Rogue Wave (The Water Keepers, Book 2) (35 page)

It was the longest shower of my life. Was this the way I wanted it to happen? It did seem like the perfect scenario—beautiful view, romantic hotel room, and Rayne—the most amazing guy in probably the entire universe. And it wasn’t like we were really rushing into things; we had known each other a long time now, and we’d been through a lot together. We loved each other.

But it had only been days since I was finally able to let go of my fears and realize I was ready to move forward with him. It didn’t help that my life had been a crazy mess ever since.

I did love him; there was no question about that. But after twenty minutes of agonizing back and forth over what I should do, I realized that it shouldn’t be such a hard decision. There was too much to worry about at the moment, and I was too vulnerable right now to handle taking on such a major step in our relationship at the same time. If I was this worried and nervous about moving our relationship to the next level, then maybe I just wasn’t ready for it. And I realized that I shouldn’t have to be either. I reminded myself that it was okay to wait until I was ready.

When I finally got out of the shower, I was relieved to find a robe folded up on the shelf in the bathroom. I cinched the white cotton belt securely around my waist and poked my wet head out through the bathroom door, still feeling awkward about the way I had left things with Rayne. He was standing across the room in front of the desk with his back turned.

“Hey,” I said to his back, still hesitating.

When he turned around, his smile was so warm and nonjudgmental that my worries faded to the background.

“Are you hungry?” he said casually, as if it was just another day. “They just dropped off some food.”

I smiled with relief, so glad he wasn’t upset with me. “Yeah, I’m starving.”

“You have a choice between fettuccine Alfredo or a cheeseburger and fries.”

I walked over to the table to get a closer look. “They both look so good. I can’t decide.”

“Then why don’t we share,” he offered. “You go get comfy, and I’ll bring it over to you. It will be like bringing you breakfast in bed, only for dinner.”

We sat in the bed together on top of the covers, without any pressure at all. We were just eating together, nothing more. But halfway through our dinner, there was a pause in our conversation. Rayne stared down at his plate a moment and said, “I’m sorry if I made you feel uncomfortable earlier. It was my fault. I may be an agent trained to keep my emotions under control, but I’m still a guy. I shouldn’t have let things get out of hand like that.”

“No, it wasn’t your fault,” I said. “It was me. I thought it was what I wanted, but I kind of got…scared.” I shook my head, embarrassed. “That probably sounds really lame to you.”

His eyes squinted together. “No it doesn’t. It’s a big thing, Sadie. I understand that. It is for me too.”

“Really?” I said.

His gaze was intent. “Really.”

Suddenly his expression seemed almost nervous. “Sadie, I’ve never…
been
with anyone…that way…before.”

“You haven’t?” I blurted in surprise, probably sounding way more excited than I meant to. “But you’ve been around so much longer than me. I mean, you’ve lived like, over thirty years already.”

“Yeah, thanks for reminding me,” he said with a laugh. “It’s true I’ve lived longer than you, and I went through a lot of training when I was younger, but it’s not like I’m some experienced, wise old man already. Things move slower on Ambrosia. By the time I graduated from the Academy, I had already lived twenty years, yet my body was still the equivalent of a fourteen-year-old boy, and I was only out in the field for a year before I took this assignment. After that, I was hardly ever home. It wasn’t exactly the best situation to start a relationship in.”

For some reason, I just assumed Rayne was more experienced than I was. Sometimes he could just be so confident and mature—and alluring. It was hard to believe that he hadn’t picked up some experience along the way. But knowing he still had some innocence to him, made his loyalty and thoughtfulness make that much more sense.

I shoved a French fry in my mouth, still feeling a little embarrassed by the general topic of the conversation. “Wow,” I said, chewing. “I had no idea. I was kind of expecting you to be the one that would know what you were doing in that department. At least this way you won’t know if I’m doing it wrong. Right? I mean…when we actually get around to doing, uh, that…one day.”

Oh my gosh. Could I sound like any more of an idiot right now?

Rayne grinned, but he didn’t laugh at me. “Well, just for the record,” he said. “I would never pressure you to do anything you weren’t comfortable with.”

“Thanks,” I said. I bit down nervously on the inside of my lip. “This has just been a really long couple of days, you know? I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

He nodded. “Yeah, me too.”

Rayne picked up the tray of food, that neither of us were touching anymore, and placed it on the table.

“I’m going to rinse off in the shower,” he said. “And when I’m done, we’ll do nothing but relax. Sound good?” I nodded cheerfully and watched his back until he slipped behind the bathroom door. Then I threw myself with a major sigh of relief onto the bed, just happy I had made it through the last hour without internally combusting.

28. PILLOW TALK

There was a knock on the hotel room door. I jumped up from the bed to answer it.

 An older woman greeted me in a gray collared shirt with her hair pulled back in a bun. “Frankie asked me to drop these off,” she said, handing me two shopping bags.

I thanked her and set the bags on the bed.

“If you want me to take your dirty laundry,” she said, “we can have it back for you by morning.”

“Oh. Uh, sure,” I answered. I gathered up my pile of clothes from the corner of the room, wondering if Rayne, who was still in the shower, wanted his clothes washed as well. Just as I was cautiously opening the bathroom door, the water in the shower shut off.

“Wait,” I called out, automatically squinting my eyes just in case. “Don’t come out.” I started rambling out of embarrassment. “I’m just in here because someone’s here to pick up our laundry. Do you want me to give them your clothes?”

I heard the shower curtain swish open, causing me to jerk my eyes in Rayne’s direction. When I saw his head poke out from behind the curtain, his shoulder all wet and glistening, I looked away, clinging to the wad of dirty clothes I was already holding awkwardly in my arms, probably blushing like crazy at the same time. All I saw was an arm and a shoulder and a face, but just the thought of what else was hiding behind that curtain…turned me into the equivalent of a giddy, ten-year-old girl.

“It’s okay, you can look,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m wearing a towel.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said behind wide eyes and a huge grin, still staring intently at my feet. “So, should I just grab these clothes on the floor to give to her?”

He laughed and stepped out of the tub, bending over to pick up his clothes.

Whatever the definition of smooth was, at this moment, I was exactly the opposite.

“Oh, okay,” I said, tripping back over my feet. “I’ll just…let you get them.” I stumbled out the bathroom door, feeling like a major idiot.

The woman in the gray shirt waited politely in the entryway, holding an empty laundry bag by her side. I shoved the wad of clothing out of my arms into her bag and thanked her, hoping my face wasn’t as red as it felt. When I turned around, Rayne was standing behind me, still wearing nothing but a towel around his waist.

This time I kept my cool—well, sort of—as I tried really,
really
hard not to ogle his delicious bare chest and walk past him to the shopping bags at the edge of the bed. One of the bags contained men’s clothes and the other had women’s. Rayne grabbed some money from his wallet on the table and handed the woman a tip. Then he turned his attention back to me.

“Here,” I said, holding out the bag of men’s clothes. “This one’s for you.”

Rayne slid the bag out of my hand. “Did I ever mention how adorable you are?” he said. Then he kissed my forehead lightly before heading back into the bathroom.

I was relieved to find a comfortable t-shirt and a pair of cotton shorts in my bag, not some silky little pajama thing, like I pictured Frankie picking out for herself. And when Rayne emerged out of the bathroom, fully clothed in blue pajama pants and a white cotton t-shirt, my tense muscles were finally able to relax. One day, I was sure I would feel completely at ease with me and Rayne and the whole intimacy thing, and I expected that it would be absolutely amazing when I did, but tonight just wasn’t that night.

He came and sat next to me on the bed where I was leaning up against a mound of pillows. I leaned my head against his shoulder, ready to finally relax and take a breath.

“Just so you know,” I said quietly, not moving from my position beside him. “I think you’re kind of adorable, too.”

I felt his chest lift slightly as he chuckled. “Thanks, I try my best.”

It was nice to take a few quiet moments, decompressing from the events of the day. After a while, Rayne began tracing the top of my hand with his fingertip. I closed my eyes for a moment, letting his warm touch soothe me like it always did. When his finger moved to the inside of my wrist, I opened my eyes and watched as he circled his fingers around my Watermark. There was no question that it was going dark again, but neither of us mentioned it. We just had to trust that everything would go as planned tomorrow when he went to pick up the Healing Water. I looked up at his face, and he smiled back at me, as if to say,
I won’t let anything go wrong; you’re going to be fine
.

I thought I should probably ask him what our specific plans were for the next day, but I didn’t feel like thinking about it.

“What was it like for you at the Academy?” I asked, finding something interesting to talk about instead, hoping it would take my mind off the subject.

“The Academy?” he repeated.

“Yeah, I mean, what kind of stuff did they teach you there? Was it hard for you?”

“It was pretty tough,” he agreed. “We had to study everything from foreign language and cultural integration to survival training and hand to hand combat. The last two years were especially intense, after we took our placement tests. That’s when they decide which type of agent they want you to become. After that, the students separate into specialized training programs.”

“So, you didn’t get to choose to be a Keeper? The people in charge chose it for you?”

Rayne turned on the bed to face toward me. “Well, they let each student declare where they would like to be placed before testing, but not everyone scores high enough in the right areas to get into the program they want. Typically, students put Scout as their first choice. They’re kind of like the elite of the school, and there’s a lot of recognition and big money involved. Most students don’t make it into the program though, so they usually end up with their second choice. In the beginning, that used to always be Keepers, but it seems like a lot of people prefer to be Backers now. I guess things have been changing lately.”

“What was
your
first choice?” I asked. “Did you want to be a Scout like everybody else?”

“No,” he laughed. “I guess I was kind of an oddball. I put Scout as my second choice.”

For some reason, I was hoping that would be his answer. I smiled. “Did you always know you wanted to be a Keeper, then?”

Rayne shrugged. “In the beginning I didn’t know
what
I wanted to be. I was just a kid from a tree farm, you know? Sometimes I wondered what I was doing at the Academy to begin with. But yeah, I mean once I was there, being a Keeper just felt like a better fit for me. And after I took my qualifying exams, I was just glad they didn’t kick me out of the Academy all together.”

“Why? Did you fail all of your tests or something?” I joked.

“Actually…” He looked at me as if hinting I might be on the right track.

“Wait, are you serious?”

“I was called into your father’s office only an hour after my last exam. It’s not exactly common to be contacted by the
Ambassador
himself after the tests, unless they had some pretty bad news to give you. Maybe it was a little different for me because Hamlin was my mentor before I was even admitted into the school, but I definitely wasn’t surprised when I got the call. I messed up royally on one of the most important tests, and I was sure he was calling me in there to tell me I’d failed miserably.”

“So what happened?” I asked. “Obviously they didn’t kick you out of the school.”

“No, it was the opposite actually. I couldn’t believe it when your father told me what they were thinking. Not only were they
not
going to fail me, they actually wanted to talk me into taking the position of a Scout instead of a Keeper, even though it wasn’t my first choice.”

“Nice,” I said, impressed. “So then, you didn’t fail your test like you thought you did?”

“Sort of. I mean, I still technically got a low score on the test itself, but I guess it was the reason
why
I scored low that impressed them.”

“Okay, I’m kind of confused,” I said. “What kind of a test was this?”

“Well, they give a pretty grueling written exam with ten different sections, which I studied for like crazy,” Rayne explained. “But the other, more important part of the test is a little harder to prepare for. They put you through a series of real life simulations to test your physical abilities and to see how you’ll react under pressure. In the first few situations they put us in, we were all on our own, but the very last test of the day was a group simulation. We were all called in together and told that Banya had suffered an enemy attack and that the city was being bombed. The enemy was gathering up prisoners, and it was our responsibility to go in and free as many people as possible, and get them to the appointed safety zone before time ran out. When I saw the course they’d set up right on the school campus, I couldn’t believe it. It literally felt like we were in a city being destroyed to pieces by explosives.”