“Well, it turns out the kitchen wasn’t quite as stocked as I wanted it to be,” he said ruefully. “I guess the person I had organizing this particular trip wasn’t as up to the task as I’m used to.”
I took the sideways compliment and gave him a matching sideways glance, acknowledging what he’d just done there. “Oh, you mean your other assistant—who I assume planned this trip for you—didn’t do as complete a job as I would have? Maybe that’s because they’re not as good as me. There’s a reason they pay me the big bucks. Or at least, there’s a reason they should pay me the big bucks.”
Because we both knew that he didn’t pay me nearly what I was worth. Yet another reason to move to a new country—and a new employer—I told myself firmly.
It was certainly an easier reason to give than the real one. The one that had to do with me spending the last five years lusting after my boss—and then finally sleeping with him, only to be told I wasn’t worth the time it took to consider making it a real relationship.
And that thought was completely uninvited right now. I was stuck in this house with this man for who knew how long. I wanted to at least try to get along. And thinking about what he’d done wasn’t going to help me do that.
“So,” I said, returning the subject at hand. “Dinner?”
“Ah,” he said. He’d turned and was stirring something, but now switched back to looking at me. “Like I was saying, I’m afraid it’s not as original or exciting as I wanted it to be. Not that I was planning this or anything. I mean, why would I be? That would be… presumptive.”
He finished the statement on such a humble, almost apologetic note that I laughed.
“I don’t think I would give you a hard time if you’d planned to come here and cook me dinner, actually,” I noted. “I’m not that good at cooking myself, so I rarely complain if someone else wants to do it.”
“You can’t cook?” he asked, like this was the most surprising news in the entire world.
“I’m not good at it,” I clarified. “Baking, I can do. But one cannot live on cookies and cake alone. Even if one adds pies to include fruit in one’s diet.”
“Well,” he said thoughtfully. “One can. But one might find oneself slightly less healthy for the experience.”
And that was the start of it. He’d cooked spaghetti with chicken meatballs, as it turned out, along with a loaf of French bread—which he had evidently baked himself, despite the pantry supposedly not being stocked—and there was plenty of green salad and even more wine, plus broccoli, which he actually mixed into the spaghetti sauce, saying that it was always better if there was something green included in the red.
“I never realized that you had to think so much about colors while you were cooking,” I said, taking a bite of the meal—which was insanely delicious. Rich and filled with spices, and perfectly complemented by the combination of thick tomato sauce, cheese, and broccoli. “And by the way, this is amazing.”
He pointed his fork at me in a ‘gotcha’ gesture. “That’s because I think about the color combinations,” he said. “Red: diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, tomato paste. Green: oregano, parsley, and of course the broccoli, plus the chopped basil and rosemary in the meatballs. Brown: a scoop of bouillon and the meatballs themselves, though I have to admit that using chicken instead of beef makes the brown coloration kind of iffy. White: parmesan cheese and the garlic. Put them all together, and…”
I tipped my head. “But are those all the colors you need, really? I mean, what about orange and yellow?”
“Lemon zest, to start with, which I forgot to add to my list. And for the orange, bell peppers,” he said easily. “Better for you, really, since that means even more vegetables. But they didn’t have any available.”
“Purple?”
“Red onions. Obviously.”
I pressed my lips together, thinking about this new set of rules that I assumed Damon was actually just making up. Sure, he’d gotten lucky so far. All of those things did go with spaghetti. But what about…
“Blue,” I said, positive that I’d caught him. Positive that I’d found the one color he couldn’t actually use.
He groaned in pleasure. “Really? You’re just throwing me softballs now. Blue cheese rather than parmesan. That sharp tang on top of the spaghetti sauce? That extra kick?” He chef’s-kissed his fingers and and then grinned at me. “You’re not going to beat me at this game. I’ve thought a lot about this particular subject.”
“So I see,” I said, already knowing that I was going to beat him at that game—or at least learn how to play it better than he did. I couldn’t help it. I’d always been competitive. And combining competition with food?
I mean… was there anything better?
* * *
After we finished dinner—and our first bottle of wine—we moved into the living room, still talking about whether blue cheese actually counted as a blue food when it was obviously more green than blue.
Once we got into the living room, though, we realized that we were…
“Trapped together,” I said dramatically. “In this bungalow on the beach. No cable. No computers. No internet.”
“But,” Damon said, throwing open the cupboard under the TV. “Plenty of board games. I checked.”
I squinted at him, wondering if the wine had already gone to my head. “Is that part of your standard once-over when you get a new hotel room? Must Have Board Games?”
He snickered. “It is when I’ve just found out that we’re going to be stuck in said hotel room for an indefinite period of time without internet,” he replied. “I found them not long after you stormed out of the place, to later try to drown yourself in the ocean.”
I dropped onto the couch, thankful for the slight wine buzz, because it made what I was about to say a whole lot more… say-able.
“Have I thanked you yet for saving my life?”
I swear, my words were only a little slurred from the wine. My thought process only a little bit slowed by the amount I’d had to drink.
Though, I had to admit that the drinking was probably the only reason I was feeling brave enough to sit here with him, and even thank him. Or rather… it was the only thing that allowed me to drop my pride for long enough to realize that I needed to.
Before, when I was sober, I’d only seen how embarrassed I was to have been in a position where I required saving. Now I could see that if he hadn’t been there, I would have lasted for about five more minutes, max. And… there was a lot to be said for him having been there to keep me from sinking down to join all the other things the sea kept in Davy Jones’ locker.
He set his wine down on the coffee table, slid a game onto the surface next to it, and sat next to me. “You have not,” he said quietly. “But it’s also not necessary. Any decent human being would have done the same thing.”
“You’d be surprised,” I replied, my voice somehow weaker than it had been. Softer. Nearly a whisper. “As someone who spends an awful lot of time on the beach, I’ve seen a lot of people not bother to lift a finger to save someone in trouble.”
He reached up and brushed a lock of hair off my cheek, his eyes darker than I’d ever seen them, his face losing its usual humor and turning incredibly serious. “Then I guess most people aren’t watching someone so important that they can’t imagine living without them drown,” he whispered. “I guess most people aren’t so horrified at the idea of losing that person that they’re willing to do anything they have to, if it means saving them.”
He could have been talking about anything. He could have been talking about needing me to continue on as his assistant, and how inconvenient it would be for him if I chose to drown instead, on an island far from home.
But I didn’t think he was. I sensed he was talking about something a whole lot more important—and a whole lot deeper.
Which was why I let go of the rest of my pride—courtesy of the wine, seriously—and leaned forward just a breath. Just to see if he would come the
rest of the way.
He did. And when his lips slid across mine with a butterfly’s touch, the world around me exploded in lights and colors. And I turned my brain off, allowing my body to rule for the night.
Chapter 17
Damon
The next week should have been frustrating, seeing as how we were not only stranded but also delaying a really, really important business deal. Anything could have been happening out in the wider world—with the governor of Saipan or my own company in Hawaii—and since we didn’t have any internet or phone coverage, I couldn’t get any updates on the situation, or any additional moves from Josh or his company.
So yeah, that part was really frustrating. I’d never been good at being kept in the dark. I wanted to be the one who was in control of every situation. I wanted to be the one who got to say yes or no, this or that, high or low. I wanted to be the one controlling the whole thing. Controlling my own destiny.
So sue me. I was head of my company, and I’d worked really hard to get there. What was more, I worked really hard to stay there—and do the things that would keep my company at the top of its game, and keep my employees safely employed. Which meant I had to be the person who could look at any situation and see the best path forward, the way that would make the most sense and the way that would take care of everyone.
So yeah, see what I said about liking it when I was the one in control.
But get locked into a situation where you have absolutely no control, and where you can’t change that, you get over the need for control really quick. If you don’t, you’ll drive yourself insane.
If, on the other hand, you just sort of accept it and find a way to distract yourself, you might find yourself discovering something you never even knew existed.
So there I was, locked in a situation where I had absolutely no control, and no way out. And when you’re stuck in a place like that with someone like Aubrey…
Well. Other things start to seem okay. Control starts to seem like a secondary—or even tertiary—concern. And you realize that maybe just spending time with someone important to you is enough.
In the end, the rest of that week was actually a dream. And it passed in a whir of color and activity.
The day after I cooked dinner for her, Aubrey woke up and declared that I’d gotten to choose what we did last night, and though it was a necessary thing—considering it included that whole eating situation—it also meant that she got to decide what we were doing today.
Which was how I found myself dressed in my bathing suit and floating on my back in a calm, protected cove on the beach, the sun shining down on us from above. I hadn’t, as Aubrey observed, spent nearly enough time taking advantage of the water in Hawaii.
“You live next to some of the most beautiful beaches in the entire world,” she lectured me. “And you almost never go in the water.”
Her hand popped up at my indication that I was about to answer her, and I shut my mouth again.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she said firmly. “I control your calendar, remember? I see what you do with all your time. And there is never a morning blocked out for going to the beach—or even surfing.”
She said this last sentence like it was the most horrible thing she’d ever heard, like I was breaking some sort of cardinal rule by daring to not surf, and I flipped off my back, which was starting to go tingly from having been in the water for so long, and started to tread water so I could actually look at her.
“You say that like not being a surfer makes me a bad person,” I noted, amused.
Aubrey, who hadn’t bothered to move off her back for this conversation, did a sort of floating shrug thing. “Not a bad person,” she said. “Just not a surfer.”
I considered this for a moment, wondering if ‘not a surfer’ was as detrimental as she made it sound, and then smiled to myself and went back to floating. If she thought that being a surfer made you a worthwhile human being…
No. I wasn’t even going to think about that, because it was actually ridiculous. I had never in my entire life wanted to learn how to surf, and I wasn’t going to do it just to impress some girl. Even if that girl was Aubrey. Who was suddenly feeling a whole lot more important to me than I’d ever thought anyone could be.
Yeah, I know how that sounds. But I’d spent a whole lot of my life working very hard not to let anyone get too close to me. I had too much else to worry about, and a girlfriend—or, God forbid, a wife—would take valuable time away from the company. I hadn’t had the best relationship with my parents, and God knew they hadn’t had the best relationship with each other, so a real relationship with another human being had always seemed… like more trouble than it was worth, to be honest.
That had certainly always been the case with my mom and dad, who, though they were living in one of the most romantic places on Earth, had barely managed to speak more than three sentences to each other every day. My mom had been a nice enough woman, and a good mom, but my dad hadn’t thought we were worth the time it took to be a dad—and had told me time and again that I would never amount to anything.
He’d left soon after I turned fourteen, and I’d never heard from him again. I knew he hadn’t bothered to get in touch with my mom—or give her anything that even remotely resembled child support. He hadn’t been there when I graduated from high school. Or college. He hadn’t been there when I started my company.
And honestly, that hadn’t bothered me much. Because I’d seen how he’d treated my mom and me. And I’d decided pretty early on that if that was what being in a relationship was like, then I was good, thanks. It wasn’t worth the trouble. Or the heartbreak.
So why on earth was I suddenly experiencing all these feelings about spending time with Aubrey?
I put the thought away and returned to the subject at hand, asking Aubrey about how she got into surfing, and before long I was hearing about the competitions she’d entered when she was younger and how she’d thought for a long time that she would grow up to be a professional surfer—until she realized that she wasn’t actually good enough at it to make a good living, and had chosen to grow up and get a real job instead.
That, evidently, was when she’d started working with me. And I knew what had happened since then. She got up at inhumanly early hours to get a surf session in before work and often got to the office still wet and smelling of the beach, her nose sunburned and her eyes dancing. This was the first time, though, that I’d heard about how surfing actually made her feel. And it sounded…
Heavenly. It sounded heavenly. The freedom she talked about, the adrenaline rush, the victory of catching that wave and riding it all the way to the shore…
“I have never wanted to surf before,” I told her honestly. “But you’re making me want to try it.”
I caught the grin out of the corner of my eye, and smiled myself at the way it lit up her face with victory. Like she’d been specifically waiting for me to want to surf. Like it was some sort of bet she’d actually made with herself.
Which was why, the next day, she started trying to teach me how to surf. I’d argued at first, saying she’d already gotten to decide on spending the day in the water, and now it was officially my turn. But I hadn’t gotten far with that—partially because she pointed out that it had been my idea in the first place.
It went about as well as you would expect—meaning it went completely terribly, with me falling again and again and again when I just couldn’t understand how you were supposed to stand up on what was essentially a piece of wood flying over the water, and coming up each time so waterlogged that I was starting to swear I was actually going to be peeing saltwater for the next month.
Instead of letting me give up, Aubrey was the soul of patience, actually taking us through five different surfboards in the space of the day as we searched for one that would ‘speak’ to me.
“We’re lucky they have a big selection in the storeroom,” she said as she pulled out what she called the longboard. “Ma
ybe this one will give you better control.”
But that one, in the end, was just as bad for me as the others.
After that, we switched to bodyboarding. And I was much better at riding the waves on my stomach than I was at doing it on my feet. Maybe because it was a whole lot harder to fall.
It also gave me a way better view of her smile as she guided her own board down the waves, her hands sure as they grasped the board, her body leaning this way and that. She made the whole thing look so effortless, so natural, that I started to wonder whether she was actually a mermaid, and simply masquerading as a human.
We spent the rest of the week doing everything I never had time for at home. We lazed on the beach. We went hiking in the mountains, packing picnics and eating in the middle of the jungle. We talked like we’d never talked before.
And at some point during the week, after a whole lot of wine and a very competitive game of Trivial Pursuit, she ended up in my bed, her skin hot as flames and her eyes filled with desire. And I’d made love to her. Which was something I knew I’d never said about anyone else ever before.
I made love to her. Because the woman was becoming something bigger in my life than I’d expected… and I was starting to think that holding her as close to my body as I could, and refusing to ever let her go, sounded like an awfully good idea.
I didn’t know how she felt about it. I didn’t know if she wanted anything like that. But if the way she stared up into my eyes was any indication, there was a pretty good chance that she felt the exact same way.
Chapter 18
Aubrey
When I woke up the next morning, hazy and lazy from the amount of wine I’d had the night before—and the epic make-out session that had happened immediately afterward, plus what had happened after that make-out session—I stretched in the bed, letting my muscles loosen up in the early morning light. I’d been surfing all of my life, so I knew how it felt to push my body to the limit, make it work until it didn’t have anything left to give, but the last week had been… different.
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