I need a shower. Hot water, my own shampoo, ten minutes of aggressively not thinking about anything. Least of all, him. I take my time, relishing my privacy, since it’s a precious commodity at this point. Eventually, I step out, feeling refreshed and almost like myself again. I towel off, then wrap myself in one ofthe suite’s bathrobes—the one with “Hers” embroidered on the pocket, as if the universe hasn’t mocked me enough already.
As I reach for the bathroom door handle and take my first step out, I nearly collide with Alec. Again.
I yelp in surprise, startled to find him back from his run already.
Standing just outside the bathroom doorway, close enough that I can feel the heat radiating off him, his shirt damp at the collar, a sheen of sweat along the base of his throat. His chest is rising and falling with breathing that’s trying to be controlled and not quite making it.
Neither of us steps back right away. His eyes move down my face, slow, and drop to the sagging neckline of the robe. His jaw tightens, a muscle flexing under his skin the way it might if he was trying to keep something locked down. When his gaze comes back up, his eyes are darker, and the look in them sends a flush across my collarbone that I pray the bathrobe is covering.
Then I make the mistake of letting my gaze drift down the length of him too. That deadly weapon he’d been holding at my back this morning seems to be coming to attention again. I swallow on my parched throat and try not to stare.
He steps back as if he just came out of a daze. “Sorry.” His deep voice is gruff, his gaze on the floor now.
I slip past him without a word. I don’t stop moving until I’m out the sliding doors and on the veranda, both hands on the railing, the morning air cool against my damp face. The veranda. Our designated neutral zone. If one of us is out here, the other gives space. That was his rule, and right now I’m grateful for it, because I need a whole lot of distance from him and a cold drink before I can look at him without seeing the shape of his body imprinted on the inside of my eyelids.
I’m going to explore the resort today. I’m going to sit on the beach and order something sweet and full of rum with anumbrella floating in it. Then I’m going to let the Caribbean sun bake this entire morning out of my skin.
What I’m definitely not going to do is think about the fact that tonight we have to do the whole bed-sharing thing all over again. Not going to think about how good he felt wrapped around me either, or the fact that it’s been a really long time since I craved someone the way I’m starting to crave him.
Oh, God.
I’m going to need more than a pillow wall to ward against the effect Alec Beckett seems to be having on my sanity.
CHAPTER 9
ALEC
Istand under the rain shower with my palms flat against the tile and the temperature cranked to a setting that just shy of scorching, letting it pound the tension out of my shoulders. The run was supposed to handle that. Five miles along the beach, and my body still feels like a live wire stripped of its casing. My lungs burn. My quads are tight. None of the exertion has touched the thing I was actually trying to outrun.
Ella Manning’s soft curves and intoxicating scent filling my senses since this morning when I woke up.
I was awake before the alarm.
Not by a few seconds. By long enough to be fully, painfully, aware that I was wrapped around Ella like I’d been engineered to fit there. My arm across her waist. My chest flush against her back. My face so close to her hair that each breath pulled her into my lungs. And lower, pressed against the curve of her very nice ass with an erection so insistent it had probably been there for hours.
Yet I didn’t move.
I should clarify. I registered all of it. The destroyed pillow wall. The fact that I’d crossed every boundary I’d drawn thenight before. The full, undeniable reality of my body curved around hers, her warmth soaked into my skin, her breathing slow and steady against my arm. I registered every detail, and I stayed. Not because I was frozen or half-asleep or processing.
I stayed because she felt good. That simple. That indefensibly damning. She was warm and she fit against me with a precision that made three feet of empty mattress feel like a waste of good engineering, so I pressed my face a fraction closer to her hair and I stayed.
I felt the exact moment she woke up and realized where she was. Her whole body went taut against mine. Her pulse jumped under the arm I had across her waist, and then she started the most careful extraction I’ve ever witnessed, lifting my arm millimeter by millimeter like she was defusing ordnance.
I let her because I had no fucking idea how to initiate my own escape without having to own up to the fact that I was sporting the hardest erection of my life. I kept my breathing even and my eyes shut and let her believe I was sleeping through all of it. A kindness or a cowardice, depending on how you look at it. I’m not sure which one it was.
On a groan, I tip my head back under the shower spray and close my eyes.
After the run, I came back to the suite wired and stupid. I heard the shower running when I let myself in. I knew she was in there. I should have called out, dropped my keycard loudly, done anything to announce myself. Instead I walked straight to the bathroom and nearly right into her as she opened the door, flushed and damp in that white robe and nothing under it.
The embroidery on the pocket said “Hers” but all my body saw was “Mine.” Which is nuts, because Ella is the last woman I should want. Forgetting the fact that we couldn’t be more opposite if we tried, she’s also a virtual stranger trapped in thissuite with me against either of our wills. Even if that’s not how she felt this morning snuggled deep in my arms.
I shut off the tap and dry off. Then I put on a pair of khaki beach shorts and a linen shirt in a color somewhere between sand and gray. I take my medication with a palmful of water from the sink, downing them with a grimace.
When I step out of the bathroom, I can see Ella on the veranda.
She’s standing at the railing with a coffee cup held in both hands, looking out at the water. Her dark hair is catching in the soft breeze, despite her repeatedly tucking the errant strands behind one ear. She’s changed into a light blue T-shirt dress and sandals, and her shoulders are relaxed in a way they weren’t thirty minutes ago. The tension from the bathroom is gone, or at least packed away somewhere I can’t see.
I watch her for a few seconds longer than I should. Then I grab my laptop bag from the closet shelf and slide the glass door open.
