I glance at the rose petals still scattered across the duvet, the heart shape already disrupted from where I dropped my tote bag and where his hand pressed flat to draw the line. The champagne is still sweating in its silver bucket. Outside, the late afternoon sun is turning the ocean to liquid gold, and I can hear the faint pulse of steel drums carrying up from somewhere on the resort grounds.
All of this, designed for two people falling in love. The petals. The champagne. The bed big enough to get lost in. And instead, it’s us. Two strangers with a chalk line and a set of rules anda mutual agreement to pretend that the air between us isn’t humming at a frequency I can feel in my teeth.
In a few hours, the sun will go down. The suite will get dark. And we’ll climb into that bed on our respective sides, separated by nothing but an imaginary boundary and whatever self-control we can scrape together.
I look at Alec, standing by the veranda doors with the golden light catching the hard lines of his profile, and something tightens low in my stomach. Not butterflies. Something heavier. Something that knows, with the quiet certainty of a woman who’s spent years reading people for a living, that this man and this bed and this week are going to be a problem.
The kind of problem we’re both determined to avoid.
CHAPTER 7
ALEC
The suite smells like her when I open the door and enter the foyer.
Not perfume. Ella doesn’t wear perfume, a fact I’ve noticed against my will over the past twelve hours. Whatever it is clings to the air the way her personality clings to a conversation: warm, uninvited, impossible to filter out. Sand-crusted flip-flops kicked off near the door where she must have stepped out of them earlier. A beach cover-up hanging on a hook I’d mentally claimed as mine. And on the big screen TV across from the living area sofa, some movie is paused on a close-up of two people who appear to be three seconds from tearing each other’s clothes off.
Wonderful. Just the ambiance I was hoping for.
I walk farther into the suite and find Ella cross-legged on the sofa in the living area, surrounded by what appears to be the aftermath of a room service siege. I count several plates, a bread basket reduced to crumbs, the remains of a cheese-slathered chicken dish, and something involving butter-soaked shrimp. She’s working on dessert now, a slice of chocolate cake so dark and rich it looks indecent, and she’s eating it with the kind offocused pleasure most people reserve for activities that require a locked door.
“Hey, you’re back!” She waves her fork at me without looking up. “Did you have a nice walkabout? You left hours ago. Where’d you go? Did you eat?”
So many questions. I sigh as I decide which one I feel like answering. “I had dinner at one of the onsite restaurants.”
“Cool,” she says around a mouthful of cake. “How was it?”
I set my keycard on the dresser with more precision than the task requires. Unlike her dinner, mine was grilled mahi-mahi and steamed vegetables, washed down with sparkling water and the grim satisfaction of a man following medical orders. “It was fine.”
“Just fine?” She glances at me, then at her own wreckage, then back at me with a grin. “Because this cake is the opposite of fine. It’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.”
Christ. Now I’m thinking about her putting things in her mouth. My cock is suddenly thinking about that too.
She takes another bite and makes a sound, a low, involuntary hum that vibrates through the room and lands directly in my groin like she aimed it there. My hand tightens around my phone. She has no idea she’s doing it. That’s the worst part. If this were calculated, I could file it under manipulation tactics and move on. But Ella doesn’t calculate. Ella just exists at full volume, and my body has decided to tune to her frequency without consulting me.
“Want some?” She holds the fork out toward me, a generous chunk of cake balanced on the tines. “Everyone deserves chocolate, Alec. Even people who don’t do fun.”
“I’m fine.”
“You keep saying that.” She tilts her head. “You said that on the plane too, right before you looked like you wanted to throw my cookies out the window.”
“I didn’t want to throw your cookies out the window.”
“Your face wanted to.”
I almost smile. Almost. “Chocolate has no place in my current dietary protocol.”
“Dietary protocol,” she repeats, like I’ve just spoken in Klingon. “You know what? That sentence is the saddest thing I’ve heard you say, and believe me, you’d already set that bar pretty high.” She waves the fork again. “One bite. Did you know chocolate has antioxidants? I read that somewhere.”
“Where? On the back of a candy wrapper?”
She laughs, shrugging. “Still counts.” Another bite. Another hum, this one quieter but worse somehow, throatier, and my cock stirs against my thigh with a persistent enthusiasm I haven’t had to manage since I was a teenager. I’m thirty-two years old. I’m far from being a monk. I should not be getting hard because a woman is enjoying dessert. Loudly.
I head through the living area to the bedroom’s en-suite bathroom. Cranking the cold water to high, I splash some on my face. Grip the marble vanity and stare at the pathetic man in the mirror. This is what my life has become. Two weeks ago I was negotiating HoloTech’s multi-billion-dollar acquisition of Meridian Defense Systems. Now I’m hiding in a bathroom in Barbados, trying to escape a petite firecracker who makes chocolate cake sound like a religious experience.
Pathetic, Beckett. Truly world-class.
When I come back out, the room service tray has been relocated to the desk, the movie is off, and Ella is in the bedroom pulling clothes from her suitcase. “I’m going to get ready for bed,” she says. “Unless you still need the bathroom?”
