“You’re going to find a way to work,” Finn said, without opening his eyes. “I know your walks. Go on, then. But remember, it’s a clothing-optional beach, not a clothing-optional conference call. Leave the worrying here with me. I’ll mind it.”
I shook my head and stepped away from Finn and his damn lounger, and because the universe has a sense of humor that it usually aims directly at me, the path I picked led me along the pool deck and straight past the spot where Wes Calloway was working.
He had his tripod out and was shooting a breakfastspread on a long table for the resort’s website. He was crouched at an angle that could not have been comfortable while swearing softly at a plate of fruit.
“Light again?” I asked.
He jerked up, startled. I half expected a curse to fling my way, but instead, that grin happened, the slow rearranging one.
My stupid chest did the thing it had done the evening before.
“Worse,” he said. “It’s the fruit. It’s sweating. Mango sweats under lights, and there’s nothing in the world that makes a sweating mango look appetizing. I’ve got an hour to make this mango photogenic, and it has betrayed me.” He sat back on his heels and squinted up at me. “Aren’t you supposed to be relaxing? I saw you over there. You lasted about as long as a man holding his breath under water.”
“You were watching me?”
“I’m a photographer. I watch everything. You were lying on that lounger like it had personally wronged you.” He stood, brushing off his knees, leaving the mango betrayer to its fate. “You’re doing it wrong, you know, the relaxing.”
“So I’ve been told. Repeatedly. By a man who eats more bacon than there are pigs.”
“Then let me tell you differently.” He capped his lens and slung the camera onto his shoulder. Therewas something decided in the way he did it, like he’d just chosen to stop working a beat before he’d meant to. “The trick is, you can’t aim at it directly. Relaxing’s like a sunset. You don’t catch it by chasing it. You catch it by being somewhere good when it shows up. You’ve been trying to schedule it. I bet you planned to do the aqua fitness at noon.”
My eyes dropped to my shoes.
He shook his head. “No wonder it’s running from you.”
“Finn said almost exactly that. About the schedule, I mean.”
“Finn sounds like a wise man.”
“Finn is a pest who got me into this.”
“The best ones usually are both.” Wes started walking, slowly, in no particular direction. Somehow, I was suddenly walking with him, the way you fall into step with someone without deciding to. “Come on. I’ve got two hours before the light’s worth anything for the beach shots. Let me show you the part of this place the brochure actually got right. I promise, no fitness, aqua or otherwise.”
Behind us, from the direction of the pool, I heard Finn’s voice lift in delighted conversation with the older couple, something about the swim-up bar’s opening hours. I knew without looking that he’d clocked me walking off with the photographer, andthat he was, at this very moment, deeply and insufferably pleased with himself.
My phone was still back in the room.
The Hargrove site was a thousand miles away.
And for the second time in two days, I let a stranger lead me somewhere with no schedule, no task, and no idea what came next.
And found I didn’t mind it at all.
That, it turned out, was the real lesson.
Not the brochure.
Him.
Chapter 6
The place the brochure got right turned out to be a cove.
We reached it by a path Wes clearly already knew. It meandered past the maintained part of the resort where loungers thinned out and manicured sand gave way to something rougher and more natural, a curve of beach tucked behind a shoulder of black rock where the water went still and clear and almost embarrassingly blue.
There was nobody there.
After a full day of being surrounded by more humanity than I’d bargained for, most of them naked, the emptiness of the place landed like a held breath finally let go.
