Chapter 9
ALEC
Istand under the rain shower with my palms flat against the tile and the temperature cranked to a setting that just shy of scorching, letting it pound the tension out of my shoulders.
The run was supposed to handle that. Five miles along the beach, and my body still feels like a live wire stripped of its casing.
My lungs burn. My quads are tight. None of the exertion has touched the thing I was actually trying to outrun.
Ella Manning’s soft curves and intoxicating scent filling my senses since this morning when I woke up.
I was awake before the alarm.
Not by a few seconds. By long enough to be fully, painfully, aware that I was wrapped around Ella like I’d been engineered to fit there.
My arm across her waist. My chest flush against her back.
My face so close to her hair that each breath pulled her into my lungs.
And lower, pressed against the curve of her very nice ass with an erection so insistent it had probably been there for hours.
Yet I didn’t move.
I should clarify. I registered all of it.
The destroyed pillow wall. The fact that I’d crossed every boundary I’d drawn the night before.
The full, undeniable reality of my body curved around hers, her warmth soaked into my skin, her breathing slow and steady against my arm.
I registered every detail, and I stayed.
Not because I was frozen or half-asleep or processing.
I stayed because she felt good. That simple. That indefensibly damning. She was warm and she fit against me with a precision that made three feet of empty mattress feel like a waste of good engineering, so I pressed my face a fraction closer to her hair and I stayed.
I felt the exact moment she woke up and realized where she was. Her whole body went taut against mine. Her pulse jumped under the arm I had across her waist, and then she started the most careful extraction I’ve ever witnessed, lifting my arm millimeter by millimeter like she was defusing ordnance.
I let her because I had no fucking idea how to initiate my own escape without having to own up to the fact that I was sporting the hardest erection of my life.
I kept my breathing even and my eyes shut and let her believe I was sleeping through all of it.
A kindness or a cowardice, depending on how you look at it. I’m not sure which one it was.
On a groan, I tip my head back under the shower spray and close my eyes.
After the run, I came back to the suite wired and stupid.
I heard the shower running when I let myself in.
I knew she was in there. I should have called out, dropped my keycard loudly, done anything to announce myself.
Instead I walked straight to the bathroom and nearly right into her as she opened the door, flushed and damp in that white robe and nothing under it.
The embroidery on the pocket said “Hers” but all my body saw was “Mine.” Which is nuts, because Ella is the last woman I should want.
Forgetting the fact that we couldn’t be more opposite if we tried, she’s also a virtual stranger trapped in this suite with me against either of our wills.
Even if that’s not how she felt this morning snuggled deep in my arms.
I shut off the tap and dry off. Then I put on a pair of khaki beach shorts and a linen shirt in a color somewhere between sand and gray. I take my medication with a palmful of water from the sink, downing them with a grimace.
When I step out of the bathroom, I can see Ella on the veranda.
She’s standing at the railing with a coffee cup held in both hands, looking out at the water.
Her dark hair is catching in the soft breeze, despite her repeatedly tucking the errant strands behind one ear.
She’s changed into a light blue T-shirt dress and sandals, and her shoulders are relaxed in a way they weren’t thirty minutes ago.
The tension from the bathroom is gone, or at least packed away somewhere I can’t see.
I watch her for a few seconds longer than I should. Then I grab my laptop bag from the closet shelf and slide the glass door open.
She turns. Something crosses her face, quick and unreadable, before her expression settles into careful neutrality. “Hey.”
“I’m heading down to the pool area,” I tell her. “The suite’s yours for the day.”
“Oh.” She blinks. “You don’t have to leave on my account.”
“I’m not.” That’s mostly true. “I have some work to catch up on.”
She lifts an eyebrow at the laptop bag but doesn’t comment on it. “I was going to explore the resort in a bit,” she says. “Maybe hit the beach.”
I nod, even though I’m not sure why she feels compelled to give me her day’s itinerary. The ocean fills the sudden silence between us. For a second I think she’s going to say something about the morning, about the bathroom, about any of it. She doesn’t.
“I’ll check with the front desk about the room situation,” I say. “See if anything’s opened up.”
Her brows rise in response. “Right, good idea. Fingers crossed!”
I grunt in agreement, still hesitating to leave for reasons I prefer not to consider. “Enjoy your day, then.”
I close the sliding door before I can do something idiotic like tell her to be careful on her own today, or ask her what she thinks about while she looks at the ocean. Laptop bag in hand, I exit the suite and head for the elevator.
The pool area is already busy by the time I find a lounger. I choose one near the far end, angled away from the main crowd, partially shaded by a palm tree. Close enough to the tiki bar to order water but far enough from the speakers pumping out soca music that I should be able to focus.
I set up the laptop, tilting the screen against the glare that immediately renders it nearly unreadable.
The Barbados sun is not conducive to working, which everyone else here seems to have figured out already.
I adjust the angle. Worse. I cup my hand over the display like a visor.
Marginally better, but now I look like a man trying to hide that he’s watching porn in public.
The humidity is a problem too. Within five minutes, a fine layer of moisture has settled over the keyboard, and my water glass is sweating a ring onto the side table that’s creeping toward the laptop’s charging port with the slow inevitability of a hostile negotiation.
I relocate the glass. It sweats a new ring.
I relocate it again, then finally give up.
Seventeen unread messages wait in my inbox, six flagged urgent.
The subject lines blur. HoloTech integration timeline.
Q3 board materials. A penetration test summary from my CTO that three days ago would have consumed my full attention for an hour.
Buried in the queue, an update from legal on the Meridian deal.
The acquisition is stalled without me, nine billion dollars in limbo because my cardiologist decided I needed a tan.
I read the first email twice without absorbing a word.
The cursor blinks. I rest my fingers on the warm keys and stare at the screen, seeing nothing but Ella’s face.
I’m pulled back to something she said on the plane, about the way she decided to move to Sedona.
Picking the town randomly, by closing her eyes and pointing at a map.
How her finger landed on a tiny town in the Arizona desert, and she just went.
No research. No due diligence. No spreadsheet weighing cost of living against employment prospects against long-term viability.
She closed her eyes and trusted whatever was going to happen.
I’ve never made a decision that way, let alone one that would determine the trajectory of my entire life.
I’m not sure I’ve made a decision in the last decade that didn’t involve at least two consultants and a contingency plan.
And somehow she ended up in a place she loves, working a job that makes her happy, with friendships strong enough that she’d been planning this trip with one of them.
And, in what I’m gathering is true Ella style, when those plans fell through, she adjusted.
Didn’t let it stop her for second. Instead, she came here solo.
To a foreign country, to a luxury resort she’d never been to.
That takes something. Not sheer impulsiveness, which is what I would have called it a day ago. Something braver than that.
Something I would even call admirable.
While I’m grappling with my warming regard for the woman who’s participated in upending my entire vacation, an attractive blonde in a coral bikini settles onto the lounger two spots down.
Expensive swimsuit, Chanel sunglasses. She arranges herself with the awareness of someone who knows she’s being observed, adjusting the angle of her lounger so it happens to face mine.
I catch the glance she sends my direction over the top of her sunglasses. Appraising. Available.
I return to my inbox.
The third email is from my assistant, Martha. Subject line: VACATION MEANS VACATION, ALEC.
Shit. Busted. I close it without reading.
Other guests drift through the frame of my peripheral vision, laughing, ordering drinks, doing whatever it is people do on tropical vacations.
A couple on the loungers across the pool is sharing an elaborate cocktail in a coconut with two straws, their legs tangled together. I look away from them too.
I don’t need any reminders that this resort is designed for romance. I’ve got a perky brunette suitemate whose very presence has everything male in me itching to ditch my laptop and go back to see if Ella’s still there.
Because evidently, I’m a glutton for punishment.
I catch myself starting to smile over the way she outmaneuvered me in our battle for our favorite side of the bed.
I could have fought harder on that, but for some reason I decided to let her win.
Maybe it was because of how stubbornly she asserted herself.
Maybe it was because she was so fucking adorable doing it.
But I think it was actually because of the monster. The childhood nightmare she used as supporting evidence for why she deserved my side of the bed.
And now I’m sitting poolside with seventeen urgent emails and a laptop slowly being dissolved by tropical humidity, and what I’m thinking about is seven-year-old Ella, so scared of a monster on the right side of her bed that she’s slept on the left side ever since.
There’s something about that. Not the fear.
The loyalty to it. The way she carries her own history so lightly, turning wounds into punchlines without ever pretending they didn’t hurt.
Why? I don’t have a framework for my curiosity about her. I don’t have a contingency plan for wanting to know someone the way I’m interested in knowing more about her.
She reads people. I’ve watched her do it.
Marina at the front desk. The flight attendant on the plane.
It’s not just friendliness. Friendliness is a surface skill.
What Ella does is deeper. She sees the person underneath, the way a good analyst reads between the lines of a quarterly report.
Except she does it without effort, without strategy.
Just by paying attention in a way that makes people feel like they matter.
The question forms before I can stop it: What does she see when she looks at me?
I probably don’t want to know. I’m not normally an asshole. Hell, I hope I’m not. It’s just that this recent health scare has me… well, a little scared. It’s not a feeling I’m used to. It sure as fuck isn’t a feeling I enjoy.
I’m not enjoying this forced vacation either. I’d rather be back in my office working, not voluntarily exiled from my suite because there’s a woman in it who’s sending my central nervous system into red alert every time I’m near her.
I power down the laptop with a sigh. The screen goes dark and my own reflection stares back at me, distorted in the glossy surface.
A scowling man in a linen shirt, sitting by an inviting-looking pool he doesn’t want to be near, unable to focus on the work that has defined his entire adult life because a woman he met twenty-four hours ago is taking up all the space in his head where spreadsheets and startup projections used to live.
I lean back against the lounger and look at the water.
This morning was just a physical reaction. Predictable. Manageable. Proximity plus soft curves plus basic biology equals an outcome that means exactly nothing. I’ve been telling myself this since the shower, and the argument is almost convincing.
My heart rate has been elevated all morning, which I’m choosing to interpret as a sign that my cardiovascular system is functioning.
Mission accomplished. It works. It works so well it apparently runs a full diagnostic every time Ella enters a room or exits one or breathes in the same square footage as me.
I should get up and press the front desk about the room situation. That’s the practical move. Find an alternative arrangement. Reestablish distance. Solve this problem the way I solve everything: structurally, eliminating each obstacle until the desired outcome is achieved.
That’s all Ella Manning is, after all. An obstacle standing in the way of my relaxation. A distraction I damned well don’t need.
And for the first time in a long time, I don’t have a plan for that.