And if the past few days far away from the drama of her real life had told her anything, it was that she sorely needed a break. A return to simpler times. Like the summer when the most important thing that had ever happened to her had been a smile from the dreamy brown-eyed boy across the other side of the beach bonfire.
“The thing is,” she said, regretting opening her mouth even as the words poured out, “I’m currently...thinking about...seeing someone.”
“Someone?” he asked, everything in him suddenly seeming very still.
“Well, a man, to be more specific.”
Jonah looked about the bar where an islander was putting chairs onto the tables so he could sweep the floor. He hooked a thumb in the guy’s direction.
“No!” said Avery, grabbing his thumb and pulling it down by his side. It brought her within inches of his chest, so that she could feel the steady rise and fall of his breaths, the heat of his skin, could count his individual eyelashes, all one million of the gorgeous things. She let go. Backed away. Breathed. “Someone else. Someone I met here years ago. Someone I’m hoping to...reconnect with.”
“So then you’re not here to help out Claudia.” His words were tinged with such depths of boredom she wondered how she’d even come to think it was any of his business in the first place.
“Of course I am.” Avery lifted her chin. And she was. Or at least she would be. But since their big girlie talk, she hadn’t been able to pin her friend down long enough for a coffee, much less a conversation. Go play tourist! Claude would say on the fly. Swim, drink cocktails, take a boat to Green Island. Look how that turned out.
“You city girls,” said Jonah, his voice dropping into a by now familiar growl. “Can’t relax. Can’t do one thing at a time. Can’t settle your damn selves for love or money.”
“That’s a pretty broad brush.”
“Am I wrong?”
Well...no. Back home “busy-busy” or “can’t seem to get anything done” was akin to “fine, thanks.”
“Yeah,” he said, ducking his head as he ran a hand up the back of his neck and through those glorious curls. “That’s what I thought. Come on, princess, let’s get you checked in.”
He jerked his chin in the direction of the exit, and this time he didn’t hold out a hand.
Feeling strangely bereft, Avery collected her sandy, sodden gear and followed in her wet clothes and bare feet as at some point she’d lost her shoes. Beneath the shadows of the palm trees that grew everywhere in this part of the world, up the neat paths nearly empty of tourists now most had headed off the island.
And her mind whirled back to how that mortifying conversation had begun.
Can’t you? he’d asked, when she’d admitted not knowing why she pushed his buttons. But then why did he insist on pushing hers? Maybe, just maybe, she rubbed him the wrong way too. That very particular kind of wrong way that felt so right.
At that moment Jonah looked back, and she offered up her most innocuous smile.
“All okay?”
“Fine, thanks. You?”
The edge of his mouth twitched, but there was no smile. No evidence he thought she was hot stuff too. He merely lifted a big arm towards a small building with a thatched roof—the Tea Tree Resort and Spa—and they headed inside into blissful air-zconditioned luxury.
Once she’d got her key and thanked the guy at Reception profusely for the room, promising him payment, free PR services, a night in a hotel in New York if he was ever in town—all of which he rejected with a grin—she headed in the direction of her bungalow.
The clearing of a male throat brought her up short, and she turned to find Jonah leaning against the wall.
“You’re not staying here?” she asked, and the guy’s jaw twitched so hard she worried he’d break a tooth. “I mean in another room?”
“I have a place on the island.”
“Oh.” She waited for more. A description would have been nice. A little shanty hidden from view in the mangroves on the far side of the island? A towel on the sand, nothing between him and the stars? But no, he just stood there, in the only patch of shadow in the entire bright space.
“Think you’ll be okay here?” he asked, his voice rough around the edges, and yet on closer inspection...not so much. Much like the man himself.
“You tell me. You’re the one who seems to think I can’t walk out the door without facing certain death.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” he said, his expression cool, those eyes of his quiet, giving nothing away. “If you’re still alive in the morning, I’ll change my tune.”
“Till the morning, then,” Avery said, taking a step outside the force field the guy wore like a second skin. “Now I’m going to take a long cold shower.”
His gaze hardened on hers, and she felt herself come over pink, and fast.
“For the sunburn.”
At her flat response, his mouth kicked into a smile, giving her another hint of those neat white teeth. A flash of those eye crinkles. A flood of sensation curled deep into her belly.
“Good night, Jonah.”
He breathed in deep, breathed out slow. “Sleep tight,” he said, then walked away.
Yeah right, Avery thought, watching the front doorway through which he’d left long after he was gone.
When she got to her room it was to find a fruit basket, a bottle of wine, and a big fat tub of aloe vera with a Post-it note slapped on top that read, “For the American who now knows Aussies do it better.”
Avery woke to an insistent buzzing. Groaning, she scrunched one eye open to find herself in a strange room. A strange bed. Peering through narrowed eyes, she saw the pillow beside her was undisturbed. That was something, at least.
She let her senses stretch a mite and slowly the day before came back to her... Green Island. Jonah. Sunburn. Jonah. Cocktail. Jonah. And lusting. Oodles of coconut-scented lusting. And Jonah.
And she rolled over to bury her face in a pillow.
When the buzzing started up again, she realised it was the hotel phone. She smacked her hand around the bedside table till she found it. “Hello?” Her voice sounded as if she’d swallowed a bucket of sand.
The laughter that followed needed no introduction.
“Don’t. Please. It hurts.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Jonah rumbled, his voice even deeper through the phone. “How long till you can be ready to leave?”
“A week?”
She felt the smile. Felt it slink across her skin and settle in her belly. “Half an hour.”
“I’ll meet you in Reception in forty-five minutes. And don’t forget the sunscreen. Australian. Factor thirty. Buy some from the resort shop.”
“Where are we going?”
“Home,” he said, then hung up.
Avery heaved herself upright and squinted against the sunshine pouring through the curtain-free windows. The scent of sea air was fresh and sharp, the swoosh of the water nearby like a lullaby. It was a fantasy, with—thanks to rum—glimpses of hell. But it sure wasn’t home.
Home was blaring horns and sidewalks teeming with life, not all of it human. City lights so bright you could barely see the stars. It was keeping your handbag close and your frenemies closer. It was freezing in