Fuck. I’m an asshole. She told me her biggest secret and I stood there conveniently withholding that my net worth makes her lottery windfall look like a rounding error in a quarterly report.
The guilt isn’t about the number. It’s about the asymmetry. She handed me honesty and I’m still handing her a curated version of myself, letting her assume I’m just a software nerd taking a medically advised work break. My ex, Victoria, dumping me for someone with a bigger bank account when I was a broke college student taught me a bitter lesson about wealth and the lack of it. That breakup taught me about guarding my feelings too. I learned so well, I’m still doing it even with a woman who deserves better.
I don’t have any obligation to out myself as a billionaire to Ella, yet the omission of that truth sits sourly on my tongue. Tonight it feels like an even bigger lie.
As for thinking with my dick, it’s not like I have much choice. The wanting has been a constant since somewhere around day two. What’s getting worse is my ability to pretend my desire for her is manageable, because it isn’t, and a few minutes ago I came within seconds of kissing her.
Again.
I’m walking the razor’s edge on the urge even now, as we walk the garden path toward the main building. We wind through low coral stone walls draped with bougainvillea that’s gone dark in the late hour, landscaping lights throwing soft pools of gold across the walkway. Ella’s bare shoulder brushes my arm as the path narrows, and the contact sends a current through me, awareness I feel all the way down to the soles of my feet. Impressive range for a woman who’s barely touching me.
I’ve had a low-grade erection for the better part of two hours. Since the limbo, if I’m being precise, when the firelight caught the underside of her chin as she arched under the bar and Ihad to look away because my body’s response to watching Ella bend backward in a sundress was not appropriate for a public beach gathering. The walk under the moonlight, her fingers almost brushing mine the entire way, isn’t helping. Neither is the knowledge that we’re heading back to a suite with one bed.
“I’m glad you came tonight,” Ella says, breaking the silence. Her voice is soft against the garden sounds. “To the bonfire, I mean. I know it’s not exactly your natural habitat.”
“What do you mean? Limbo and steel pan drums. Right in my wheelhouse.”
She laughs, and the sound does what it always does, lands somewhere in my chest that I haven’t figured out how to fortify. I’ve spent a decade building systems designed to withstand brute-force attacks from state-level hackers, and Ella’s laugh bypasses every one of my own firewalls like they’re not even there.
The problem, which I’ve been circling all evening, is that I don’t just want her. Ilikeher. Desire is a body problem, and I’ve been managing body problems all week with the relative success of a man bailing out a sinking boat with a coffee mug. But liking is something else. I like her for the way she told me about growing up in Hoboken without a shred of self-pity. I like her for the way she scolded me about French fries like my arterial health was her personal project.
Liking Ella is not containable. It’s not something I can chalk up to proximity and soft skin and basic biology and dismiss.
I should have figured this out sooner. The data was all there.
Neither of us is walking fast. We’ve passed two perfectly serviceable entrances to the resort lobby and neither of us has turned toward them, a fact I note with the same detached self-awareness I bring to tallying my own terrible decisions.
I’m not ready to go inside, as much as my very interested cock would like to argue. Going inside means being alone inthe suite. The suite means the bed. The bed means lying next to Ella in the dark while my body runs its nightly campaign of mutiny against my self-control, and I am running out of excuses to pretend that’s a hardship I’m enduring rather than a situation I’ve started looking forward to.
The path curves through a secluded alcove set into the coral stone. Low light. Bougainvillea trailing down in thick curtains. The kind of spot the resort designed for couples to do exactly what I’m trying very hard not to think about.
Ella turns to face me, walking half-backward with that grin. “For the record, your limbo form was terrible.”
I grin. “You’re one to talk. At least I cleared the bar my first time through.”
“Barely.” Her smile widens. Damn, she’s adorable. So beautiful with her bright blue eyes and that dark hair that makes her skin look like pale silk. Still walking backward, she regards me with a playful glint in her gaze. “You looked like you were trying to muscle your way through a military obstacle course. I’m pretty sure the bar was scared of you.”
“The bar should be scared of me. I dominated that bar.” My voice is low, rough as gravel in my throat.
I don’t know if it’s my expression or the way the light is catching or the simple accumulated weight of an entire evening spent pretending we’re just two people walking, but her steps slow. Her smile softens. The guard she’s been holding drops, and what’s behind it reaches past every defense I’ve spent this week constructing and grabs hold.
She stops. I walk forward a pace, closing most of the distance between us before I stop too. It’s not a conscious decision I make. It’s gravity. The irresistible pull we’ve both been fighting most of the night. She’s close enough that I can smell her skin, warm from the sun today and the bonfire tonight.
“Alec.” My name is quiet on her lips, more of a sigh. Whatever she was going to say next doesn’t make it out because her eyes drop to my mouth and when they come back up, the look on her face shreds the last functioning thread of the argument I’ve been having with myself since the beach.
Her fingers curl into the front of my henley. My thumb traces along her jaw, tilting her chin up, and her breath catches under my palm, a small sharp intake that arrows straight to my cock.
Then her mouth is on mine and I stop thinking.
On the veranda, I kissed her and called it a mistake. Spent two nights sleeping on a couch I was too tall for, punishing us both for wanting something I wasn’t ready to admit I needed. I told myself the protocols would hold. The protocols were a joke. They were dead even before I delivered them, useless as of that first morning when I woke up with her body curved against mine and didn’t move, even when my desire for her had been obvious to both of us. Every so-called rational decision I’ve made since has been a man rearranging deck chairs while the hull fills with water.
Her lips part against mine and the taste of her, mango and warmth and something underneath that’s just Ella, hits my system like a detonation. I pull her in hard, with both hands on her body, her waist, her back, and the full length of her curves pressed flush against my chest and my hips.
She’s softer than I let myself remember. Her mouth opens for me and her tongue slides against mine in a carnal invitation. My hands tighten on her because something in my chest is coming apart, and this time I don’t want to stop it.
I pivot with her and walk her backward into the alcove wall. Her shoulders come up against the stone and I press in, my thigh between hers, my weight pinning her there. I caress the swells of her breasts, feeling her nipples harden under my palm. The sound she makes against my mouth is a low, wrecked hum thatvibrates through me, settling in the base of my cock. Her nails rake up the back of my neck into my hair and a groan rips out of me from somewhere primal that I didn’t authorize.
Fuck. If sunny Ella has been irresistible for me, sultry, sexy Ella is pure devastation.
