LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      SHOSHAUNA found the waves extraordinarily beautiful, rolling four feet high out in the water where they began their curl, breaking on the beach with a thunderous explosion of white foam and fury.

      Her foot actually touched the hard pack of wave-pounded sand, when his hand clamped down on her shoulder with such strength it spun her.

      Even though she had spent way too much time imagining his touch, it was not satisfactory in that context! She faced him, glaring. “What?” she demanded.

      “You’re not a strong enough swimmer for that surf.”

      “Well, you don’t know everything! You said the surf would never even come up in this bay and you were wrong about that!”

      “I’m not wrong about this. I’m not letting you go in the water by yourself.”

      He had that look on his face, fierce; the warrior not to be challenged.

      But Shoshauna had been counting days and hours. She knew this time of freedom was nearly over for her. Tomorrow they would be gone from here. And she knew something else. She was responsible for her own life and her own decisions.

      She stood her ground, lifted her chin to him.

      “I have a lifelong dream of doing this, and I’m doing it.”

      He looked totally unimpressed with her newfound resolve, indifferent to her discovery of her own power, immune to the sway of her life dreams. He folded his arms over his chest, set his legs, a man getting ready to throw her over his shoulder if he had to.

      As delicious as it might be to be carried by him kicking and screaming up to the cottage, this was important to her, and she suddenly had to make him see that.

      “It’s my lifelong dream, and the waves came. Don’t you think you have to regard that as a gift from the gods?”

      “No.”

      “Ronan, all my life people have made my decisions for me. And I’ve let them. Starting right here and right now, I’m not letting them anymore. Not even you.”

      Something in him faltered. He looked at the waves and he looked at her. She could see the struggle in his face.

      “Ronan, its not that I want to. I have to. I have to know what it feels like to ride that kind of power, to leash it. I feel if I can do that, conquer those waves, it’s just the beginning for me. If I can do that, I can do anything.”

      And suddenly she knew she had never spoken truer words. Suddenly she realized she had made a crucial error the other night when she had thought he held the key to the secrets locked away within her.

      When they had started this adventure, she remembered saying she didn’t know how to find what she was looking for because she didn’t know where to look.

      But suddenly she knew exactly where to look.

      Every answer she had ever needed was there. Right inside herself. And part of that was linked to these waves, to knowing what she was capable of, to tapping her sense of adventure instead of denying it. She could not ask Ronan—or anyone else—not her mother or her father or Mahail to accept responsibility for her life. She was in charge. She was taking responsibility for herself. He did not hold the key to her secrets; she did.

      She knew that what she was thinking must have shown in her face, because Ronan studied her, then nodded once, and the look on his face was something she would take back with her and cherish as much, maybe more, than the satisfaction of riding the wave.

      She had won Ronan’s admiration—reluctant, maybe, but still there. He had looked at her, long and hard, and he had been satisfied with what he had seen.

      She turned and stepped into the surf, laughed as she leaped over a tumbling wave and it crashed around her, soaking her in foam and seawater.

      Then, when she was up to her knees, she placed the board carefully in front of her and tossed herself, belly down, on top of it. It was as slippery as a banister she had once greased with butter, and it scooted out from underneath her as if it was a living thing. A wave pounded over her, awesome in its absolute power, and then she got up and ran after the board.

      Drenched, but deliriously happy, she caught the board, shook water from herself, tried again. And then again. It was discouraging. She couldn’t even lie on it without getting dumped off. How was she ever going to surf?

      Her arms and shoulders began to hurt, and it occurred to her this was going to be a lot harder than she’d been led to believe by watching surfers on TV. But in a way she was glad. She wanted it to be challenging. She wanted to test her spunk and her determination and her spirit of adventure. Life-altering moments were not meant to be easy!

      Ronan came and picked her up out of the sand after she was dumped for about the hundredth time, grabbed the board that was being dragged out to sea. She grabbed it back from him.

      He sighed. “Let me give you a few tips before you go back out there. The first is this: you don’t conquer that water. You work with it, you read it, you become a part of it. Give me the board.”

      It was an act of trust to hand the board to him, because he could just take it and go back to the cottage, but somehow she knew he was now as committed to this as she was. There was nothing tricky about Ronan. He was refreshing in that he was such a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy.

      “You’re lucky,” he said, “it’s a longboard, not a short one, a thruster. But it’s old, so it doesn’t have a leash on it, which means you have to be very aware where it is at all times. This board is the hardest thing in the water, and believe me, it hurts when it clobbers you.”

      She nodded. He tossed the board down on the sand.

      “Okay, get on it, belly down.”

      She recognized the gift he was giving her: his experience, and recognized her chances of doing this were better if she listened to him. And that’s what he’d said. True power wasn’t about conquering, it was about working with the elements, reading them.

      And that’s what Ronan was like: one of the elements, not to be conquered, not to be tamed. To be read and worked with.

      When she was down on her belly, he gave her tips about positioning: how to hold her chin, where to have her weight on the board—dead center, not too far back or too far forward.

      And so she learned another lesson about power: it was all about balance.

      He told her how to spot a wave that was good to ride. “Nothing shaped like a C,” he warned her sternly. “Look for waves shaped liked pyramids, small rollers to start with. We’ll keep you here in the surf, no deeper than your hips until you get the hang of it.”

      He said that with absolute confidence, not a doubt in his mind that she would get the hang of it, that she would be riding waves.

      “So, practice hopping up a couple of times, here on the sand. Grab the rails.”

      “It

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