by Serena Bell
“Did you like it?”
He nodded. He’d closed his eyes—remembering, she thought.
She stayed quiet, although she was desperate to ask questions. She knew if she pried, he’d clam up.
Then he opened his eyes, and there was a whole world in them.
“I got to leave everything behind. All the bullshit. And I hero-worshipped Carl then. My own dad was—”
He stopped.
“Your dad was—” she prompted.
His gaze flicked, startled, to hers. “You really want to know?”
It felt like the safe answer was probably no. But the real answer was yes, and she couldn’t bring herself, with the sea and sky all around them, wide open, to be less than honest.
“Yeah. I really want to know.”
He looked out at the ocean. Seemed to weigh a whole world of possibilities. Then took a deep breath.
“He was a drunk, and not a nice one. He never hit, but he yelled. And he flailed—broke shit, ruined shit. Couldn’t hold a job. Then he’d get into these risky schemes to try to make the money he couldn’t make nine-to-five. But my granddad … Carl … ran his own business. He bought and sold other real estate; he had this aura of being in control. He talked about what it took to run a business. You had to be gutsy and confident and cool under pressure. You had to be able to negotiate for prices and deals. You had to be careful about cash flow and you had to know the difference between earnings and profits. Hell, he taught me double-entry bookkeeping.
“So we’d come out here with both my parents and my dad would sit on the beach and drink beer and my mom would nap in the room. Brynn would read. And from the time I was little, I’d follow Carl around everywhere. He helped me set up my first business.”
“He told me that,” she said. “A lemonade stand?”
He nodded. “There were a few small ones like that—lemonade, dog-walking, leaf-raking, and then I started my yard care business—and I told you the rest. But Carl was always there to help. I didn’t see him a lot, but I always knew I could call him, if I had questions.”
“What happened?”
He looked at her blankly.
“With Carl,” she prompted. “You guys were so close back then. And he taught you all this stuff. You said you hero-worshipped him. But not anymore, huh?”
“I grew up,” Trey said, and turned away from her.
She thought he was done talking. She almost started pedaling again. But then he turned back.
“I don’t know if you knew this, but when he almost lost Beachcrest, that wasn’t the first time his investments had blown up in his face. It happened when I was a kid, too. I didn’t realize it till I was a teenager, but despite all his big talk about what it meant to be a businessman, and all the money he moved around, there was never any to spare. When I confronted him about it—years after the first time he lost big—he swore he’d learned to be more conservative. And I think for years he was … but then he almost lost the inn.”
There was frustration on his face, but also—hurt.
She drew a deep breath. “He disappointed you.”
Trey closed his eyes. “I thought he was so different from my dad, but he wasn’t. He was just like him.”
“You’re being way too hard on him,” she said. “He’s a good man.”
Anger flashed in his eyes. “You don’t know anything about it.”
Abruptly, he started again, cycling way out ahead of her toward Breaker Rock. She followed, not quite ready to catch up. There were so many questions swirling in her mind. She knew there was still more to the puzzle. She could feel it.
They rode out until they were directly across from the rock, then came to a stop next to each other, facing the sea. The rock was hundreds of feet tall, jutting straight up out of the ocean, covered with seaweed and barnacles, circled by gulls and dotted with puffins. They stopped and Auburn offered Trey a drink from her water bottle and a chocolate chip cookie. His face was calm again, any trace of anger gone.
He took a big bite. “You know that scene in the Matrix where he eats the chocolate chip cookie?”
She smiled. “Yeah.”
“Is this like that? You’re the oracle? And you foretell my future?” The wind ruffled his hair and blew his t-shirt against his chest.
She shook her head. “It’s not that kind of magic,” she said, echoing her words of the other day.
He took another bite and looked out to the horizon. It was blue as far as he could see. Good weather ahead.
He drew a deep breath.
“When we came here, Brynn and I would play on the beach. Even though at home she barely gave me the time of day because she was off with her friends. But here we’d play for hours. And I’d —”
He ducked his head.
“I remember thinking the beach could soak everything up. My dad’s crap and my mom’s unhappiness. All Brynn’s troublemaking. And my own—whatever. Everything.”
When he looked up at her again, his eyes were full of emotion. More than she’d ever seen there. She understood. For whatever reason—maybe even he didn’t understand why—he was giving her this.
“Beach magic,” she murmured.
He nodded. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Your parents. Your childhood.”
“My childhood was the beach,” she said. “My parents owned Cape House. I thought everyone lived like I did, able to run out onto the beach any time they wanted. It was a big shock to me in college, the first time I met someone who’d never seen the ocean. I didn’t even want to believe that was a thing. It was like meeting someone who’d never seen the sun.”
“I never thought of that. What it would be like to grow up with that being your every day.”
“It was pretty idyllic. But my parents died when I was sixteen.”
He froze, the way people so often did when she dropped that bomb. It was part of why she so rarely brought it up. Because you couldn’t just let it slide into a conversation and not have that conversation be instantly transformed.
“They were killed in a boating accident.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Thanks. Levi—my oldest brother—inherited the hotel. And us. Chiara and I were old enough to basically take care of ourselves, but he had to try to be a dad to Mason—who was a tough teenager—and Hannah, who was six. She was an oops baby when we were all already almost out of elementary school. So, yeah. Everything changed then.”
He watched her with an indecipherable look on his face.
“It was a long time ago,” she said. Sometimes you had to say that to get people to stop looking at you like you were a piece of glass that was about to shatter. But Trey’s expression, the intensity of his gaze, didn’t soften.
The sun disappeared for an instant behind a cloud that hadn’t existed a minute ago. She shivered, suddenly, the sweat now drying on her skin.
“You’re freezing.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted.
His gaze fell to her arms, which were covered all over with goosebumps, the downy hairs standing on end.
With a single, smooth move, he reached behind him and tugged his long-sleeved t-shirt over his head and handed it her. “Here. Put this on.”
She was cold enough to reach for it, which was a mistake. When she had it in her hands, she could feel its warmth and softness and she could smell him on it, musky and overwhelmingly male. She sat there, shirt in hands, teetering on the recumbent bike seat, teetering in all sorts of ways. The wind had made his hair all windswept, and he looked like a beach rat instead of a billionaire—in the best possible way. His skin was golden, his pecs taut with muscle and dusted with darker-gold hair. A trail of that hair arrowed down and slipped beneath his waistband.
Her gaze snapped back to his face.
He was watching her, and she couldn’t read the expression in his eyes.
“We should head back,” she said abruptly, pushing the shirt into his hand
s. “I’ll warm up as soon as we’re moving again.”
She turned the bike—almost dumping herself in the sand—and pedaled back toward Beachcrest, leaving him in the dust this time.
20
“I still don’t understand why you think bringing me to a street dance is going to help your case,” Trey said. “I don’t like crowds, parties, food carts, or loud music. And I don’t dance.”
“You also don’t like biscuits, bacon, afternoon tea, tourist traps, beach clothes, bike rides, or me.”
“I don’t like tourist traps,” he said. “Or you,” he added, mostly because he wanted to see what would happen.
“You’re no prize yourself, Xavier,” she said, right back at him. It edged up his heart rate. Because he didn’t mean it, so maybe she didn’t mean it either.
Not that it would do him any good. God damn it, he needed to stop wanting things that were not going to happen. Like whatever hadn’t happened in the dressing room this morning. And that other thing, that hadn’t happened on the beach. The world was full of things he was not going to do to Auburn Campbell, kisses he would not give her, places on her body he would never put his tongue, and surfaces he would never lay her down on. It was getting harder and harder—pun very much intended—to remember what was on the line. His business, his financial future, his reputation, and a hundred and fifty or so jobs.
“Okay,” he said. “Some of those things are okay. Parties, food carts, and music are negotiable. But I don’t dance.”
“I would have been shocked to discover that you did,” she said dryly.
They were waiting in line for pulled pork sandwiches, surrounded by the hubbub of people enjoying themselves. And he could tell Auburn was enjoying herself, too. She was wearing another little sundress—it just brushed the midpoint of the back of her thighs, which were paler than the rest of her body. He wanted to lick a line from the back of her knee to—
“I’ll make you a deal,” Auburn said. They were nearing the front of the line. “You get the mac and cheese and cornbread, I’ll get the corn on the cob and cole slaw. And then we can share. You don’t want to miss any of them. I swear.”
He squinted at her. “There are a lot of carbs in that meal.”
“I know,” she said, grinning. “I’m super excited about them.”
When they reached the front of the line, he dutifully ordered what she’d instructed. He pulled out his wallet and waved hers away. “It’s on me,” he said dryly, which made her laugh, remembering the first night at Bob’s.
“Actually, it is,” she said, and she took a napkin and swiped at the barbeque sauce that he’d managed to get on his shirt.
He eyed the stain. “Damn.”
“Amateur. Follow me.”
She led him to the rickety folding tables covered with plastic checkered tablecloths, and they set down their cardboard trays. It was six p.m., but the sun still beat down. In Tierney Bay, as in most of the Pacific Northwest, 4th of July weekend was when summer started—and two bottles of cold beer sweated between them.
“Carbs,” he said, pointing to the beers.
“Yup.” She pulled her hat brim down and pushed her sunglasses up her nose. There were a few pale freckles on it. He’d swear they’d come out today during the bike ride. Also, the skin under the freckles—and across her cheeks—was pink.
He reached out and brushed a finger across the sunburn, and she flinched.
“Sorry,” he said quickly, although he wasn’t, because now he knew what her skin felt like—softer than his favorite silk boxers. “You just—you got some sun. Looks like it might hurt later. Didn’t anyone ever tell you to wear sunscreen on the beach?”
She smiled. “Might have heard that a time or two. Following orders isn’t exactly my strong suit.”
He smirked. “No. And that’s an understatement.” He bit into his sandwich, tender pork slathered in Carolina barbecue sauce and topped with cole slaw. The perfect combo, the cool mayo soothing the slight spicy heat of the sauce, the bun tender and eggy. He’d just plain old forgotten how good food that was bad for you could be. “Oh my God.”
“Still not your scene?”
He rolled his eyes at her and dug into the mac and cheese. Holy crap. Soft and creamy and just the perfect amount of breadcrumbs—
“Hey! Leave some of that for me!” She stabbed her fork in and pushed his away. They fork-fenced over the remaining elbow noodles.
He yielded the last bite and she slid it voluptuously off her fork. He didn’t think she was doing it on purpose, it was just the way she was about food, all in. That said, he was feeling a little jealous of that fork, which was getting the full-on treatment.
“How old were you when you started working for Carl?” he asked her, to stop himself from thinking about how her mouth would feel on him.
“Fifteen,” she said. “I worked for him every summer in high school and college, and then took a permanent job with him after college. Until I went to New York.”
She stopped.
“Patrick.”
“Yeah.”
“So—you were in New York—how long?”
“Two years.”
“That’s a long time. As long as I was married.”
“You were married?”
“Yeah. Couple of years. She left. Said I was a workaholic.”
That wasn’t exactly what she’d said, but it captured the spirit well enough. Abruptly, he got up. “Let’s walk.”
They tossed their garbage and strolled together up and down the street for a bit, scoping the scene.
The street dance shut down Tierney Bay’s main drag all the way from one end of the retail zone to the other. Booths selling all kinds of food and drink—as well as arts and crafts—lined the sides. Kids blew bubbles, drew with chalk, and messed with silly string. If you walked half a block in either direction the music changed as you passed each small makeshift bandstand—bluegrass, Zydeco, country, garage rock.
It was pretty fucking charming, actually.
What happened if she succeeded? If she made him fall in love with Beachcrest?
He wasn’t going to think about that.
The band whose zone they’d just stepped into was playing “Seven Nights to Rock.”
“I love rockabilly,” Auburn said, and started dancing.
And oh, fuck, she looked good. The shimmy of her breasts, the wiggle of her hips. He wanted to put his hands on all of her at once. Which was—
Well, there was one permissible reason to do so.
He pulled her into a dance frame—ignoring her startled look—and edged her into a passable West coast swing, dredging the moves up from the depths of his soul.
“You do dance! You were holding out on me!” she said as they swiveled in and out and he spun her away into a turn, caught her at the apogee, and tugged her back.
She felt amazing in his arms, her smaller hand in his, his face tucked down near her ear, his lips against the soft satin of her hair. She smelled unbelievably good. Strawberry shampoo and a vanilla-and-cinnamon scent that he was pretty sure was her.
“I said I don’t dance, not that I can’t.” He slid her down his leg, which made her giggle. When he drew her back up and turned her toward him—their faces so close he could smell the bright malt of beer on her breath, he said, “I learned for my wedding, but this is the first time it’s ever been my choice.”
Startled, she looked up at him. Her eyes were bright, her lips parted—soft and red. She licked them and he heard his breath huff out of him, but somehow, some-freaking-how, he managed not to kiss her. It felt like the world would probably end if he did, and also if he didn’t. So for now he’d take what he had, which was the softness of her curves in his arms.
“Trey—” She bit her lip, and his cock, just an inch from her thigh, twitched.
“Just—don’t,” he said. “If either of us talks, we’ll probably say something we’ll regret, don’t you think? And I’m enjoying this way too much for that.”
She opened her mouth again, then closed it. For a long moment, he was sure she was going to shut them down—and she’d be more than right to. Then she took a breath. “Do that thing again. With the—” She gestured as best she could with him still holding her hand.
He let his own held breath out in a rush. “This one?”
He swung her out so they looked at each other down the length of both arms. Her smile was gone, and she was looking at him like—
Like she didn’t hate him.
Like she really didn’t fucking hate him.
He hadn’t thought he liked dancing. He hadn’t been bullshitting her. But apparently he just hadn’t tried it with the right person. Because this? This slow fucking burn? It was better than most actual sex he’d had.
Which didn’t stop him from wishing he’d met Auburn under any other circumstances. And it sure as fuck didn’t stop him from wanting more.
21
It was the perfect night for a beach fire—clear and warm, with a little breeze.
She’d built the fire an hour ago and tended it ever since, and her guests had gradually come down to join her, sitting on log benches to form a cozy circle around the burning driftwood.
The fire had formed coals now, and she brought out the hotdogs and passed around the long metal forks with wooden handles.
Normally, there was no happier place for her than sitting by a beach fire, but tonight, she could barely sit still. She was so full of feelings, she couldn’t even tease them apart and name them.
She’d driven Carl home from the hospital earlier today—Brynn had been tied up with kid activities—and was thrilled to see that he’d seemed almost like his old self. He’d been so glad to see Beachcrest that his eyes had glistened with tears, which had made her weepy, too.
He’d wanted an update, of course, on the situation.
Well? he’d demanded. Did he come around yet?
No, not yet, but…
But you’re doing a beach fire tonight, right? And tomorrow is the 4th. And no one does the 4th better than Beachcrest. He has to admit that.
