At one point she remembered what Graydon had said about how he wasn’t really a fairy-tale prince. And that thought led her to thinking of the old stories. Cinderella. Snow White. Fairy tales were so in right now!
The door to the chapel burst open and Graydon stood there, the light behind him.
“Fairy tales,” he said.
He didn’t have to explain what he meant; she knew. “Just what I was thinking. Do you know any Lanconian tales?”
“None that don’t involve the spilling of blood and internal organs. What about something from Victoria’s books?”
“They’re full of adultery and murder, that sort of thing. They are bestsellers,” Toby said.
“Hey, Gray!” a man called. “Where do you want this?”
“I have to go. What’s that glass slipper one?”
“Cinderella. It was my first choice, but Victoria would probably say it’s too common.”
He glanced to the side for a moment then back at her. “There’s a truck stuck in the mire and I must pull it out. What about a medieval theme with a great deal of velvet? I could have Rory send me my lute. That would give some atmosphere.” With a wave, he left.
“Velvet’s too hot for August,” she called after him, but he was gone. She went back to scraping wax. “Your lute?” she said, smiling. At least something he did fit in with his being a fairy-tale prince.
Graydon and Toby worked to put the whole area back to the way it had been before the wedding. It took her hours to clean up the chapel, while Graydon took care of the outside.
After all the service people left, the two of them wandered around the acreage carrying plastic trash bags and picked up everything from cigarette butts to a shoe that had been left behind.
When they finished it was four P.M. For lunch they’d had sandwiches from Something Natural, during which they’d talked only of the work yet to be done. Now they looked at each other, unsure of what to do next.
“In the back of the truck I saw a canvas bag full of large towels,” Graydon said.
“Beach towels,” Toby said. “Jared loves to swim, so I guess he stays prepared.”
Graydon looked toward the ocean, which was just a few feet away. “To me, the sea is a rarity since Lanconia is inland. I don’t want to keep you waiting, but would you be appalled if I stripped to the bare essentials of clothing and swam for a while? Perhaps you would join me?” Toby wasn’t sure what he was leading up to. When she was silent, he turned toward the truck. “I could drive you home and return here.”
Part of her thought this was probably an attempt to get her in a compromising position, and she should say no. But she didn’t. “I am grimy,” she said, “and I’d love to have a swim.”
She walked to the water, and before she could change her mind, she started removing her clothes down to her underwear. She couldn’t help thinking that sometimes it seemed that the whole world was leaping into bed with one another. From what she heard, dates nearly always included going to bed together. Toby wanted something deeper in her life. She wanted to experience an emotional relationship as well as a physical one. Lexie said she was missing out on a lot of life, but Toby didn’t think so.
And the truth was that Toby had never met a man who’d made her forget herself so passionately that she was blind to everything else in her life.
Whatever her thoughts, with this man she was glad she?
??d worn her lacy blue bra and matching underpants. She hurried into the water. It felt not too cold, not too warm—just perfect after the hot, sweaty work they’d been doing.
When Graydon showed up, she was up to her neck in the water. “It might be colder than you like,” she said.
“The climate in my country makes this island seem tropical.”
As she treaded water, she couldn’t keep from watching him undress. Shoes, socks, shirt. Her eyes widened. The muscles on his upper body showed that he did a lot of physical activity! When he started to unfasten his trousers, Toby dove under the water. When she surfaced, he was at the edge, about to enter. “Boxers” was the answer to the old question.
“Wonderful,” he said as he slid into the warm water and parted his arms to swim.
Toby moved back to watch him. He sliced through the water with the ease and grace of an athlete. Long, slow strokes that hardly made a wave. He went so far out that Toby began to be concerned. She meant to call out to him to be careful, but he did a dive and went underwater.
She waited for him to come up, but he didn’t, and there was no sign of him. No ripple in the water, no movement at all.
Frowning, she turned around, looking for him, but saw nothing. On her third spin around, his head appeared next to her, his face inches from hers. “You scared me!” she said.
“Sorry. Guard training. Silent underwater espionage. I think it was made up just for me. A sort of ‘Let’s see if we can terrify our future king.’ ”