Free The Wedding Fling by Meg Maguire Page A

be by to secure things ahead of an approaching storm.
    “No,” one of them said, fastening the canvas cover on her hot tub. “But very windy. You’ll be fine. Just don’ want these things flying all ’round when it get gusty. But no need to panic. Should be over by tomorrow mornin’.”
    “That’s good.”
    “An’ these villas are built like rocks, miss. Best you stay indoors, of course.”
    She pictured the cottages perched on stilts at the workers’ beach and wondered how well they would fare.
    She thanked the men when they finished the preparations, feeling excited about the coming storm. She hadn’t made any plans for the day, had no activities she’d been hoping to try out. Staying inside with a glass of wine in her hand and watching the sea thrash sounded lovely. Simple and lovely. And it’d keep her away from Will Burgess for another day, which was surely for the best. Leigh shook her head, lamenting what a fool she’d made of herself that second evening. She’d blush pink as a grapefruit the next time she needed a lift to shore.
    Just as she was finishing dinner, the winds arrived. She noticed it in the ocean first, a quickening of the waves lapping the beach, a rising of the tide. Then the sky grew heavy with fast-moving clouds, gleaming gray as gunmetal.
    Leigh settled on the couch with a glass of chardonnay to watch nature’s show. No commercials, no gossip, no reminders of the mess she’d left back home. Simple, elemental. Not unlike those few passionate minutes in the sand with Will. She gave herself a little mental shake for remembering it with such idiotic fondness. She was just another rich, bored tourist to him, surely, some laughable caricature of the jet set. It had stung to realize those facts, the morning after their...collision. Though the embarrassment didn’t do much to take the edge off the giddiness still wriggling in her middle. Her actions had been foolish, but her crush was as real as ever.
    By seven it was dark as midnight, with wind and sea spray whipping the villa’s picture windows. There hadn’t been any lightning, but Leigh’s skin felt fevery, her senses heightened as though something electric charged the air. She rose to go to the fridge, and as she refilled her glass, a great crash shattered her calm, and the bottle slipped from her hands, exploding across the tile. She whipped around to find one of the solarium’s tall panes all but obliterated, wind and spray gusting in to send the magazines and papers on the coffee table flying. She tiptoed around the bottle shards and hurried to the phone by the door to dial zero.
    “Reception,” chimed a friendly islander voice.
    “This is Leigh Bailey, in Shearwater Villa. I think something just crashed through my living room window. There’s wind coming in and stuff flying everywhere.”
    “Will you be all right for ten minutes, miss?”
    “Yes.”
    “Please shut yourself in a different room and collect anything you’ll need for an overnight stay. I’m sending a car right now, and we’ll get you to a room here in the main complex.”
    “Thank you.”
    They hung up and Leigh picked her way along the edge of the living room, collecting her phone from the table and her sandals from the floor beside it. She could see what had happened; lying amid the solarium glass was a heavy terra-cotta roof tile.
    Her ride arrived before she had finished tossing a change of clothes into a bag. To her surprise, it was Will, standing on her stoop with his messy hair whipping around his face, his truck parked behind him. He looked comforting and familiar, solid in the midst of the chaos. Her middle gave a funny wriggle.
    She had to nearly yell to be heard over the gusting. “Hello again, Captain.” She shut the door at her back and Will took her bag.
    “What happened?”
    “A roof tile got blown through one of the windows. What are you doing here?”
    “I was the only one left in the vicinity, still battening down my hatches after