When he turned and walked away, she shamelessly watched him, the loose fit of the drying shirt over his muscled back and the shift of his butt in the long shorts. She bit her lip. There was joy in Kingsley. She thought about what sex would be like with him—undeniably hot, uninhibited—and knew there would be a spontaneous delight about the encounter, a pleasure at living and breathing and being able to gulp deeply from the cup of life. He was a man worth knowing. And touching.
“I know you’re looking,” he called over his shoulder without turning around. Laughter threaded through his voice. The sound of it should have made Adah blush and look away like a thief caught with her hands in the cookie jar, but she only grinned and kept looking until she could no longer make out the finer details of his physique.
She was still smiling when she walked across the sand and through the beachfront entrance of her hotel. The lavish hotel, though stretching the limits of her budget, was one she was glad to have found. Her room overlooked the water, the entire reason for her visit to an island in the Caribbean.
“Welcome back, Ms. Palmer-Mitchell.” The woman at the front desk spared a smile for Adah as she looked up from her computer screen.
“Thank you.”
“There’s a visitor here for you. She’s already in her own room, which she requested next to yours.”
Adah stopped. “A visitor?” A bad feeling made her footsteps stutter. The leftover warmth from the encounter with Kingsley leached from her. She shivered.
“Yes. She arrived about thirty minutes ago.”
Adah had been walking the island for nearly two hours, trying to clear her mind and find a solution to the unsettled feeling that had yanked her out of her sleep nearly every night for the past six months. She was desperate for a good night’s sleep.
Adah pressed her lips closed and sucked them between her teeth. “All right, thank you so much for letting me know.”
After wishing the woman a good morning, she crossed the tiled lobby, each step feeling heavier than the last as she imagined who was waiting for her upstairs. She knew only one person with the means and motive to come to Aruba and turn her peace upside down. When the elevator doors slid open on her floor, there was someone waiting to get on it. The woman, elegant in white linen with her iron-gray hair on top of her head in a simple French twist, smiled at her in equal parts relief and triumph. Adah released a quiet breath.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Surprise, darling!” Thandie Palmer-Mitchell rebounded beautifully from the surprise of seeing Adah in the elevator.
Adah wished she could say the same for herself. Her suspicion had turned into grim certainty when the elevator doors opened on her floor. She felt scattered to the four winds at the sight of her mother, gorgeously styled and smiling in the last place Adah wanted her to be.
“Are you heading down?”
“Not anymore, now that you’re here,” her mother said.
Of course not. What she hoped was a smile spasmed across Adah’s face. “Okay. My room or yours?”
“Yours, of course. You must want to shower and get cleaned up after being out there in the heat.” Her mother fanned her face with her slender clutch purse as she stepped back to let Adah off the elevator. “After ten minutes out there, it felt like my skin was covered with sand and sweat.”
She fell in step with Adah down the wide and well-lit hallway toward the small room Adah had booked. Adah cringed, suddenly remembering her mess. Although she’d been in Aruba for only a day, most of the contents of her suitcase were already spread all over the room, a tendency toward untidiness she carried over from how she treated her space at home. The common areas were orderly and almost obsessively neat, but her bedroom and bathroom were booby-trapped with piles of clothes, books and makeup in danger of falling over.
She wasn’t dirty, Adah often reassured herself, just disorganized. Her habit of just stuffing her rolled travel clothes into her suitcase in no discernible pattern meant she often had to dig to the bottom of her luggage to find the exact thing she needed. Then after all that searching, who wanted to repack everything? There was just no point.
Her mother was the complete opposite. She used packing cubes, elegant and expensive, that she carefully arranged before each trip. Underwear in one cube, dresses in another and so on. Then she just slipped the prepacked cubes into the drawers of whatever hotel she checked into. Adah envied her mother’s ability to easily and neatly transition from place to place. But Adah had never made any effort to take on those qualities for herself.
Biting the proverbial bullet, she slid the keycard in and opened her door. “Come on in.”
Inside was the same disorder she’d left. Clothes all over the bed and the chair near the window. Her suitcase gaped open on the dresser with her other bathing suit and underwear spilling out. She grabbed clothes from the chair and tossed them on top of the suitcase.
“Sit.” She scrubbed a hand self-consciously over her windblown hair. “I’m going to have a quick shower—just make yourself comfortable.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s okay, darling.”
But Adah hadn’t forgotten her mother’s earlier comment about her getting cleaned up. “It won’t take me long. Sit and play some music on your iPad or something.”
Then she seized the nearest item of clothing on the suitcase and rushed to the bathroom. Barely fifteen minutes later, she walked out, running a brush over her hair, her body freshly lotioned and wearing the fitted floral sundress her best friend had insisted she bring to Aruba.
“Inject some sexy in your life, Adah,” Selene had told her as she pressed a large department store bag full of dresses and underwear she’d gotten nearly free in her job as a fashion buyer.
Adah felt like a fraud in the garment, effortlessly pretty in a way she couldn’t pull off in her everyday life. It felt like she was playing dress up, or at least trying to be like her mother. But she swept those thoughts away. Refreshed from her rushed shower, she twisted her straightened hair into a quick topknot.
“What brings you here, Mother?”
“My only daughter, of course.” Her mother had truly made herself comfortable, streaming a Luther Vandross song from the small iPad on her lap. She shut it down by closing the cover and set it aside. “I didn’t want you to feel all alone in this strange new place by yourself,” she continued.
“I’m not alone, Mother. There are thousands of tourists on the island this time of year, not to mention all the people who live here.”
“You know what I mean. You’re always going someplace by yourself. I think you’d be tired of that sort of solitary existence by now.”
Her mother had grown up in a boisterous home as one of six children and often voiced regrets she hadn’t had another child after Zoe died.
“With Zoe gone, I’m an only child, Mother. I’m used to being alone. Most times I prefer it.” Like now.
“Nonsense.” Her mother made a dismissive motion. “Nobody really likes being alone. But I can only be with you for a little while. There’s some business back home in Atlanta I need to tend to.” The business that had shaped the course of all their lives since it started. “I came to treat you to something nice for your birthday. I know your father and I were so busy last month we didn’t get a chance to celebrate with you properly.”
Weeks before they’d done the annual dinner at Adah’s favorite restaurant but hadn’t had time for the separate weekend trip to Saint Simons Island that was also part of the birthday tradition.
“It’s okay. I know with the company