Prologue
Jenna
The first time I see him, he's checking out my brother's arse.
“Are your bum cheeks feeling hot?” I ask Jake, nudging my arm into his.
“Excuse me?” he asks, in longer syllables and a higher pitch than is perhaps necessary.
“There's an extremely good-looking young man eyeing you up right now, but don't turn around or he'll see. I'll tell you when it's safe.”
I glance back to find the young man is still standing in the entrance of the resort’s beach bar. He continues to look towards where we’re standing at the circular bar in the centre. However, as I look at him for the second time, I couldn't honestly say he was studying my brother's backside anymore.In fact, did he just catch my eye and give me a lingering look too? I turn my head quickly before I can verify.
“Yeah, still not safe,” I mutter before sipping my drink.
Objectively, thanks to an unhealthy obsession with elliptical trainers, Jake does indeed have a great bum, so maybe the young man was just trying to establish who I am to my brother. As I smile to myself, knowing he will soon see, I feel a warmth spread across my back, as though I can sense exactly where he’s looking.
Or maybe that’s just the light sunburn I acquired today by spending an hour or two too long lying on the beach. I wasn’t even sure why I was there when I’m lucky enough to have my own private pool villa, a perk of my brother being the manager. It’s not that I can’t afford luxury like this, it’s more that I’m reluctant to indulge myself these days. While a spacious villa with the most incredible view is stunning, beautiful, wonderful - all the adjectives - I’m still here alone.
Alone.
I thought I’d be better at being alone by now.
I push all this aside and return to the present moment, a moment that has great potential for not being lonely at all for my brother. And nobody deserves that more than Jake.
Not only is he my best friend and confidant, but my brother is also the person I leaned on most when my marriage was ending. Together, we’ve been through a lot, and it’s nice to think maybe his luck is turning, even if mine is still firmly on hold. It certainly looks that way now he has his dream job managing this luxury adults-only resort on Crete’s west coast.
Iliovasílema Villas is everything he’s wanted in a job: high-end, independently owned by a local family, and in the ideal location. It’s perched at the end of a peninsula that offers panoramic views of the blue waters where the Aegean meets the Mediterranean.
“My, my, my.” My brother pumps his straw up and down in his pink gin fizz, the ice making a satisfying slushing sound. “That is interesting. Not that I can do anything about it though.”
“Why not?” I ask before taking a nice long sip of my raspberry mojito. “It's your night off.”
“ButIam the Resort Manager andheis still a guest.” He leans in closer. “It is a guest, isn't it? Not that having a staff member eye me up is any better. In fact, that's a lot worse.”
“It's definitely a guest.” I can easily recall how the man in question looked and how it told me he was a new arrival. There was his white cotton shirt with a very generous and confident three top buttons undone, tight jeans on long, sculpted thighs and the not yet sun-kissed pale white skin of his face crowned with dark hair that looked like it would curl if given time to grow. He looked fresh and perhaps a little lost.
“Well, he will have to lust at me from afar.” My brother pretends to throw long hair he doesn't have over his shoulder. “Is it safe to look now? I'm dying to have a nosey at him. We don't get many here, you know, despite the Pink Poundprices, advertising inAttitude, and rainbow fucking flags plastered all over the website.”
“You don't get many gays?” I ask, surprised.
“God, yes, we get plenty of gays. Just not the cute, young and single ones. Not the kind of twinks I could spend hours daydreaming about corrupting. I guess they don't quite have the budget yet... Oh God, I need to stop talking or thinking like this. But before I do, let my eyes just get hard for a second.”
“Your eyes can get hard?” I ask in a whisper.
He either ignores me or doesn’t hear and instead nudges me quickly. “Is it safe? Can I turn around?”
I tilt my chin to the side to check but quickly see that the young man isn't standing where he was before. Turning a little more, I still can’t place him in the small group of bodies near the entrance, so I pivot and look all the way over my shoulder. That’s when I see him sitting by himself at the table directly behind us, just a few metres away.
“Oh!” I’m a little taken aback.
It's not just his proximity. It's what he's doing.
Leaning back into the chair like it's the most comfortable place in the world, he's got a drink in his hand and his long fingers wrap around the glass like they own every inch of it. How he got a drink so quickly without coming to the bar is beyond me but there it is, and there he is. All of him. And he’s quite a sight to behold.
It's not even the planes and angles of his body I now notice filling out his shirt, nor is it the way his legs are crossed, pulling the ankles of his jeans up to reveal soft dark hair, unapologetically on show thanks to a pair of black leather Birkenstock sandals identical to mine. It’s his face, which I hadn’t fully absorbed previously. With its square jaw, deep-set dark eyes framed by dominant cheekbones and a long nose with a noticeable bump in it, it’s the sort of face that is both arrestingly handsome and intriguingly different looking. As well as his face, it's also what he’s doing. Because he's staring at me. And smiling. Smiling so broadly I can see countless white teeth and a matching set of dimples slap bang in the middle of each cheek. I blink at him once, twice, giving myself, him, and the universe timeto get this picture back into focus. To get his eyes off me and back onto my brother's arse.
But he doesn't. He keeps on looking at me and smiling.
