“Let’s get out of here,” she whispers conspiratorially. “I saw there’s another old zombie movie we can stream tonight. Before or after I tear your clothes off. Your choice.”
I chuckle despite the cold lump of stone lodged in my chest, and look up to meet her gaze. “Sounds perfect.”
She smiles. The real one. And I absorb it like a man standing in sunlight who knows the forecast is calling for rain.
Ella tips her face toward the night sky for a moment, eyes closed, and the torchlight paints the line of her throat in gold. She looks happy. She looks like a woman who handed someone her worst scars tonight and got back everything she needed.
She did. I gave her every true thing I have. My parents. Victoria. The chip that still rides on my shoulder. The wall built to keep people like Ella and me on the outside.
I just didn’t tell her the part where I built a ladder over that wall and kept climbing until I became what was on the other side. That part stays where it is. Getting heavier by the hour.
We walk back along the torchlit path. She loops her arm through mine and leans into my shoulder. The surf sounds different from this direction, softer, pulling away behind us. Her hair smells like salt and something warm and faintly sweet. I press my mouth to the top of her head and breathe her in and hold her close to me.
The quiet, steady pull of a woman I’m falling for wraps around me while the lie between us grows another day older.
Tomorrow I’ll figure out how to tell her.
Tonight I hold what I have and I don’t let go.
CHAPTER 22
ELLA
Our last full day on the island starts slow, the way all our mornings have started since the night everything changed between us. Coffee on the veranda, Alec’s leg pressed against mine, the ocean spread out below us like it goes on forever. We don’t talk about tomorrow. We don’t talk about airports or time zones or the two thousand miles that will separate his life from mine in less than twenty-four hours. We just sit in the sun and drink our coffee, and I let myself pretend that this is all I need.
By late afternoon, we’re in a shuttle van headed for Bridgetown, and I’ve made a deal with myself. No brave speeches. No “so what are we to each other” conversations. No ruining the most perfect week of my life by asking questions that may give me answers I’m not ready to hear. Today I am going to be here, fully here, with this unexpected man, on this beautiful island, for however many hours we have left.
We pour off the shuttle along with a dozen other people from the resort. Music fills the air even before the vehicle doors open. The street is a wall of sound and color and moving bodies, soca music so loud it replaces my heartbeat.
“Come on.” I grab Alec’s hand and pull him into the middle of it.
Grand Kadooment is everything the resort brochure promised. Feathered costumes in electric pinks and golds tower above the crowd on dancers who move like the music is running through their veins instead of speakers. Steel drums punch through the bass line. The air smells like jerk seasoning and rum punch and cocoa butter sunscreen. Every direction I turn there’s someone laughing, someone dancing, someone handing me something fried on a paper plate. The sun is a physical weight on my shoulders and the crowd is a tide I’m happy to be swept into.
This is my element. Give me a diner full of chaos and a hundred things happening at once and I can find the rhythm without thinking. A street festival with ten thousand strangers and music I can feel in my teeth? I was made for this. Alec, on the other hand, looks like a man who just walked into the world’s most colorful ambush.
“Dance with me!” I shout over the cacophony, tugging his hand.
He looks skeptical, his brow furrowed. “I don’t dance.”
“You didn’t think you do fun either, and look how that’s turned out.” I’m already moving my hips to the soca beat, which is fast and rolling and requires a looseness in the lower body that Alec has probably never once in his life allowed himself to experience. “Come on. It’s easy. Just feel the rhythm.”
He tries. God help him, he tries. But watching him attempt Caribbean dance steps is like watching a man try to solve a math equation with his hips. Every movement is fractionally too precise, slightly behind the beat, his body analyzing the rhythm instead of surrendering to it.
He knows it, too. I can see the wry awareness on his face, the exasperated twist of his mouth that says he’s two seconds from giving up.
“You’re thinking too hard,” I tell him, stepping closer. “Stop counting and just move.”
“I’m not counting.”
“I can see it on your face. One-two-three, one-two-three.” I move so I’m standing in front of him, my back to his chest. “Hold on to me. I’ll show you how to do this.”
His hands settle on my waist. The contact sends a warm current straight through the thin cotton of my sundress and into my skin, a direct line from his fingertips to somewhere low in my belly. My breath catches for half a second that I hope the music covered. His thumbs find the curve above my hip bones. His fingers press lightly into my lower back. And just like that, his timing improves dramatically.
“Interesting,” I say, grinning over my shoulder at him. “You got about sixty percent better the second you put your hands on me.”
He pulls me closer. His mouth is near my ear because the music is deafening, and his breath is warm against my neck when he speaks. “Maybe I just needed the right motivation.”
The low rumble of his voice against the shell of my ear sends heat streaking through me. My back presses against his chest as the crowd shifts around us and his grip tightens on my hips. I feel the solid wall of him behind me, the heat of his body through his shirt. The hard, distracting pressure against my lower back that tells me the dancing isn’t the only thing he’s feeling right now.
