Christian, with his impeccably tailored clothes and ne’er a hair out of place, hadn’t been Heath’s first or only questionable infatuation. There’d been a string of men upon whose arms he’d gotten a taste of a world he didn’t belong in. He didn’t wantto, either.
Of all the lessons he’d learned from his decades of dating debacles, the hardest had been realizing Christian, and those like him, were utterly incapable of grasping the concept of life without wealth and connections. They simply didn’t understand the struggles of someone who hadn’t been born chewing on a silver spoon. Theycouldn’t. Empathy seemed to be missing from their DNA.
Was it someMinority Report-esque designer breeding program?
A flirtatious giggle dragged Heath’s eyes over the top of his laptop screen. Westin now leaned against a pillar with one hand in his pocket and the other arm extended over Hannah’s head while she smiled up at him. You could have cut and pasted them onto the balcony of a Monte Carlo suite or the deck of a lavish yacht and called it a fragrance commercial.
Another frown pulled at his lips. His moment of reflection had taken the gossipy thrill out of their little rendezvous. Nowhe felt only a palpable unease for the young flight attendant. He worried she might find herself tossed aside, as he so often had been.
Dragging a hand down his face, Heath forced his gaze back to his laptop. What the hell was wrong with him? He was inserting himself into an entirely fictitious drama he’d created in his own imagination. These people were strangers. Moreover, they were adults. Grown humans fully capable of handling whatever was going on without the intervention of a nosy nanny.
Several flight announcements spurred people into action, including Hannah. Heath watched her hand something to Westin before bouncing on the balls of her feet and hurrying off with a wheeled bag in tow.
She appeared quite happy with the outcome of their discussion. Therefore, Heath could go back to work with a clean conscience and renewed vigor toward spending the next fourteen days being as stodgy as humanly possible.
He closed his laptop with a swift flick of his fingers and shoved it into the zippered pocket inside his bag. Who was he kidding? He’d read the opening sentence of the essay he’d chosen four times and not retained a word.
His usual method for grading was to sit at his kitchen table with a pot of tea and something jazzy or orchestral playing in the background. It had to be instrumental only, and nothing too upbeat or exciting, or he’d become wildly distracted. No Charles Mingus or Thelonius Monk, and certainly nothing from Beethoven’s major symphonies.
He thought of his noise-canceling earbuds, which were now loose in his bag thanks to his post-call pique. Finding them would no doubt eat up what little time he had left before the next flight took off, so there was no sense in bothering.
His friends had tossed a wrench into his afternoon plans, but he’d still gotten the last laugh. While they might have won a momentary victory over his good mood, they’d also ensured themoment of near-fun he’d had was now naught but a faded memory.
Defeated but smug, Heath let his attention drift over the surrounding crowd. Two separate flights shared the gate, and the people gathered were an eclectic mix. Young and old. Casual and dressed to the nines. It ran the gamut, and he made a game of guessing which person was most likely to join him on the island.
Westin, he noticed, hadn’t moved from the pillar. He’d adjusted his stance from looming to leaning, the length of his legs crossed casually as he braced a shoulder against the structure, and he was flipping a little white card through his fingertips.
It was entirely too mesmerizing, that action.
Heath hadn’t really paid attention to his hands (much), but he had noticed they were unadorned, with short, clean nails. Not manicured, like Christian’s always were. Just tidy.
For all his obvious pomp, Westin wasn’t the spa sort.
Another series of announcements went out, including the one for his next flight, so Heath gathered his things and weaved toward the jetway entrance. Westin moved in the same direction, and Heath almost pushed ahead to call out to him, but paused when Westin’s fist hovered over the opening of a trash bin and let something drop inside.
Oh, no. He did not just?—
Ignoring the disgruntled mumblings of those whose path he disrupted, Heath changed course to zigzag toward the bin. There, among the discarded snack bags and drink cups, he spotted a slightly crumpled business card bearing Hannah’s name.
His gasp further disrupted the flow of traffic. Those closest redirected to give him a wide berth. He paid them no mind. His mission was clear. Fueled by the righteous outrage of secondhand betrayal, Heath steeled his will and retrieved the card.There was no amount of hand sanitizer capable of purging the memory of reaching down into those gooey depths, but someone had to avenge the Hannahs of the world against the tyrannical whims of petulant rich boys.
Mr. Westin wanted to fuck around? Well, he was about to find out!
six
. . .
He should have known better. Thinking he could actually go an entire week without something else in his life blowing up had set him up for a universal “I told you so,” but he’d done it anyway.
Worse, he’d said out loud that taking the honeymoon without Lucy felt right. Like a reset, a way to close the door on that chapter and start over. He just wanted a brief break from reality—as if reality had ever let him take a damn vacation.
“What is this?”
Lennox, his plane buddy from flight one, stormed up and waved something so close to his nose that Evan could feel a breeze on his eyelashes.
“I’m gonna need you to get your hand out of my face,” he said, taking a step back. The last thing his strained reputation needed was news of an arrest in Puerto Rico for assaulting an irate and possibly gay man. The socialites would have a field day.
“You need to explain yourself!”
