Chapter 21
ALEC
Ella looks like a goddess in the pale green dress.
We’re walking the torchlit path toward the beach, her hand in mine, and I can’t stop stealing glances at her. The neckline of the dress drapes into that soft dip between her breasts, and the light from the tiki torches along the path turns her soft skin golden.
I told her in the boutique I’d spend all of dinner trying not to stare at her, but I underestimated the problem.
Every step she takes shifts the luminous fabric against her body, giving me a slightly different view of the hollow at the base of her throat, her collarbones, the upper curve of her breasts catching light and shadow.
I’ve had my mouth on every inch of skin that dress is covering.
Not to mention all the other, delicious inches of her. That knowledge is not helping my focus.
Her dark hair is down, loose and a little wild the way the salt air always makes it by evening.
She’s wearing simple sandals. No jewelry except for a thin chain with a small pendant that sits above the neckline and catches the torchlight every time she turns her head.
She looks stunning and she knows it, and the confidence in her walk is doing things to the lower half of my body that I’m going to need to manage before we sit down.
The path opens onto the private stretch of beach and Ella stops. “Alec.”
I watch her take it in. The table set for two in the sand, close enough to the water that the surf foams white a few yards away.
Crystal stemware. Linen napkins. Candles in hurricane glass.
A server stationed at a discreet distance near a portable bar setup.
Tiki torches mark the perimeter, their flames low and steady, throwing warm light across the white tablecloth and leaving everything beyond the circle soft and dark.
The ocean is a black sheet with silver edges where the moon hits.
Her hand tightens in mine. Not a squeeze.
More like a reflex, her fingers closing around what they’re already holding.
Her mouth opens slightly and the expression on her face settles into something I wasn’t prepared for.
Not the performed surprise I’ve seen from women who expected a gesture like this and were already composing their Instagram caption.
Ella looks like someone just handed her something she didn’t know she was allowed to want.
That expression lands in my chest like a fist.
“You did all this?” Her voice is quiet. Not a question about logistics. She knows I was arranging dinner for us today. She just didn’t know what I had in mind.
“I had some help from the kitchen.”
She turns to look at me and her eyes are bright in the torchlight. “Oh my God. This is...”
She doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead she rises on her toes, puts her hand on the side of my face, and kisses me. Soft. Brief. When she pulls back the look she gives me makes the entire afternoon I spent arguing with the resort’s private dining coordinator worth every second.
“Come on,” I say, leading her forward.
We step onto the sand, and I pull out her chair before the attendant can get there. She sits, giving our server a warm smile while I round the table and take the seat across from her.
The server brings menus. Handwritten on thick card stock, four courses, every item curated by me and the chef in a conversation this morning.
The left column is her menu. The right column is mine.
I spent twenty minutes with the chef making sure her side read like a celebration and mine read like a prescription.
Ella browses the menu, her gaze moving over both sides. Then she looks at me.
“Alec.” She holds up the card. “My appetizer is coconut shrimp. Yours is a salad. My entree is a filet with truffle butter. Yours is grilled mahi-mahi. My dessert is chocolate lava cake.” She turns the card toward me like I haven’t seen it. “Your dessert is a fruit plate.”
“It’s a seasonal fruit plate. With mint.”
She arches her brows at me. “You built me a menu of everything I love, and then you built yourself a menu that your cardiologist would frame on his wall.” She props her chin on her hand and grins at me. “Are you trying to make me feel sorry for you, or are you trying to impress me?”
I lean forward, keeping my voice low. “Which one will help me get lucky later?”
She laughs, but I see the flirty gleam in her eyes. “You’re not going to need dinner on the beach or fancy menus for that.”
“Good to know.”
My arousal stirs at the feel of her bare foot sliding against my leg.
I reach across the table for her hand, and she laces her fingers through mine.
For a long moment we sit there like that, in the candlelight, holding hands across a table with a comfortable ease that a week ago I wouldn’t have imagined I’d ever find with anyone.
Now, it’s hard to imagine sharing a romantic meal with a woman other than the extraordinary one seated across from me now.
I feel like I’m exactly where I should be, and with it comes a startling sense of calm.
That’s new. That’s Ella.
The coconut shrimp arrives for her, the salad for me, and both are good.
She steals a mango wedge off my plate without asking, because apparently what’s mine is hers now, and pops it into her mouth with zero guilt.
I watch her lips close around the fruit.
Her dress shifts when she leans forward and I lose a full three seconds to the view before I redirect to my own plate.
The entrees come and go. Her filet is good enough to make her close her eyes and moan on the first bite. My grilled mahi-mahi is fine. Healthy. Responsible.
Then the chocolate lava cake arrives.
Single plate. Two forks. The server sets it between us and the molten center has already started to breach the surface, dark and glossy, pooling against a scoop of vanilla that’s beginning to surrender. Ella stares at it like it insulted her mother and she’s about to forgive it anyway.
“You’re not going to make me eat this by myself are you?”
“I ordered it for you.”
“There are two forks.”
“The second one is decorative.”
Giving me a dry look, she picks up her fork and cuts into the cake.
The center collapses outward in a slow, obscene flood of chocolate.
She loads the fork and takes a bite and the sound she makes is the same sound she made in the suite that first night, the low hum that sent me to the bathroom to run cold water on my face.
Except now I’m sitting across a candlelit table from her, and the sound goes through me like a current and settles low and stays there.
She catches me watching. “What?”
“Nothing. Eat your cake.”
“You’re looking at me like you want to say something.”
I’m looking at her like I want to lay her across this table and forget about the server twenty yards away. I shift in my chair, seeking a more comfortable angle now that my pants are getting tight around the groin. “I’m just enjoying the show.”
She grins. Loads the second fork with cake and holds it across the table. “Live dangerously, Alec.”
I think back to the similar note she left me on the mini fridge in our suite around the time our whole unwilling roommate situation began.
A week ago, I refused this same offering from this same woman, and we both remember why.
Not because I had any real disagreement with chocolate.
Because taking something she was offering meant crossing a line I was still pretending existed.
That line is gone now. I lean forward and take the bite.
Rich. Dense. The kind of sweetness that has no business being this good, and the warm chocolate dissolves on my tongue while Ella watches my face with an intensity that has nothing to do with dessert.
My cardiologist would definitely not approve, but he isn’t sitting across from Ella Manning in a sexy green dress with torchlight on her collarbones and a saucy dare in her eyes, so his opinion feels academic.
“Verdict?” she asks.
“The cake is acceptable.”
“Acceptable.” She laughs and loads another forkful for herself. “Your face is doing the standing ovation thing again. You’re busted.”
She’s right. I am busted. In more ways than she knows.
We finish the cake together, trading forks across the table, her feeding me bites I pretend to resist and accept immediately, the chocolate and the candlelight and the ease of sharing a plate blurring into something that feels like the most natural thing in the world.
Her tongue catches a smear of chocolate at the corner of her mouth, and I watch her lick it away, my train of thought derailing so completely it’s a miracle I stay seated across from her.
“I’m sorry about what happened earlier today,” I say, needing to get my mind off all the things I’d like to do with Ella and a plate of sticky chocolate sauce. The server has stepped away to get coffee for me, chamomile tea for her. “At the boutique, I mean. With that woman.”
I don’t dignify Honey Carlisle by using her name. She doesn’t deserve to be anything more than a footnote. Even that’s being generous. But I know she hurt Ella, and that’s not something I take lightly.
“If she’d been a guy, I would’ve decked her.”
Ella smiles, shaking her head. “I’m good.
She didn’t break anything that wasn’t already cracked.
” She glances up, meets my eyes. “That’s the thing about scars.
They’re strongest where they healed, right?
Except when someone presses on the exact same spot, and then it turns out the scar tissue is just.. . thinner than you realized.”
The server returns with our coffee and tea. “May I bring either of you anything else this evening?”
I look at Ella and she shakes her head. “Everything was wonderful.”
“We’re all set,” I tell the man. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure, sir. Miss.” He nods, then discreetly leaves us alone on the torchlit beach.
“What about the bill?” Ella asks.
I shrug. “It’s handled.”