Tropical Holiday Tails - Zoe Chant Page 0,6

going to find her, and tell her all the things he was feeling, however awkwardly it came out. He was going to confess that he was a charlatan who didn’t belong in a resort like this.

Would she forgive him? Or would she find that his deception was too much to accept? Was he too much of a…what had Tom called him? A creeper? The dictionary had helpfully supplied that a creeper was someone sneaky and deceptive. It had also confirmed that ‘expert’ was the English word for ‘professional,’ but it still didn’t sound right to his ears.

But the next morning, Tom intercepted him at the restaurant.

“She’s not interested,” he said, like a brutal check against the boards.

“Not…interested?” Lars could only repeat dumbly.

“She knows you’re a moose,” Tom snarled. “Did you think she could possibly want to see you after finding that out?”

Lars could think of nothing. He didn’t think of himself as a dummy, but he knew that he sometimes took longer to find the right words than it ought to, which led to him repeating himself, and over-compensating by talking too much. And if she knew he was a moose…

“I won’t bother her,” he told Tom mournfully. “If that’s what she wants.”

“That’s what she wants,” Tom said firmly.

Appetite gone, Lars picked at his breakfast half-heartedly and returned to his cottage to find a strongly-worded letter on his door regarding the state of the foliage that he’d eaten the night before.

Julie had gotten adept at watching Lars while she pretended to read. She sat with her book where they might see each other and hoped with an excited flutter in her chest that this time he would come and talk to her, prepared to put the book down at the slightest invitation.

But he didn’t come over, not even to make loud conversation with someone nearby, as he’d been in the habit of doing.

Now, every time he caught sight of her, he reversed direction so quickly, Julie would have guessed he was on skates.

Was he disappointed that they were mates? Had he found out that she and Tom were dirt poor and only at the resort by grace of winning a sweepstakes? She ached at the idea that he might not want her.

She tried a meditation class to clear her mind, failing miserably at it. She took salsa lessons with a beautiful Hispanic woman with a rich accent that she could only compare to Lars’s European lilt. She even tried a fancy drink with an umbrella at the bar.

“Are you going to be at the dance tonight?”

Julie looked up in surprise. She had been gazing out over the pool and put her book down absentmindedly. The bartender had apparently taken that as an invitation for conversation.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said miserably. It sounded like another chance for Lars to avoid her.

“You should come,” the bartender coaxed in his thick Southern accent.

Julie had once liked Southern accents, but there was only one accent she wanted to hear now. “I don’t really have anything to wear,” she fibbed. She had brought a black dress she’d never had the courage to wear.

“Don’t be too put off by the word formal in the description,” the bartender said kindly. “We get all kinds of dress styles at these things. It’s understood that everyone is living out of suitcases. You should come!”

Julie looked up at him, out of excuses. “I guess,” she agreed reluctantly.

Lars eyed himself in the mirror. The suit was the best that money could buy, perfectly tailored to his broad shoulders. The gold watch was a gift from a technology company courting him to do a commercial. The haircut was hours old from the well-appointed resort spa and perfectly styled with product that even smelled expensive. He should feel confident and ready for everything.

Mostly he just felt like a fraud.

Every time they put him on television, he wanted to blurt out that there had been a terrible mistake. He wasn’t the hero that they made him out to be. He wasn’t the rising star, the next Gretzky. He was just a lost kid who had never felt comfortable in any country, good at fighting and fast on skates.

Now he was expected to wear expensive suits, and vacation at exclusive resorts.

He didn’t recognize the young man in the mirror.

That man looked like a bear.

There wasn’t a bear inside of him, just a gangly-legged moose that he was wrestling back with sheer force of will.

Julie had liked the bear. There had been awe in her