Page 37 of True Abandon

With a whistle through his teeth, he responds, “I’m glad I'm here then.”

“Has your guest arrived yet?” Kal asks as he approaches Jax’s table.

“She’s here, but she refuses to eat. Must be a side effect of her bitchiness,” Jax says looking at me and then to Kal. “Is she always like this or is it just with me?”

“Trish is—”

“It’s just you,” I cut off Kal who is looking at us in utter confusion.

Kal motions his pen from Jax to me and back. “Do you two know each other?”

Jax opens his mouth first. “Yes.”

“No. Mr. Davis is staying in the Pele suite. If you’ll excuse me, I have an afternoon itinerary to plan.”

“Spa,” Jax says before I get a chance to turn around.

“Pardon?”

“We have spa appointments in,” he looks at his imaginary watch, “forty-five minutes.”

I drop my chin. “We?”

He points a finger at me to him and back while mouthing the word, “We.”

“Why?”

He lets out a huge grin as he opens his menu. “I’ll have the catfish, and Trish will have the cheeseburger, medium-well.”

My eyes shoot death lasers at Jax. “I’m not eating.”

“What, you don’t like cheeseburgers anymore? It’s practically the only thing you ate for the first sixteen years of your life.”

“I’m on the clock. I can’t sit down and have lunch with you.”

“I am the clock. Sit.”

I let out a loud growl and turn to Kal. “Nothing for me.”

Kal walks away, seeming confused.

I turn back to Jax. “New rule. No bringing up the past.”

“Why not?” He sounds insulted.

I slap my hands on the table and get up close, nose to nose, to his perfect face and snarl at him. “Because we have none. As far as anyone here is concerned, we don’t know each other, got it? And I make the itinerary, remember? So, no spa.”

“I already made the appointments. You can plan everything else after. Seriously, when does someone turn down a massage?” He looks down at my finger running circles around my thumb. “Based on your current disposition, I thought you could use a little peace. You can lower the invisible force field you keep around yourself for an hour.”

I drum my nails on the teak table top while I appraise his rather correct description of my current state.

“I’ll meet you at the spa.” I stomp to the bar, lean on the counter and call over to Isaiah, the bartender.

“Aloha awakea,” he greets me a good morning, his Hawaiian accent giving him a long, lazy sound.

“What’s the name of that margarita you served Lani’s ex-boyfriend? The one with the jalapeños?”

“Ahh,” he says, rubbing his belly. He’s too big for the work shirts, so the hotel makes an exception for him to wear whatever he likes as long as it is tropical in nature. Today, his shirt is covered in various images of palm trees and flamingos over a midnight-blue background. “A Flaming Volcanorita.”