Page 51 of The Grumpy Billionaire
The boat turned away from the shoreline and out toward open ocean. “Are we going to Block Island?” I asked.
It was the only destination I could imagine off the mainland, and Reid had already told me we wouldn’t be fishing.
He grinned mysteriously. “Just be patient. You’ll see.”
He was right about the motion-sickness medicine. It was doing its job. Whether from the pills or the wine, I felt good. A bit buzzy, but I wasn’t nauseous, and that was all I cared about.
Finally, about two hours out from shore, the yacht slowed and came to a stop. Right in the middle of the ocean. A little flutter of panic chased through me.
I stood up. “Why did the boat stop? Is it broken? Did the engine quit?”
My mind flooded with details of past news stories about stranded powerless cruise ships with failing toilets and boats lost at sea during hurricanes. The skies were crystal clear today, but itwasfall in New England. Hurricanes happened.
I stood and went to the side, gripping the handrail and leaning over to see the rolling water beneath us.
“No, Mara.” Reid laughed. “The boat didn’t break.” He got up and joined me. “We’re here.”
“Here? Here where? We’re in the middle of nowhere. Why did you bring me out—”
And then something large leapt out of the water and splashed back down about fifty yards from the boat. I nearly fell in my hurry to scramble back from the side.
I crashed into Reid, and my arms slipped around his waist before I could stop and think about what I was doing.
“What was that?”
“That,” Reid said with a tone of satisfaction. “Was what we came to see.”
He peeled me from his torso and threaded his fingers through mine. He drew me back to the railing, then let go of my hand and slipped an arm around my back, settling a reassuring warm hand on my waist.
“Just wait,” he said softly.
I looked up at his face, so close to me in this position. I was about to obey my brain’s prudent command to move away from his side when it happened again. A huge form erupted from the water this time much closer to the boat.
It splashed back down, sending a shower of sprinkles in our direction.
I looked at Reid, the realization hitting me.
“A whale,” I squealed. “It’s a whale. Oh my God. I’ve never seen one outside of an aquarium. Did you know this would happen?”
He beamed down at me. “I had the captain check in a little while ago with some fishing boats to find out where the pod had been spotted. These are humpbacks. This is their feeding ground. They’re out here every day from early summer to late fall.”
“Wow. Will it jump again?”
“It’s called breaching when they come up out of the water. And it’s not just one. There are a whole lot of them under there. Now that the boat’s been still a few minutes, we should be able to see quite a few breaches.”
The sentence was hardly out of his mouth before it happened again. This time the whale came almost all the way out of the water before diving back under the surface, its wide tail the last part to disappear. Another followed immediately.
I laughed out loud. “They’re gorgeous.”
“Aren’t they? I make a point of coming out to watch them at least once a year. One time we had probably forty of them near the boat. I’ve seen porpoises, too.”
All around us, waterspouts of various sizes broke the surface in frothy sprays, as the pod members took turns surfacing for air.
The experience was like something from a nature documentary. But this was much more beautiful, because we were actually living it instead of passively viewing it on a screen.
It was nothing short of emotional to see such massive creatures displaying their enormous strength so close, to feel the cold droplets of their spray and hear the airy whooshing noise of their spouting, the loud smacking splashes of their tails striking the ocean’s surface.
I leaned away from the splash of a particularly nearby breach, pressing into Reid’s side and ducking my face into his shoulder. His hand automatically came up to hold my head against him, and we both laughed.
