Chapter 20
ELLA
My body is still carrying a low, pleasant hum when I enter Palm Court’s swanky boutique around noon the next day.
I can still feel all the places Alec’s body pleasured mine, all the ways his mouth and hands have now ruined me for anyone else.
To say nothing of that amazing cock of his.
I may be going back home soon, but after Alec my so-called sex life will never be the same.
Really, that thought should bother me more than it does. It definitely shouldn’t have me grinning like a cat who gorged itself on a big fat canary last night, but my face doesn’t care what my brain is saying.
I had an incredible day—and night, and morning—with him. And tonight he’s taking me on our first official date. He refused to tell me where we’re going, instead cryptically instructing me to dress up while his thumb traced the curve of my hip under the sheets this morning.
He’s somewhere on the resort property now, arranging our dinner plans, and I’m determined to find something stunning to wear for him. All I packed were sundresses and bikinis, none of which will do. I want something special.
Let’s be honest here. I want to blow him away.
The boutique is tucked off the main lobby, small and quiet.
It’s the kind of place where dresses hang with six inches of space between them not crammed in tight like the discount places I normally go to where people shop by the armful.
The lighting makes everything glow. Even the air smells expensive.
I hold a sea glass green dress up to my chest and study myself in the full-length mirror. It’s fitted through the waist, with a drapey neckline that dips low enough to be interesting without crossing into territory that requires double-sided tape.
The saleswoman, a warm Bajan woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, nods as she approaches me. “That’s one of my favorites.”
“I love the color,” I tell her, but then I spot a pale-peach dress that’s also pretty in a different way. “This one is nice too.”
Feminine and soft, with thin spaghetti straps and a hem that hits just above the knee. Simpler than the green. It doesn’t scream “look at me” the way the first one does. I hold it up in front of me and assess in the mirror.
“Another good choice,” the saleswoman says.
“I like them both for different reasons. The green is sexier. The peach is more me. Which is maybe why I should pick the green, because I already know how to be me, and tonight I want to be...” I trail off, not sure how to finish that sentence.
She smiles. “The version of you that makes someone’s jaw drop?”
“Exactly that.”
A week ago, the first thing I would have done is flip the price tags and calculate how many double shifts each dress represented.
The old reflex almost fires, my fingers twitching toward the tag on the green, but I stop.
I have money in my account. Real money, not the kind that comes with an asterisk and a prayer that the electric bill doesn’t hit before payday.
And the woman in this mirror, the one with the sun-kissed shoulders and the reckless smile, isn’t here to budget. She’s here to choose.
I’m holding a dress in each hand, genuinely torn and enjoying the luxury of that indecision, when the air in the boutique shifts.
It’s a feeling I know from the diner. The change in atmospheric pressure that happens when a certain kind of customer walks in.
Someone who’s already decided the service won’t be good enough, the food won’t be hot enough, the wait will be too long.
I can feel those types of people before I see them, the way the room tightens by a fraction.
I turn.
Honey Carlisle steps out from behind a display of rich-lady silk caftans near the back of the store, and the smile she gives me is polished and cool and about as warm as the marble floor under my sandals.
“Ella. What a nice surprise.” She says my name correctly this time, which means she’s been paying closer attention than she pretended at the bonfire. “Shopping for something special?”
I swallow past the cold knot in my throat. “Just looking at a few things.” I match her pleasant tone because that’s what I always do with people like her. I read the table, smile, give the customer the benefit of the doubt until they show me who they really are. “You?”
“Oh, I practically live in here.” She runs her fingertips along a rack of dresses without looking at them, the way someone touches furniture in their own house. “They know my size by heart at this point.”
I notice the saleswoman has quietly made her escape. Evidently, she’s familiar enough with Honey to make a fast getaway.
Honey’s wearing white again. Linen, perfectly pressed, with gold jewelry that looks heavy and real. Her hair falls in a smooth platinum curtain that probably required thirty minutes and a professional-grade flat iron. Everything about her is curated, expensive, deliberate.
I’ve waited on a hundred women who look and act like her. I know the type and I know the tip. Usually generous, but always with a faint air of charity about it.
“That’s a gorgeous green.” She nods toward the dress in my right hand. “Bold choice.”
“I think so too.”
“Is it for something tonight? You and your suitemate have plans?” The way she says suitemate makes the word sound temporary. Disposable.
“We do.” I leave it there.
Her eyes move over me. Not the quick social scan people do in conversation, but a slower assessment that starts at my sandals, pauses at the sundress I’m wearing, which is a cotton thing I bought at a street market three days ago, and arrives at my face with a conclusion already formed.
“Can I be honest with you, Ella?” She tilts her head, and the gesture is so fake it makes my teeth clench. Sympathetic angle. Concerned brow. “I’ve been watching you two all week, and I think you’re lovely. I really do. But I’d hate to see you get hurt.”
The back of my neck prickles. The same feeling as a customer reaching for the complaint card. “I appreciate the concern.”
I turn my head away from her, but she edges closer.
“It’s just that men like Alec...” She pauses, as if choosing her words carefully, though I’d bet my last shift’s tips she rehearsed this.
“They enjoy vacation. The sun, the novelty, the… well.” A delicate gesture in my direction.
“But when the plane lands and real life starts again, the vacation stays in the vacation. You understand what I mean.”
I understand exactly what she means. I also understand that my fingers have tightened on the hangers to help me resist the urge to wrap them around her neck.
“I don’t think you know Alec well enough to speak for him.”
“Maybe not.” She concedes the point without giving an inch of ground.
“But I know this world. And I’ve seen women walk into boutiques like this one, picking out dresses for men who are going to forget their names by the time they’re back in business class.
” She lets that land, then softens her voice in a way that’s worse than if she’d stayed sharp.
“You work in a restaurant, right? Waitressing, was it? There’s nothing wrong with that.
But this,” she gestures at the boutique, the dresses in my hands, the sparkling resort beyond the windows, “this is a different playing field, Ella. And buying a pretty dress doesn’t change which team you’re on. ”
The words hit me in the sternum. Not because they’re clever or even original, but because they find the exact spot that’s already scarred over.
The spot where someone else once stood, telling me the same thing in different words.
Telling me I didn’t fit in his world, that I was too naive to see the obvious, too much of all the wrong things to hold onto someone who had other options.
My shoulders start to draw in. I feel it happening, my body folding itself smaller to present less of a target. Heat climbs up my throat. My jaw tightens and the dresses in my hands feel suddenly ridiculous, costumes for a play I was never cast in. The green silk is cool against my damp palm.
“I’m not trying to be cruel,” Honey says, and the terrible thing is I almost believe her.
She believes this. She lives in a world where these hierarchies are load-bearing walls, and she’s looking at me like I’m a nice girl who wandered into the wrong building.
“I just think someone should be honest with you before you invest too much of yourself in something that has an expiration date.”
My pulse is loud in my ears. My face is hot. But my feet are on the floor and my spine is straight and I have handled worse than this at the diner. I have smiled through worse than this from people who thought the uniform and nametag meant I didn’t have feelings.
“You know what I think, Honey?” My voice comes out steadier than I expected. Quieter, too. “I think you’ve decided who I am based on my job and my suitcase, and I think that says a lot more about you than it does about me.”
It’s not a knockout punch. It costs me everything I have just to keep my voice level, and the trembling in my hands is real. But I said it. I looked her in the eye and I said it.
Honey’s mouth opens, then closes, regrouping. Before she can recalculate her angle, the air shifts again.
This time the shift is warm.
I feel Alec before I see him, a sense I’m starting to recognize.
A current that runs along my skin, a gravitational pull in the pit of my stomach.
Then he’s there, stepping through the boutique entrance with his easy stride, as though he just finished his errand and came to find the person he wanted to be near.
His eyes find me first, the way they always do when he walks into a room.
Then they move to Honey. Then back to me.
Whatever he sees on my face rearranges his expression in an instant.
He doesn’t ask what’s going on. He doesn’t look confused. He steps to my side. Not in front of me, not between me and Honey. Beside me, shoulder close enough that the warmth of his arm presses against mine. The positioning is about as subtle as a solar flare about to scorch the earth.
Honey straightens. “Alec. We were just chatting about...”
“I heard you.” His voice is low, stripped of every degree of warmth I’ve come to know in it. “I heard enough.”
He looks at Honey the way I imagine he looks at people in his business life who have made a very serious miscalculation. Not angry. Not loud. Searing.
“Ella has more class in her worst moment than you’ve shown in your best.” He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to. The words land with the authority of a man who has never once had to repeat himself to be heard. “We’re done here.”
The silence that follows is total. Honey’s composure fractures, just barely, a flicker behind her eyes that she covers with a smile that doesn’t reach any part of her face. She picks up a clutch purse from the counter, touches her hair once, and walks out of the boutique without another word.
The door swings shut behind her. The ambient music, which I hadn’t even noticed had been playing, suddenly sounds very loud.
Alec doesn’t turn to face me. He doesn’t ask if I’m okay.
He just stays where he is, right beside me, solid and steady, and after a moment his hand finds the small of my back.
The touch is light. Certain. The same hand that gripped my hip in the shower, that steadied me in the ocean, that adjusted my snorkel strap with fingers so gentle I almost cried.
That hand on my back right now is telling me the same thing it always tells me.
I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.
The old choreography is still humming in my body. The heat in my throat, the tightness across my shoulders, the echo of words that found their target. But underneath it, quieter and more solid, is the thing I felt on the beach when I reached for his hand. Safety.
Not because he stepped in. Because what he did tells me exactly what I needed to know.
He saw me. The waitress, the clearance-rack shopper, the woman holding a dress she isn’t sure she deserves.
He saw all of it and he didn’t flinch. He didn’t pause.
He stood beside me like that was the only place in the world he would ever choose to stand.
His actions say I’m not too much for him. I’m not out of my depth.
I’m exactly where I belong.
“So.” He glances at the two dresses I’m still gripping. His voice has thawed, the ice from a moment ago already gone, replaced by the dry warmth I know. “Dinner’s all set. Find anything in here that you like?”
I hold up both hangers. The green sea glass. The pale peach. My hands are still shaking slightly, but less than a minute ago, and the act of lifting the dresses feels like reclaiming the afternoon. “I can’t decide.”
He considers them with the same focused assessment he gives everything.
His eyes move from one to the other, then to me, then back to the green.
“This one. The neckline is going to sit right here.” He lightly touches the space between my breasts, one fingertip, brief and specific.
“And I’m going to spend all of dinner trying not to stare at it. ”
I laugh. It comes out smaller than usual, still shaky at the edges, but real. “Sold.”
He takes the dress from my hand. “This is on me.”
“No, Alec. I have money. I can pay.”
He cups my cheek tenderly in his hand. “I know you can. But I want to do this. So, let me.”
I hold his intense gaze for a moment, then give him a soft nod. “Okay. Thank you.”
I return the peach dress to the rack while he pays. When I join him at the counter, the saleswoman squeezes my hand as she passes me the bag, a small, wordless kindness that almost undoes me more than anything Honey said.
Alec holds the boutique door open. I walk through it with the stunning green dress in a bag and his hand finding mine as we step into the sunlit corridor.
Tonight he is taking me to dinner. I am going to wear the dress he bought for me. And the woman who walks into that restaurant is not going to be shrinking or pretending or apologizing for a single thing about who she is.
She’s just going to be Ella.
Because that’s all I need to be with Alec.