To love and to honor Read Online Free PDF Page A

Popsicles. Dogs watching hungrily. Gay umbrellas. Canopied chairs. Figures outstretched on the sand in colorful scraps of clothing staring up at the sky through the black lenses of sunglasses. Man and woman pacing the beach, her multi-colored parasol a moving splash of vivid color. Gypsy in enormous hat peddling baskets. Stout woman with ankle-length skirt wading. Diminutive black cloud of sandpipers on the wing. Girl in crimson one-piece bathing suit on the step of a pavilion applying lipstick. Flashy man in black-and-white check suit, soft hat drawn low over one eye ogling her. Human interest. They were both facing her. Something familiar about the tough guy. She focused her camera

    TO LOVE AND TO HONOR SJ
    on the couple and snapped it. The man must have heard the click, for he eyed her with a baleful glare.
    Little boys tumbled in and out of the lifeguard's dory drawn high on the beach. That lifeguard. Jim d'Arcy. His first season here. Bossy creature. Female admiration had gone to his head. He rated admiration. She would hand him that. Tall, slim, straight as an arrow. Lean hips. Brief sky-blue trunks on a perfect body beautifully tanned. With wings on his white cap and at his heels, his right arm raised, his left upholding a caduceus, he would be Giovanni di Bologna's bronze Mercury come to life.
    She made a little face in his direction. She had had two tilts with him since her arrival. Twice he had followed her in his boat to remind her that swimmers were not allowed beyond the float, as if she hadn't just realized that she was out of bounds. Of course he had been in the right, but his manner had infuriated her.
    She entered the bathhouse barely avoiding collision with a woman going out. She looked after the as-near-as-nothing-as-the-law-allows clothed figure with its unbecoming rolls of flesh and shook her head. After spending hours on this beach, observing the swim clothes many women wear, no one ever will convince me that my sex is vain, she told herself.
    Her cap matched the string of large turquoise-color porcelain beads at the base of her throat, as in a white sharkskin suit with a brief pleated skirt she ran toward the shore. As she passed the pavilion she heard the girl in the red swim suit say: "I'll try. Give me time—" "Shut up," a low voice warned.
    The black-and-white check man and the girl whose pictures she had snapped were quarreling. Evidently they were pals and she had thought he was being given the come-on, Cindy decided before she waded into the water and struck out for the float. "Come backl"
    A man's shout. That pesky lifeguard again. She wasn't anywhere near out of bounds. She glanced up at the

    plane only a trifle less blue than the sky, deafeningly thrumming above her head.
    Another call. What did it mean? She raised her shoulders from the water and looked ahead. A motorboat just beyond the float was making a beeline for her. Was the person at the wheel stark mad? She looked again. There was no one at the wheel. The boat was running amok, was headed for her with diabolic intent.
    Memories of stories she had heard of swimmers beheaded or rendered footless by a propeller blade, panicked her, paralyzed her arms and legs. She must make the float. Her haven seemed miles ahead in a rough jade-green sea.
    "Steady. Take it easy!"
    The voice rose above the hum of the oncoming motor. An arm seized her and dragged her down, down, down. Instinctively she closed her lips and eyes. It seemed but an instant before she rose to the surface and a breathless voice encouraged:
    "It has gone over us. You can make the float. Only a foot ahead."
    A huge wave made by the careening boat, a hand on her wrist, and another under her armpit lifted her to the rough boards. She clung to an iron ring. The lifeguard had disappeared. She'd never call him bossy again. Had he gone under? Had he been struck by the propeller while saving her? She flung herself flat and reached down with one hand.
    "This way. This way," she called.