by Serena Bell
Perversely, it made Trey think of something that had happened when he was ten. His father and mother, talking in tense tones after they thought he was in bed.
I kill myself to keep this family solvent. I worked for that money. And you gambled it away.
She didn’t mean literally. Trey’s father wasn’t the casino or cards kind of gambler. He loved schemes. And he believed in them. He was sure he’d find one that would change everything for them.
What had struck Trey that night was not his mother’s words to his father. It was that his mother was crying as she spoke. His father had made his mother cry.
He’d vowed at that moment, he would never be like his father. Weak, impulsive, so unwilling to work hard that he’d rather grasp at a thread that could pull everything down like a house of cards. He’d never be the kind of man who would make a woman suffer because of what he couldn’t give her.
“I’m happy for you if you can believe that,” he told Deja, “but in my experience, love doesn’t conquer anything. Unless by ‘conquer’ you mean ‘destroy.’”
“Do you really think that?”
It wasn’t Deja’s voice, but Auburn’s, at his shoulder. Her gaze searched his face, avid and curious. It made him feel like she could see right through him.
And the worst part was, he had no idea what she would see if she could.
He owned the fucking inn. It was his to do whatever he wanted with. In a few days, it wouldn’t matter what she thought of him or what she saw when she looked into his eyes.
So why, for the first time in a lifetime of doing business, did he feel like he was operating at a disadvantage?
Like he was weak and impulsive and on the verge of doing something he’d regret?
He set his half-drunk glass of milk down on the coffee table. His second cookie, too.
“I’ve got some emails I have to answer,” he said. “You can check teatime off the list.”
Deja was still looking at him. Hard.
“You go do that, then,” she said. “We’ll all still be here, enjoying each other’s company, believing what we believe. Devouring what we wish to devour. Speaking of which, if you’re not going to eat that other cookie, hand it over. Someone needs to teach you to quit wasting food.”
17
Auburn pounded on the door to the guest house.
“What?”
“You missed breakfast, and you’re supposed to be biking on the beach with me right now. Technically, you’re in violation of our agreement.”
She was sure his absence had something to do with the unusually personal conversation she’d overheard between Trey and Deja. The one that had ended with him declaring that love destroyed things. Auburn had tried to get Deja to tell her what had led to Trey’s dark utterance, but Deja had just shrugged. “All I said was that romance writers believed that love conquered all. And he went off.”
Auburn suspected that there was more to Deja’s story than she’d told, but she hadn’t been able to pry any more information out of her.
She also hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Trey since last night. She’d lain in bed and wondered at the vehemence in his voice and what had brought it about. She had all these pieces of him, like a puzzle, but they didn’t quite fit together. Something was missing. And she wanted to understand what it was.
Love doesn’t conquer anything. Unless by ‘conquer’ you mean ‘destroy.’
Those were big words.
“I have a work emergency I need to take care of.” Trey’s voice came from a distance.
“Can you come to the door so I can stop shouting at you through it?”
She waited long enough that she wasn’t sure he would, and then he did, opening it barely enough for them to converse through the gap, like he was trying to keep something out. Her. And he wouldn’t quite look at her, either. “Look. I have things I need to take care of. I need to take a rain check.”
“We have a deal. You promised me a week.”
“Yeah, well, I’m unpromising.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying not to lose her temper with him. She opened them and said, “If you don’t want to do the deal, that’s fine, but I’m not going to just give up on Beachcrest. If you can’t go through with this, we can do it the hard way, with a partition action. And maybe I’ll lose, but maybe I won’t. Carl has a good claim on sweat equity in the property. He might convince a court to sell it to me. You and I both know if you didn’t think that was a possibility, you wouldn’t have signed that contract with me.”
“That contract would never hold up legally.”
“That’s not the point, Trey. If you don’t honor your deal with me, this whole thing is going to be out of both of our hands. And I don’t think either of us wants that.”
She was pleased to hear her voice come out strong and sure—far surer than she felt.
He paced away from the door, to the other side of the room. Back again. His expression was dark. He reached up, pressed a hand against the wall over his head. Leaned in and sighed heavily. “Okay,” he said, finally. “Give me a minute.”
She eyed him. “You can’t go dressed like that.”
He was wearing brown linen dress slacks and a cream button-down, both gorgeous specimens that clung to his muscular body like a second skin. She knew the fabric would be soft to the touch, and the urge to reach out and test that theory made her fingers itch.
Quit it, she admonished herself. This is enough of a mess without you bringing sex into it.
“I’ll change into jeans.”
His expression was bland, almost blank, the same cool, impersonal gaze he’d leveled at her in Carl’s hospital room, in the dining room at Beachcrest when he’d tried to buy her off, and when she’d presented him with her deal. Like she was just a minor irritation. Gone was any hint of the warmth he’d shown her yesterday, or the teasing.
Something had sent him back into his shell.
Well, fuck it, she’d drawn him out once, and she’d do it again.
“You can’t wear pants for beach biking,” she said levelly. “You’ll roast. You need shorts or swim trunks, and sandals would be good.”
“I don’t have those.”
“You’re at the beach with no shorts or swim trunks.”
“I’m only nominally at the beach.”
“Have you even been down on the beach at all yet?”
He shook his head.
She sighed. “I’ll ask Levi if you can borrow some of his beach clothes.”
He shook his head. “No way. I’m not wearing some other guy’s swim trunks or sweaty sandals.”
She looked him over. Just thinking about riding a bike in pants made her uncomfortable—let alone with the sun blazing down on them. “We’re going shopping, then.”
“Where?” His eyebrows drew together, suspicious.
“Let me worry about that.”
“In town? Because there aren’t any real stores in town.”
She rolled her eyes. “Deal with it.”
“You’re going to make me go to one of those tourist traps, aren’t you?”
She raised her eyebrows. “You’d hate that, huh?”
He nodded.
“Then, yes, definitely.”
The corner of his mouth lifted, almost imperceptibly. Was that an actual smile? Yes. It was barely detectable, but she didn’t need to be able to see it to confirm it, because she could feel it in her chest. She’d made Trey Xavier smile.
He could retreat into his turtle shell, but she’d lure him out again. For Beachcrest.
And for her. Because the mystery of him reached out to something inside her. Because she’d seen those hints of warmth—of softness—and goddammit, she wanted to pull him apart like a warm chocolate croissant and lick out the “gooeyness” inside.
Not literally, of course. There could be no licking.
She tried to imagine what he’d have to say if she shared that metaphor with him and had to cough ba
ck a laugh.
“What?” he demanded.
“Just—finish up and get your butt out here. We have real work to do.”
18
“No,” he said, hanging back on the sidewalk as she stepped forward, toward a shop called Sea Stuff. “I can’t shop in there.”
The two large storefront windows brimmed with beach clichés—pastel colored women’s coverups, pillows that said “Everything’s Better At The Beach,” a frisbee with a sand dollar on it, a rainbow kite, a folding shovel with an octopus decal. An assortment of cheap jewelry bearing sea star charms and exhortations to “Love” or “Breathe.”
“You can, and you are.”
“No. It’s a tourist trap. No, worse: It’s the tourist trap that all tourist traps were made in the image of.” He actually found himself stepping back, a dramatic retreat, and realized: He was doing it to try to make her laugh. Damn it. He had to quit that.
After his conversation with Deja yesterday afternoon at tea, he’d nearly bailed out of the whole deal. Before he did something he’d regret. For example, kiss her.
Although he knew that wouldn’t be the worst thing he could do. The worst thing would be to like her. Generally speaking, Trey went out of his way not to have feelings—even mild ones—for people he did business with—particularly if those people’s interests were not aligned with his.
If he liked Auburn Campbell, it would be that much harder to do what he knew he had to do.
Deja had seen him looking at Auburn and had recognized what he’d been trying to deny since that first night in Bob’s Tavern, that despite the mess on the table between him and Auburn, he couldn’t look away. Because she was pretty, yes, sexy, hell yes, spunky, feisty, spirited, yes, yes, and God, yes. But the thing he liked most about her was how she saw the upside of everything. Goodness in everyone. Beauty in the things that were shabby, broken, or ugly. Fun in little bits of nothing. Which made no sense, because he had no patience with that kind of sentimentality. None.
And in this case, he could absolutely not afford it.
“You don’t need designer clothes to bike on the beach,” she said, and before he could argue, she swung the door open and marched in.
Mouth open, he followed her.
She led him toward the back of the shop, where she began pulling things off racks and piling them into his arms. “Go. Try those on.”
“Are you always this bossy?”
She made a face at him. “Only when a rich, out-of-town asshole shows up and threatens to tear down my inn.”
He squelched a smile. “Not your inn. My inn.”
She scowled and gave him a little shove toward the dressing room. “Shut up and get naked.”
His eyes found hers, but her expression gave nothing away, which made it ten thousand times more annoying that his body had reacted so instantly, a hum of blood southward. Or was it their back-and-forth a moment earlier that had done it? The stakes were way too high for any of this to be a game, and yet, she made him feel like it was.
Another thing he didn’t want to like about her.
Inside the fitting room, he examined what she’d picked out for him. A long-sleeved SPF surf shirt that said Tierney Bay and a cheap pair of Hawaiian print board shorts. Canvas-strap flip flops. Jesus. Talk about ruining someone’s life. But he obediently put them on and checked himself out in the mirror. He didn’t look anything like himself. His hair was even standing on end from the clothing change. He looked—
Well, he looked like a beach rat. A surfer dude, minus the bleached long hair. And the tan. But even that—he’d somehow picked up some color the last couple of days, maybe when he’d taken his laptop out on the porch yesterday afternoon.
He tried to think whether there was anyone else on earth that he’d ever allowed to dictate his wardrobe choices. Dress him.
No. Definitely not. He’d even quit letting his mother shop for him before he was twelve.
And yet he’d given Auburn the privilege, and he didn’t even resent it all that much.
He stepped out. She was standing there, leaning against a column. She was wearing a floaty white shirt that was mostly sheer. He could see through it to her bright red lace bra and her creamy curves. He could see the outline of her navel in the sweet curve of her belly. His eyes traced that soft slope down under the waistband of her skirt.
His hands wanted to follow the path his eyes had taken, dip into her—probably red lace—panties, and wrestle control from her. Preferably by making her lose it completely.
“Well, look at you,” she said. “You look almost like you know how to relax and cut loose.”
Her gaze traveled unabashedly over his bare feet, up his bare calves—leaving a wake of heat—and up. It traversed his abdomen and fanned out over the span of his shoulders. He could feel the approving perusal like a touch. And his body, Judas that it was, leapt accordingly.
Her attention snagged on the action in the unforgiving board shorts and came up to meet his eyes, sharp and interested. The heat and tension built between them until he could feel the blood moving everywhere. High in his cheeks, fast in his chest, hard and hot where it counted.
She wants what I want.
“Auburn—”
“Finding everything okay?” a voice asked from behind him.
“Yes—” he said, his attention flicking away from Auburn for just a split second, but it was long enough. When he looked back, her face was carefully blank again. Wiped of everything that had been there a moment before.
“Get changed,” she said, not looking at him. “And then we can fight over who’s going to pay for your new outfit.”
Even as flustered as he felt, that made him smile.
19
Auburn unlocked the shed and they dragged the recumbent bikes and a pair of helmets out and hauled them down to the beach.
It was the perfect early summer day—warmer than average for the beginning of July, with the sun sparkling off the water and turning it the same blue as the sky. The sand was burnished white-gold all the way down to the tide line. They tugged the bikes to the packed wet sand near the water.
“So? What do I do?”
“You sit. And put your feet on the pedals, and your hands on the handlebars.” She indicated the two short poles sticking out on either side of the seat. “These are how you steer.”
He eyed them suspiciously, and she grinned.
He tried to sit in the bike’s slung canvas seat and promptly tipped over and deposited himself in the sand.
He laughed.
Like, actually laughed.
Rich and deep and genuinely amused. And oh, fuck, she liked it way, way too much. She’d thought she was a sucker for the all-business version of Trey Xavier, but it was nothing compared to how much she liked the rumpled beach-ready version.
“This is a plot to take me down a notch, huh?” he asked, turning his smile on her and taking years off her life.
He hauled his ass out of the sand, brushed himself off, gave her a bemused look, and tried again, managing it better the second time. He pedaled around, gingerly at first, then gaining both speed and confidence.
“See that?” She indicated the monolith in the distance. “Breaker Rock. That’s where we’re headed.”
They set out side by side. It had been a while since she’d taken the bikes out, and she’d forgotten how much work it was. But fun too. He was faster than she was—which made perfect sense because his body was a finely tuned machine. His new trunks had ridden up a little, and she had a full-on view of his thighs, bulging with muscle, dusted with dark gold curls. Nghngh.
She was still unsettled by their exchange in Sea Stuff. It had taken almost the whole walk back from town for the pulse between her legs to quiet. For her nipples to soften so they weren’t so sensitive against the lacy cup of her bra. And for her brain to start working again. Slowly, but surely.
Nothing had happened. But she wasn’t sure what would have transpired if the salesclerk hadn’t sho
wn up at that exact moment. There had been something in the way Trey had said her name, to say nothing of the obvious evidence of his interest …
And it hadn’t been one-sided. She’d felt the tension drawing tight between them as they’d tussled verbally, and she’d stepped over the line first. Even if she’d regretted her words—“shut up and get naked”—a second after they’d popped out.
She had to be more careful. She wasn’t one of those people who could get physical with someone and not have it mess with her emotions, and she wasn’t one of those people who could ignore her emotions and make antiseptic, logical decisions.
Ergo, there could be nothing physical between her and Trey. She could never close the circuit, connect those two sparking wires, feel his power jump the gap into her body.
Nope.
He struck out ahead of her, then came back, once, then twice, the third time riding around her in a circle. “I’m your satellite!” he called.
His playfulness tugged in her chest. This—this was exactly what her plan depended on. But more than that, it satisfied the part of her that loved Beachcrest. The part that loved cooking for people, taking care of them, and watching them bloom and relax under the vastness of the ocean sky.
She hadn’t fully realized it, but she’d wanted this. To see him shed the seriousness. Trey playful was something else.
Abruptly she stopped the bike. “This is beach magic.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
She threw her arms out. “How big it feels. How airy. Like it can swallow everything. You could take everything in the world seriously, but not out here.”
She thought he’d fight her—if only on principle—but he just looked thoughtful.
“I did this once before.”
“Rode beach bikes?” she asked.
“Yeah. When I was visiting Beachcrest as a kid.”
Her mouth opened. But of course he’d been here as a kid. Why hadn’t she assumed he had? “You stayed at Beachcrest?”
“A few times, a few summers, when my mom was still alive.”
