Chapter 7
ALEC
The suite smells like her when I open the door and enter the foyer.
Not perfume. Ella doesn’t wear perfume, a fact I’ve noticed against my will over the past twelve hours.
Whatever it is clings to the air the way her personality clings to a conversation: warm, uninvited, impossible to filter out.
Sand-crusted flip-flops kicked off near the door where she must have stepped out of them earlier.
A beach cover-up hanging on a hook I’d mentally claimed as mine.
And on the big screen TV across from the living area sofa, some movie is paused on a close-up of two people who appear to be three seconds from tearing each other’s clothes off.
Wonderful. Just the ambiance I was hoping for.
I walk farther into the suite and find Ella cross-legged on the sofa in the living area, surrounded by what appears to be the aftermath of a room service siege.
I count several plates, a bread basket reduced to crumbs, the remains of a cheese-slathered chicken dish, and something involving butter-soaked shrimp.
She’s working on dessert now, a slice of chocolate cake so dark and rich it looks indecent, and she’s eating it with the kind of focused pleasure most people reserve for activities that require a locked door.
“Hey, you’re back!” She waves her fork at me without looking up. “Did you have a nice walkabout? You left hours ago. Where’d you go? Did you eat?”
So many questions. I sigh as I decide which one I feel like answering. “I had dinner at one of the onsite restaurants.”
“Cool,” she says around a mouthful of cake. “How was it?”
I set my keycard on the dresser with more precision than the task requires. Unlike her dinner, mine was grilled mahi-mahi and steamed vegetables, washed down with sparkling water and the grim satisfaction of a man following medical orders. “It was fine.”
“Just fine?” She glances at me, then at her own wreckage, then back at me with a grin. “Because this cake is the opposite of fine. It’s the most delicious thing I’ve ever put in my mouth.”
Christ. Now I’m thinking about her putting things in her mouth. My cock is suddenly thinking about that too.
She takes another bite and makes a sound, a low, involuntary hum that vibrates through the room and lands directly in my groin like she aimed it there.
My hand tightens around my phone. She has no idea she’s doing it.
That’s the worst part. If this were calculated, I could file it under manipulation tactics and move on.
But Ella doesn’t calculate. Ella just exists at full volume, and my body has decided to tune to her frequency without consulting me.
“Want some?” She holds the fork out toward me, a generous chunk of cake balanced on the tines. “Everyone deserves chocolate, Alec. Even people who don’t do fun.”
“I’m fine.”
“You keep saying that.” She tilts her head. “You said that on the plane too, right before you looked like you wanted to throw my cookies out the window.”
“I didn’t want to throw your cookies out the window.”
“Your face wanted to.”
I almost smile. Almost. “Chocolate has no place in my current dietary protocol.”
“Dietary protocol,” she repeats, like I’ve just spoken in Klingon. “You know what? That sentence is the saddest thing I’ve heard you say, and believe me, you’d already set that bar pretty high.” She waves the fork again. “One bite. Did you know chocolate has antioxidants? I read that somewhere.”
“Where? On the back of a candy wrapper?”
She laughs, shrugging. “Still counts.” Another bite.
Another hum, this one quieter but worse somehow, throatier, and my cock stirs against my thigh with a persistent enthusiasm I haven’t had to manage since I was a teenager.
I’m thirty-two years old. I’m far from being a monk.
I should not be getting hard because a woman is enjoying dessert. Loudly.
I head through the living area to the bedroom’s en-suite bathroom.
Cranking the cold water to high, I splash some on my face.
Grip the marble vanity and stare at the pathetic man in the mirror.
This is what my life has become. Two weeks ago I was negotiating HoloTech’s multi-billion-dollar acquisition of Meridian Defense Systems. Now I’m hiding in a bathroom in Barbados, trying to escape a petite firecracker who makes chocolate cake sound like a religious experience.
Pathetic, Beckett. Truly world-class.
When I come back out, the room service tray has been relocated to the desk, the movie is off, and Ella is in the bedroom pulling clothes from her suitcase. “I’m going to get ready for bed,” she says. “Unless you still need the bathroom?”
I grumble my reply. “Go ahead.”
She disappears with an armful of clothing and a bag of what looks like an entire shelf of beauty products.
The door closes. The faucet runs. I hear her humming to herself, off-key and cheerful, the muffled sounds of bottles being opened and closed, a drawer sliding on its track.
Our toothbrushes are standing side by side in the cup on the counter in there.
Our towels on adjacent hooks. The entire bathroom arranged like it belongs to two people who chose to share it, which we did not.
I sit on the edge of the bed and groan. The resort activity guide sits on the nightstand and I pick it up, but I can’t even pretend to read it.
Instead I’m listening to the other side of the bathroom door, the sounds of a woman going through her nighttime routine. The normalcy of it is disorienting.
I can’t remember the last time someone else’s nightly rituals took place within earshot of my bed. Years.
Not since Victoria.
The bathroom door opens and she steps out, and my brain goes offline.
White tank top that clings too tightly to her perky tits and hardly hides the dusky outlines of her nipples.
The sleeveless top bares a whole lot of smooth skin that’s picked up a faint glow from whatever time she spent on the resort grounds this afternoon.
Boy shorts, baby pink, hit just below her round ass and the enticing V of her crotch.
She’s barefoot on the marble. Her dark hair is down and slightly damp at the temples.
None of this was chosen with me in mind.
She packed these clothes for solo nights in a suite she expected to occupy alone, and the complete absence of performance is what makes the visual hit so hard.
A woman in lingerie is a woman with an audience.
A woman in a washed-out tank top is a woman who thinks she’s alone, and the unguarded ease of her body in those clothes sends a pulse of heat through me that settles low and stays.
“All yours,” she says, and if she notices the way I’m gripping the activity guide like it personally wronged me, she doesn’t mention it.
I change in the bathroom. T-shirt and nylon athletic shorts.
The shorts are the problem. Normally I sleep in nothing, a fact that didn’t seem relevant until I was standing in a bathroom putting on clothes specifically because a woman I’ve known for twelve hours is waiting on the other side of the door in boy shorts and a tank top that’s doing things to my composure that a twelve-billion-dollar hostile takeover attempt failed to accomplish.
When I step back out, she looks up from the bed and gives my outfit a once-over. “Huh.”
“What.”
“Nothing. You just look like a different person without the button-down and dress slacks.” She pulls the covers over her lap. “More human.”
“I was human before.”
“Debatable.” She arches a brow and smiles. Then she looks at my shorts and frowns. At first I wonder if my semi-erection is obvious, but then she tilts her head at me in question. “Do you always sleep in workout shorts?”
“Always? No. Never. At home I sleep naked.”
The words are out before I fully consider them, and Ella goes very still. Her lips part. A flush creeps up her neck, and she blinks once before looking down at the comforter.
“Well,” she says after a pause that lasts roughly a decade. “Thanks for the... compromise.”
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
I clear my throat and focus on the bed situation, which is its own crisis. She’s already settling in. On the left. My side.
“That’s the left side,” I say.
“I know.”
I scowl. “I sleep on the left.”
“That’s so sad for you.” She doesn’t move. “Because I also sleep on the left, and I’m already here.”
Is she serious? I fold my arms. “I’ve slept on the left side of every bed I’ve owned since I was twenty-three.”
“Impressive streak. I’ve slept on the left since I was seven and had a nightmare about a monster that could only attack from the right. So I have seniority and a more compelling origin story.”
I suppress my smile. “A monster.”
“Don’t judge my trauma. It was very formative.” She pats the right side of the mattress. “This side is perfectly good. Better bathroom access, closer to the veranda. If you think about it, I’m actually doing you a favor.”
She’s not doing me a favor. She’s dug in like a tenant with a lease, and she’s clearly enjoying this. I can see it in the slight curve of her mouth, the way she’s watching me from behind those arresting blue eyes with the quiet satisfaction of a woman who knows she’s already won.
I walk to the right side, grumbling the whole way. Her smile widens.
“Smart man.”
I should not find that attractive. The fact that I do is a problem I’ll address later, when I’m not climbing into a bed with her.
She sits up and starts pulling the decorative pillows into a line down the center of the mattress, stacking them with a concentration that would be endearing if the whole exercise weren’t a testament to the absurdity of this situation.
Two adults in a honeymoon suite, separated by a barricade made of throw pillows.
This is my vacation. My get-away-from-stress, doctor-prescribed, forced vacation.
“Fortifications?” I ask.