“Staff told me about it my first day,” Wes said, picking his way over the rocks with the surefooted ease of a man who spent his life on uneven ground. “It’s technically part of the property, but it’s a hike, so the all-inclusive crowd doesn’t bother. It’s too farfrom the bar.” He chuckled as he set his camera bag down in the shade of the rock. “I come down here when the light’s no good and I just need to not be working at anything.”
“You come here to relax.”
“I come here to fail to work, which for me is the same thing.” He flashed me a shy grin, as though he was checking to see if I approved his correction. “We’re more alike than your shirt suggests, Mark Apparently.”
I’d slipped on my polo again. Of course I had. But the sun was high and the walk had been warm and the water in that cove was doing something to the light that even I, who knew nothing about cameras, could see was rare.
Wes pulled his henley over his head in one unhurried motion, the way a man undresses when he’s done it in a hundred strange places and stopped thinking about it. He dropped it on his bag without glancing in my direction.
I’d had him pegged as lean.
His henley had been telling a polite version of the truth.
Out of it, he was all economy and use, sporting the kind of body that gets made by doing rather than lifting, lean through the waist and propped on a swimmer’s shoulders. There was a delicious, longridge of muscle down each side of his spine that moved when he bent to toe off his shoes, and he was tanned everywhere clothes covered him—and paler everywhere they didn’t. There was a line low on his hips where the sun had clearly never been invited and a scatter of dark hair across his chest that thinned to a line and kept going. On one shoulder spread a puckered old scar. It was faded white with age, and looked like the kind one gets from a fall rather than a fight. A tattoo I couldn’t read scrawled on the inside of one forearm, also faded like something he’d gotten young.
He wasn’t built to stop a room the way some men are.
He was built to make you keep looking, which was worse, because you didn’t notice you were already entranced.
He kicked off his canvas shoes and walked straight into the water until it was up to his waist without so much as testing the temperature, and stood there with his back to me and his face tipped up to the sun like the whole point of being alive had just occurred to him.
The muscles of his back shifted as he raised his arms and dragged both hands through his hair. I, who had spent two days insisting to Finn that I was looking very specifically at the sky, discovered I wasnot looking at the sky at all.
“You coming in?” he asked, not turning around, “or are you going to guard the bags like a very large, very nervous German Shepherd?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“You’re not thinking about it. You’re building a case against it.” He turned then, water sheeting off him. His grin was there, but it was softer than before. “There’s nobody here. There’s no schedule. There’s no Finn to perform your reluctance for. It’s just water, and it’s just me. I’ve already seen the worst thing about you, which is that shirt.”
I glanced down at my shirt, shrugged through a grin, then stripped it off in one smooth motion, nothing like the cluster back at the pool.
Suddenly, there was just a man standing waist-deep in clear water who’d asked me to come in with him. The simple, terrifying fact was that I wanted to. The even more terrifying fact was that he was looking at me,allof me, all my size and gray and chest hair going silver and the whole intimidating bulk of me that sent most men politely in the other direction.
And he wasn’t going anywhere.
He was, if anything, looking like he liked what he saw.
That didn’t happen to me.
Men found me handsome enough from across a room, but alarming up close. Somewhere in the gap between those two things, most of them excused themselves. I’d stopped expecting the looking to last.
Wes’s looking lasted.
“There he is,” he said, and I startled.
Unsure what else to do, I waded in.
The water was the temperature of nothing, that perfect blood-warm level where you stop being able to feel the line of it on your skin and became one with the sea. I stopped an arm’s length from him, close enough to see the salt drying at his hairline and the way the amber in his eyes went almost translucent in the direct light.
“Better?” he said.
“I’m not generating my own weather system anymore.”
“Finn again?” His eyes smiled with his words.
“Finn again.” I huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “He’s not wrong often. It’s his worst quality.”
We stood there in the water a while.
