“For the record,” she murmurs back, pulling me closer by the collar of my robe, “you’re a terrible liar.”
She’s right. I am. I’ve been lying to myself about this woman since seat 2A. Every lie worse than the one before.
The most honest thing I’ve done in six days is close that door a moment ago.
My brain has run nonstop for thirty-four years. Right now, with Ella’s hands in my hair and her laughter dissolving into a sound that’s lower, warmer, needier against my mouth, the whole system goes quiet. Not broken. Just unnecessary when I’m with her.
I peel the bathrobe off her and break our kiss only so I can begin a slow worship of her naked body. She gasps when I press my mouth to her hip, then lower.
I glance up at her, my head wedged between her parted thighs.
“Now I’m going to make you come so hard they’ll hear you all the way down to reception.”
CHAPTER 18
ELLA
The path past the beach bar is crushed coral and tree roots, and I’m three steps ahead of Alec because I actually know where we’re going for once. My hips are doing that loose, rolling thing they’ve been doing all day, memories of his hands and mouth on my body putting a definite spring in my step as I lead him toward the far end of the beach. I keep catching myself smiling at nothing, which is the kind of behavior that gets you put on a watch list back home but feels perfectly reasonable when your whole body is still warm from a morning that started with breakfast in bed and ended with the breakfast tray on the floor.
“Where the hell are we going?”
“You’ll see.” I step over a root, then pause to make sure he sees it too. “Clive told me about this spot.”
“Clive.” The way he says the man’s name is low and kind of growly. “Who’s Clive?”
“He’s one of the gardeners. He says don’t bother snorkeling off the main beach. This spot is supposed to be better.”
Alec chuckles. “You’ve been here six days and you have a network of local informants.”
“What can I say? It’s a gift.”
He grunts behind me, then his hand finds my hip as he steps around the root I just cleared. Whether he’s steadying himself or just wanting to touch me or both, I don’t know. The contact is too brief but far from casual and my train of thought just... derails. For a second I’m back on the rumpled sheets with his mouth on my neck and his weight settling over me, and it takes my brain a moment to recalibrate.
Day six. We leave in two days. The awareness skims through me the way the check always comes at the end of any good time. I’m not ready for this week to end, but I let the reminder pass and keep walking.
We clear the trees and the cove opens up past the point and even I, a woman who has seen exactly one beach in her life before this week, can tell this spot is different. The water here is so clear it almost hurts my eyes. Turquoise shading into deep blue over the reef, soft white foam rolling up onto the sand. And it’s quiet. No music from the beach bar. No kids shrieking. Just the soft push of waves against the rocks and a silence that feels like something you’re allowed to borrow only for a brief moment.
Two sets of snorkel gear are waiting on the rocks where the activities desk said they’d leave them. I grab a mask and hold it up to my face, which is immediately hilarious because the rubber seal smashes my cheeks into my eye sockets and the snorkel sticks up from the side of my head like a periscope on a very confused submarine.
I’ve never snorkeled. I’ve never even been in water I couldn’t see the bottom of. This was not in my personal skill set as of a week ago, right next to “flying first class” and “sleeping with grumpy, jaw-droppingly gorgeous men.”
I glance at Alec as he pulls his mask on, and my laugh bursts out before I can catch it. This is a man who holds his coffee cup like it’s a contract he’s reviewing. Who probably irons his casualshirts. Whose entire physical presence communicates that every molecule of his body has been placed exactly where he intended it. And right now, he has a rubber mask bisecting his hair into two tufts, a snorkel clamped between his teeth, and swim fins on his feet that make him stand like a duck. He looks like every other tourist who’s ever strapped on rental gear, which is to say, absurd. Somehow that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen in six days.
“Don’t say it,” he mutters around the snorkel, reading my face.
I hold up my hands. “I’m just admiring how the mask really brings out your cheekbones.” I bat my eyelashes and nearly poke myself in the eye with my own mask strap. So much for looking cute.
He steps close and reaches behind my head to adjust the strap. His fingers gather my hair, gently lifting it over the rubber band, then resettling it against my neck. The touch is practical, just a man fixing a piece of equipment, except his fingertips drag across the skin below my ear as he pulls away, and my whole body flushes hot from a contact point no bigger than a quarter. I’m glad the mask covers half my face because whatever expression I’m making right now is not casual.
He peers at me, looking blurry through my mask. “Too tight?”
I shake my head and give him a thumbs-up.
Together, we waddle to the water in our flippers and wade in up to our knees before sinking into the waves. The sea takes my weight and the world changes. The water wraps around me, warm and strange and closer than air, pressing against every inch of skin at once. I gasp into the snorkel just from the newness of being held by something that big. Then the sound, my own breathing amplified and strange, mechanical almost, like hearing myself from the inside. I put my face under and the ocean opens before my eyes.
And oh… I wasn’t ready for this.
So much blue. Everywhere. A blue that doesn’t have a name in my vocabulary, deeper than anything I’ve seen on a screen or a postcard, and it’s moving, shifting, the light coming down in columns that waver and break apart and re-form. A school of fish passes below me, tiny, electric blue and yellow. They scatter like a handful of coins thrown into the air.
