She tilts her head. “Oh, I’m sorry, are you two together?”
“No,” Alec says. Simple. Flat. A single syllable that is factually, completely accurate and still lands on something tender inside me that I didn’t know was exposed.
Because we’re not together. We’re strangers who got double-booked into a honeymoon suite and woke up spooning this morning and just shared a sunscreen application that rewired my central nervous system, but no. We are not together. Obviously.
The word shouldn’t sting. It does.
“I’m Honey,” the blonde says, settling onto the chaise beside his. “Honey Carlisle.” She extends her hand to Alec with the kindof polish that suggests she introduces herself to attractive men in resort settings as a matter of routine.
Alec politely gives her his first name, and she takes the opening and runs with it. She gives him her back and he begins applying sunscreen. My sunscreen, to add insult to injury.
I reach for my earbuds. Put them in. Don’t press play.
The music stays off, which means I can hear everything: Honey’s warm, cultured voice asking where he’s from, what brings him to Barbados, how long he’s staying.
“Have we met before? You look so familiar, I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere.” It’s a line. I’ve heard variations of it a thousand times at the diner, and I recognize the gambit for exactly what it is, a manufactured connection, an excuse to keep talking.
“Nope. We’ve never met.”
“You’re sure?”
Alec confirms it. He hasn’t met her. She changes tactics, waxing on about the weather and all of the fun activities she’s hoping to try while she’s at the resort.
He’s polite to her. Civil. Answering her questions in the short, clipped sentences I’ve come to recognize as his minimum-viable-conversation mode. No warmth. No dry humor. None of the reluctant engagement that surfaces when he’s talking to me, that almost-smile that keeps dying before it fully commits. He’s doing her back the way you’d wash a car. Efficient. Impersonal. Done.
Honey glances at me over her shoulder. Quick. Assessing. The kind of look that takes in my flamingo towel, my drugstore sunscreen, and plastic flip-flops and draws a conclusion in about half a second. She turns back to Alec without comment.
I should not care about this. I stare at my ebook reader, seeing nothing, and try to name the feeling that’s sitting like a stone behind my ribs. It’s not jealousy.God, is it?I don’t haveany claim on Alec Beckett, and jealousy requires a claim, or at least an expectation, and I have neither.
What I have is the residual warmth of his hands on my back and the sound of him telling a beautiful stranger that no, we’re not together, and the quietly awful awareness that I put my earbuds in without music so I could hear every word she said to him, which is the behavior of a woman who cares, and I am not ready to be that woman.
Stop it, Ella.You’ve known this man for a day and a half. He rubbed sunscreen on your back. That’s not a relationship. That’s dermatological courtesy. Except that moment we shared before Honey showed up was anything but courtesy.
Honey finishes her conversation and saunters away with a “Nice meeting you, Alec” and a smile that promises future encounters. After she’s gone, the air between his chaise and mine feels different. Cooled. The interrupted moment sealed over like water closing above a dropped stone, and whatever was in his eyes when I turned around to face him is gone, or hidden, or something I only imagined because the sun was in my eyes and his hands had been on my skin and I wanted to see it.
He returns to his chaise without looking at me. I pretend to read.
The distance between our loungers is the same as before, but it feels wider.
I lie in the sun with my earbuds in and my ebook open to a page I’ve read three times without absorbing a word, and I try to sort out what just happened. The sunscreen. His hands, slow and warm and sure. The way his fingers traced my neck like he was memorizing the shape of it. The look on his face when I turned around, unguarded and raw and wanting, and the way it vanished the second Honey appeared. His flat, factual “no” in answer to whether we were together.
And underneath all of it, the thing I keep circling back to: I didn’t like watching that. Not Honey’s flirting, which was harmless enough. Not his polite cooperation, which meant nothing. What I didn’t like was simpler and harder to dismiss. Another woman near him. Another woman’s claim on even five minutes of his attention. The ease with which Honey inserted herself into a space that, seconds earlier, had felt like it belonged to just the two of us.
I don’t know what to do with that.
Honey Carlisle is beautiful. Polished. Confident in a way that suggests she gets what she goes after, and what she’s clearly going after is him.
So why did watching him shut her down, politely and completely, make satisfaction bloom behind my sternum? And why, twenty minutes later, can I still feel the exact path his hands traced down my spine, his thumbs pressing into the muscles along my shoulders, his fingers grazing the side of my neck in a touch so light it could have been accidental but wasn’t?
I close my eyes against the sun and press my back harder against the chaise, as if the firm surface can overwrite the sense memory of his palms.
It can’t.
CHAPTER 11
ALEC
The evening humidity out on the veranda has glued my shirt to my back and I’m three sips into a glass of warm rum punch that Dr. Vaughn would confiscate if he could see me. I’m not supposed to mix alcohol with my medication. I’m also not supposed to have a resting heart rate that spikes every time I remember the way Ella’s skin felt under my palms this afternoon, and yet here we are.
