He exhaled. Apparently his thirteen-year-old daughter could read him better than half his executive team. “I’m fine. Get in. Seat belt.”
She obeyed, humming under her breath, and he slid behind the wheel. His hands wrapped around the steering wheel too tight. He forced his fingers to ease. Rowan’s voice replayed in his head, uninvited.
You’re one wave away from it, Suit.
He’d never wanted to argue with someone and kiss them in the same breath before. It was ridiculous. Immature. Dangerous.
He started the car. “So,” Kelsey said, still buzzing on some internal current. “Did you see when I almost ate it and then recovered? Rowan said my feet were finally in the right spot. She said my brain and body stopped fighting each other for, like, three whole seconds. Isn’t that cool?”
He cleared his throat. “It was ... impressive.”
She beamed and turned to the window, watching Waikiki blur by. “I like her,” Kelsey added after a beat, casual in the way that meant it wasn’t casual at all. “Rowan, I mean.”
He swallowed. “You seem to,” he said. “She’s ... unusual.”
“In a good way,” Kelsey shot back immediately. “You like her, right?”
His grip on the wheel tightened again. He thought of the way she’d stepped into his space like she wasn’t afraid of him. The way she’d thrown his life in his face with a handful of sentences and landed closer to the truth than anyone had in years.
I know when to let go.
You hold on too tight.
He thought of how he’d very nearly proved her right, how close he’d come to grabbing her by the shoulders and kissing that infuriating mouth just to see if it tasted as sharp as her words.
“I think,” Everett said carefully, “she’s good for your surfing.”
“You didn’t answer the question.” Kelsey sighed, but let it go, already scrolling through photos on her phone. “Never mind. You’re weird today.”
He drove them back to the house, answered her questions distractedly, and made a dinner he barely tasted. Once she was in her room with the door half closed and headphones on, he poured himself a drink he didn’t need and stared out at the dark line of the ocean.
Normally, the day would have sorted itself inside his head by now, everything dropping neatly into place. Instead, all he saw was the look on Rowan’s face when she’d saidEveryone breaks.
He’d wanted to tell her she was wrong. That some people were built to carry more. That if you held hard enough and worked long enough you could outrun the crack.
But something in her eyes had made the lie stick in his throat.
He took a swallow of whiskey. What bothered him most wasn’t that she’d called him out.
It was that a part of him—small, traitorous—worried she was right.
Maybe that was the reason he didn’t show up at the next lesson. He had an instinct Rowan would care for his daughter and keep her safe. He didn’t need to show up in the middle of a workday, especially if she thought for one moment he was interested in any type of relationship. It had been a one-off. An almost-kiss he’d long forgotten. Everett stuck to what he did best and focused on Purity.
The second day, Tom texted a quick??got her, boss??and a photo of Kelsey grinning in the passenger seat, hair still wet. Everett told himself it was fine, that he was doing what he was supposed to do: working, providing, building the future. He had a breakfast with the contractor and several meetings with Matthew.
By the fourth missed lesson, guilt had begun to rub at him like sand in a shoe.
He justified it. She was with Rowan. She was improving. He was giving them space. He was being professional. He’d almost kissed a woman who clearly despised him in the middle of a surf shop while his daughter was in the bathroom. Staying away was the logical choice.
Still, when Tom reported that Kelsey talked nonstop about “this new thing Rowan taught me” all the way home, something twisted under his ribs.
It was ... what? Attraction? Annoyance? An inconvenient, unnecessary pull toward a woman who pushed every one of his buttons and then smiled like she’d done him a favor.
You don’t know anything about me.
She was right. He didn’t. And he shouldn’t want to.
He’d come to Hawaii to open a hotel, secure a promotion, and give his daughter a decent summer. Not to fix broken surfers. Not to rethink his life because a woman in cutoff shorts with salt-tangled hair told him he’d been doing it wrong.
