across his shoulders. The way his back rose and fell with his breathing, which was weirdly in time with my own, and I found myself holding my breath for a second to break the rhythm. “There,” I said when I’d finished, acutely aware of the fact that this had been a lot less sexy than I’d imagined it in my head. “No sunburns in your near future.” I didn’t know what to do with the film of sunscreen left on my hands, so I wiped it on my own arms, feeling strangely self-conscious.