31. Fox
FOX
H arry, you son of a bitch , I was still thinking when we landed on the man’s lawn.
My new friend hadn’t understood the problem, but had believed he knew the solution. He’d sent us to swim alone, trying to engineer exactly the close encounter we’d had.
I had treaded water as far from Ashley as I could get, seriously considering hiking down the entire mountain and hitchhiking to the resort, just to avoid further temptation.
To avoid the bitterness in her profile.
I couldn’t believe she had admitted to entertaining fantasies starring me . It was one thing for my subconscious to sideswipe me with an erotic dream, quite another to process her conjuring sexual encounters between us. Her candor had pretty much mule-kicked me off whatever high horse I’d been on. I’d had to kiss her. Had to.
And of course reality was infinitely better than my dreams.
I don’t know how I stopped. I really don’t. The fact she’d been ready to go all the way had nearly undone me. I was all about consent and always checked in before things went too far, but things had been going far and fast and had felt right . In a way I’d never experienced.
My chest was still tight with regret at turning her down. Hell, my balls were punishing me with a dull ache that extended into my stomach and down the insides of my thighs.
Now I only had the memory of kissing her and sucking her nipples and it was a pearl in an oyster, digging at me, yet I couldn’t resist turning it over and over, allowing it to take up more and more space inside me, glittering and precious and liable to kill me if it was ever pried out of me.
Harry’s butler met us. Harry had expected us to be gone at least another hour and had run out for a follow-up appointment with his doctor. We could enjoy his pool if we wanted to wait for him to return.
I glanced at Ashley. She had been pretending fascination with anything that wasn’t me for the last hour. She had taken a seat in the back of the helicopter for the flight back, too, apparently no longer caring if I plummeted to my death.
“We’re expected back at the hotel.” Or rather, Ashley expected me to take her back to the hotel and I’d disappointed her enough for one day. “Thank Harry and let him know I’ll give him a call to thank him myself. It was great.”
“You didn’t touch the picnic,” the pilot reminded me. “Take it with you.”
Like we needed another bottle of champagne, but the butler carried it to the car for us and set it in the back seat. As I rolled away a minute later, toward the gate at the end of the driveway, I touched Ashley’s wrist.
“Hey,” I said.
“Can we not?” She moved her hand into her lap and kept her head turned away.
Been here, done this. My sigh burned into the bottom of my lungs.
I racked my brain as we crawled through congestion toward the resort, pulling over to put the roof up when rain started to spit. Ten minutes later, the squall became so intense, pouring in such voluminous buckets, I pulled over again to wait it out.
“What are you doing?”
“It’ll pass in a minute.”
She tsked and put on the A/C to combat the humidity and the fog gathering on the insides of the windows.
“Ash—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Because you don’t have a solution, either. Do you?” Sexual frustration added a layer of aggression to my voice that came across like blame. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but this wasn’t easy for me, either. “Say we have sex. Then you go to wherever the hell you think you’re going and I’ll feel like I took advantage of you. So will you, by the way.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Like hell I don’t.” She had been genuinely hurt when Izzy had promised to travel with her then dumped her. That had been a trip . Not physical intimacy. “And what do I tell Shane? Nothing? Let it sit on my conscience like a tumor? What if you and I try to give this a serious go? Now we have to tell Shane. I talked him out of marrying you . Shane pretends he doesn’t have feelings, but he does. He would be rightfully pissed and probably would demand I buy him out—which I can’t. He’s not in a position to buy me out, either. So now we dissolve what we’ve built? Take a loss on the house? Even if he walked out and left T&B for me to run, I need his celebrity endorsement. That’s our brand. The business wouldn’t survive without him so every way I look at this, I’m screwed.”
“So long as your priorities are straight,” she muttered.
“That is fucking unfair. Tell me there’s a way you and I can see what this is—” I pointed between us. “—that won’t cost me everything, including people I genuinely care about. Tell me. I’ll do it.”
“Don’t yell at me,” she snapped, eyes gleaming with unshed tears.
I recalled her experience with her father’s anger and clenched my hands on the steering wheel, trying to rein in my anger so I didn’t scare her.
“You think I don’t know how shitty this is?” she asked. “I know I can’t go to Sydney with you. I’ll never be part of your life if I do. Shane’s mates are never going to accept me if I’ve moved on to his bestie like some kind of two-timing slut.”
“ Don’t .” I would never let anyone call her something like that, especially her.
“I’m not keen to be the girl who broke up T&B, either. You think Eddie and Sandy are going to keep being nice to me if I’m with you? No. You did the right thing, Fox. Is that what you need to hear? Thank you for saving us both. Okay?” Angry tears stood on her cheeks and she swept them away.
“The thing that bites most is that it’s more of the same. No matter what I want…” Her voice cracked and her hands clenched into fists. “I’m always forced to lower my expectations. Get married in Hawaii? Heck, no. I can’t even get laid in Hawaii. Career? I can go back to my job in Pine Grove that pays the bills, but I can’t have a career I enjoy. I wanted that job at T&B! Do you realize that? I felt like I did good work there.”
“You did.”
“Nice to know, but who cares? Because someone else gets to have that job. Not me.”
“I keep telling you, we can find a way to...keep you on. Somehow.”
“This is not about finding the compromise! It’s the fact that settling is all I ever do because that’s all I’m allowed to do. So fine. I’ll settle for being friends except, wait, we can’t be friends anymore because I ruined everything by letting you touch my boobs. I’ll go home and go back to not even wishing.”
“Ash—”
She cut into my attempt to reason with her. “The rain is letting up. I want to get back. Unless that’s too much to ask?”
My hands were still clenched around the steering wheel. I wanted to shake it loose from the car and throw it across the road with a primal scream, but I gritted my teeth and pulled into traffic. This was such a cluster-fuck.
At the resort, I left the car with the valet and carried the basket into the hotel.
“You gave your room key to Fliss,” I reminded Ash when she started digging into her bag on the way to the elevator. I fumbled my wallet from my pocket.
“I’m looking for my phone. I haven’t checked my messages.”
“I heard from Shane,” I finally remembered to tell her.
“When?” She snapped her head up, bag still agape. “What did he say?”
“Yesterday. I meant to tell you, but we went on the cruise and...” I shrugged. Had it slipped my mind? Or had I shoved it out of the way?
“And?”
“He’s sorry.”
She stared at me until the doors opened for us. Then she choked out a husk of a laugh.
“Great. That fixes everything. Thanks.” I used my card on the reader and she stabbed the button. As soon as the door s opened and she shot off down the hall to the room.
I gathered my patience and followed, catching up to her at the locked door where I touched the card to the reader. I schooled my expression as we entered, expecting Fliss to be here, but there was a whole gaggle of female voices.
“Oh, hello .” Izzy came in from the balcony.