Harlequin E New Adult Romance Box Set Volume 1: Burning MoonGirls' Guide to Getting It TogetherRookie in Love

by Jo Watson

  I was stunned. At a loss for words. It felt like I’d had the wind knocked out of my sails. What could I say in response to that? He’d been so honest and open with me that I couldn’t imagine any reply in the world would do it justice. And in that moment, I felt so close to him.

  We sat in silence for a few moments again before I finally spoke. “My parents got divorced when I was very young and I lived with my mother. She’s a theater actress.” I rolled my eyes and saw Damian give a faint smile. “She’s an alcoholic and an addict, too, and we moved around constantly. I think we lived in about twenty different places in the space of four years. She didn’t even care if I went to school or not, all she cared about was getting drunk or high. She once disappeared for seven days when I was eight. My dad fought for custody for years, and every time it looked like he was going to win, she swore blindly she’d clean up, and the courts would give her another chance. She would be fine for a couple of months, but then something would happen and she’d drink or use again. But when I was twelve, she had a car accident with me in it. I broke my arm and my wrist. She was obviously drunk and that was the last straw, my dad got custody. But…”

  I felt sad just thinking about it. “Those first twelve years of my life were pretty tough and I was pretty messed up when I finally moved in with my dad. I guess that’s why my family is so protective over me.” I could feel the tears building, but I took a deep breath and fought them back down.

  And then I flinched as a tiny fish swam into my foot and past me. Soon, another fish went by and another and another until a small school of brightly colored fish swam between us. Damian put his hand into the water and we both watched as the tiny fish darted through his open fingers.

  “Try it!” But without waiting for a reply he took my hand and plunged it into the water next to his. I watched in wonder as the silver-and-blue fish weaved their way through our fingers. They tickled, and we both laughed out loud.

  “So, I guess we’re both damaged souls then, Lilly.” Damian looked at me and I could see that his mood had lifted, and so had mine.

  “I guess we are,” I said, as I watched the last of the fish disappear. I heard a loud swishing sound and turned to see that Damian was standing up out of the water.

  “How ‘bout we get out and find out where those hamburgers are?” he said, trying to shake some of the water off.

  “Sounds like a plan. I’m actually starved.”

  I’d just started getting up onto my knees when a hand reached down to help me up, and without thinking, I took it. In one swift movement Damian pulled me up out of the water and we came face-to-face. The two of us stood dead still, inches away from each other, holding hands, and for some bizarre reason I don’t understand, neither of us let go.

  We just stood there.

  Staring.

  Holding.

  I could hear him breathing.

  I could feel my heart beating in my ears.

  He smiled at me.

  I smiled at him.

  And then he reached up and touched my cheek. It was so gentle and soft, my whole body responded with a shiver. I felt his finger trace the surface of my cheek and then he held up a single eyelash in front of my face.

  He took a small step toward me, “Make a wish, Lilly.”

  And so I blew.

  And blew.

  But the lash clung on for dear life.

  And so I blew some more.

  Harder.

  Maybe a bit too hard.

  I winced, as I caught the glimmer of a tiny fleck of spittle tumbling through the air with a trajectory that put it on a collision course with his finger.

  But no matter how hard…

  Or how much….

  That lash wasn’t going anywhere.

  So much for my wish.

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe this!” I jumped up and flung my arms in the air.

  “What?” Damian was clearly taken aback by my sudden and rather dramatic outburst.

  “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream or shoot myself.”

  He looked puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing is going right, and I keep making a complete idiot of myself. And now I can’t even blow an eyelash off a finger, and…and…and…”

  Damian’s eyes followed me as I started to pace up and down the embankment waving my arms in the air like a rag doll in a tumble dryer. “This has got to be some kind of elaborate plot against me!”

  “Lilly…” His tone was soft and soothing, which made me want to slap him, “…that could’ve happened to anyone.”

  “Name one person that it’s happened to. One person.”

  Damian rubbed his forehead thoughtfully. “This girl at university once wore mismatching shoes to class,” he offered.

  I swung around and looked him directly in the eye. “That’s hardly the same. Besides, did her fiancé leave her at the altar the day before? No!”

  I kicked some sand into the water, hoping it would serve as a good exclamation point for the end of that sentence. “You know what these past few days have felt like? They’ve felt like someone, or something, has been conspiring against me, turning my whole life into some kind of sick cosmic, karmic joke. I’m almost expecting Ashton—whatever his name is—to rise up out of the water disguised as a merman and shout, ‘Surprise. You’ve been Punk’d’.” I kicked some more sand into the water, trying to make the mother of all exclamation marks. It was all very dramatic. But I didn’t care, because that eyelash was the straw that broke this camel’s back. It wasn’t about the lash. This was about the fact that I felt victimized by the world. That I felt like somewhere, out there, was a cinema full of people with popcorn and Coke laughing at me.

  I was angry, and kicking the sand into the water wasn’t generating the kind of punctuation marks that could vaguely emphasize my current state of distress; in fact, my toe was sore. I think I hit a shell or, knowing my luck, a giant, rusty metal anchor.

  “I guess I’m just tired of crappy stuff happening to me.” I walked over to the table, sat down and hoped that we were close enough to the Bermuda Triangle for it to magically suck me in.

  “Guess what my wish was?” I said.

  “What?”

  “That bad shit would stop happening to me.”

  Damian walked over to the table and sat down. He looked genuinely concerned.

  “I’ve been trying so hard not to think about it, but do you know what it felt like when he didn’t show up, in front of five-hundred guests?”

  “I can’t even imagine, Lilly.” Damian reached across the table, and for a moment I thought he was going to hold my hand, but at the last second he picked up the bottle of water and poured us both a glass.

  I mentally sighed; my life was a complete disaster zone.

  We sat there in silence, sipping our sparkling water and listening to the bubbles pop and fizz. For some reason I thought about my wedding invitations—I’d put so much effort into them. I’d spent hours at the paper shop choosing just the right color, texture and thickness. Hours spent with the designer finding the right layout and design elements to make it perfect. The invites were an off-white color—Romantic Eggshell Dream was the name of the paper. They were embossed in the corners with a delicate flower design and all handwritten in calligraphy—some old lady sat there for days doing them all—and then folded them in half and tied them together with pale lavender ribbons. What a waste!

  And then another thought hit me. This scandal was going to be spoken about by my family for the next millennium, at least. In fact, it would probably be passed down from generation to generation in the great oral tradition of storytelling. Some great, great niece of mine living in the year 2090, where robots feed you breakfast and everyone lives in hydroponic bubble suits, would still be telling the tale of poor aunt Lilly.

  I was grateful when a loud voice suddenly broke through my self-flagellating thoughts.

  “Your hamburgers,” said the man in the black suit w
ho seemed to have appeared out of nowhere and was very suddenly moving things around the table to make space for our food. He glanced at me with a displeased look, as he bent down and picked up all the candles and flowers that had fallen over. I mentally kicked him in the groin and smiled politely.

  I looked at my plate. My burger might as well have been hanging from the roof of the Sistine Chapel. It was a work of art and I almost felt bad for eating it…almost. But at this point, I was starved. I grabbed the burger, took an enormous bite and started wolfing it down. It dawned on me that I didn’t care that I probably looked like a hungry scavenger, frantically pecking on the last remains of a carcass. Because the one good thing about having your life declared as a disaster zone is that things that bothered you before seemed so insignificant now.

  Take eating in front of a guy, for example. Why is it that when a waiter arrives, whilst in the company of a male we’re trying to impress, we become panic-stricken possums, and in meek little voices say, “I’ll have the salad, please. No dressing, no croutons.” We have these strict woman rules about what to eat and what not to eat on a date—no spinach or any other kind of leafy green that clings to your teeth, no ribs or spaghetti and definitely no soup. So we order a plate of leaves and spend the night moving a lonely piece of lettuce around our plate, as if eating something with the calorific equivalent of air would impress him. And you know the hotter the guy, the less you’re gonna eat!

  But since I didn’t like Damian, and this was not a date and I definitely wasn’t attracted to him, I didn’t care if he looked at me like I was a yeti that had just emerged from hibernation and was eating the end off a low-flying cow. I continued to ravage the burger, and got so lost in the process that at some stage I caught myself making loud mmm sounds. I don’t think I looked up once, either. I was just so focused on the task of consuming as much fat as possible. I swallowed the last mouthful and finally looked up and straight into the face of a smiling Damian.

  “What?” I snapped at him, a fleck of something flying onto the table.

  “Have you ever considered a career as a professional eater?” he said, putting a chip into his mouth.

  Although I’d just claimed not to care, I was terribly offended by this suggestion, and he could see that.

  “I mean that in the nicest way possible,” he said, pointing to the corner of his mouth in a you’ve-got-something-on-your-face kind of gesture.

  I grabbed my napkin and rubbed my mouth, then looked at him for confirmation that it was gone. He shook his head and pointed to the other side and I repeated the process again, looking up for confirmation once more. But Damian shook his head again, took out his phone and took a photo of me. He turned it around so I could see.

  How I’d managed to get tomato ketchup on my forehead is beyond me.

  “Oops,” was all I could manage, but before I could do anything about the splotches of wayward sauce, Damian had leaned across the table and was wiping my face with his napkin. He had such a look of concentration on his face as he poured a little bit of water onto it and went to work on my forehead. Then my cheek, and then the corner of my mouth. My lips tingled as the cool fabric touched them. Suddenly all I could feel were my lips and all I could see was him.

  I pulled away quickly and sat back in my chair.

  “Thanks.”

  “Pleasure.”

  This whole situation was just so, so bizarre. Here I was, on my honeymoon, in the most romantic place in the world, with a stranger who had just been gently, and very familiarly, wiping my face clean with his napkin. Who the hell had seen this coming? Not even my mother’s psychic Esmeralda (real name Jane) had predicted this, not that I placed much confidence in her psychic abilities. But surely something this big would have come through somewhere, considering she “read me” the day before my wedding! My mother had insisted on it.

  When Michael and I had first gotten together, my mother was adamant that I get our cards read to make sure we were compatible. Of course I’d said no, but then she pulled one of her guilt trips.

  So half an hour later I’m sitting in Esmeralda’s “reading room,” a dark and grotty cottage at the back of her property. As you walked in, you were instantly deafened by the cacophony of wind chimes. Chimes made of shells, feathers, crystals and the skulls of little woodland creatures hung like bats from her roof. The next thing to assault your senses was the incense that practically choked you, followed by the near heart attack her pet monitor lizard, Sid, gave you as his scaly tail brushed past your ankle.

  And there she was, in full chiffon-draped glory, the star, Esmeralda, sitting at her little table covered in black velvet. And you know what it’s like—even if you don’t believe in the powers of the woman sitting across from you fingering a pack of dirty cards, you want to. My mother had obviously told her about Michael, and even though I knew that, I still soaked it all in.

  “I see a man. A blonde man.” She had a very fake mystical-sounding accent.

  Of course, your heart does cartwheels at this point.

  “Yes, I see him very clearly now.” She fanned her cards out and moved her fingers around in little circles. “I see your future with him. I see you walking down the aisle. I see he will be very rich one day and you will live in a big house.” I hung on her words like they were a magical rope that would pull me toward a happy future. “Yes, I see three children. I see blonde children with blue eyes, and one is a boy and the other two are girls. And you will be very happy and in love forever.”

  And of course you want to believe it all, and I did, right up until the second I held that note in my hand. Perhaps I’d wanted the fairy tale so badly that I’d missed something real?

  Chapter Seven

  The wind had picked up, creating little ripples on the water. I was still wet, and although the breeze was warm, I suddenly felt very cold. I folded my arms across my chest to shield myself from the intensifying wind.

  “Cold?” Damian asked.

  “Freezing.” I started to shiver.

  The man in the black suit returned to inform us that they were expecting a storm and we should get inside as soon as possible. I was surprised by how fast and furiously the storm escalated, beating the sky into a frenzy of raging wind and rolling black clouds. By the time we’d reached our room, the rain was pelting down, soaking our already-wet clothes and hair. We rushed inside and I watched Damian get pulled into a wrestling match with the wind, until he finally managed to slam the door shut.

  Thailand was a place of extremes—no doubt about it. Ten minutes ago we were enjoying a warm tropical evening, and now we were watching violent lighting severing a stormy sky. It was breathtaking.

  I shivered, colder now than I’d been before, and all I wanted to do was slip into a warm bath, but then I remembered that slightly inconvenient problem—the open-plan layout of the room. I walked over to the bath and Damian must have noticed.

  “I’m pretty sure I can resist the urge to look if you want to have a bath,” he said with that devilish, slightly skewed smile again. “In fact, I’d love to have one, too, so I’ll promise not to peep, if you promise not to peep?”

  “Why would I peep?” I felt a little uncomfortable with this conversation and its subject matter—casually devising a strategy to get naked together as if we were talking about something as simple as making a cup of coffee And then, because we were talking about it, I suddenly started to imagine Damian naked. I couldn’t help it, okay? It was human nature, or something. I banished the thought quickly, hoping that my shocked blush wasn’t as visible as it felt.

  I was in a predicament; I was desperate for a bath, but the idea of communal nudity in such close proximity made me feel terribly uncomfortable.

  “Um…” I scanned the room. “Okay, you have to sit on that couch over there with your back to me. And don’t you dare look, not like you did at the airport.”

  “Hey, that was an accident, I turned around at the wrong time, and it’s not like I stared.”

&n
bsp; “Well, let’s try and not have any accidents happen this time,” I said, turning on the taps.

  The bath was enormous, manufactured for optimal romance and relaxation, and stretching out in the warm water was exactly what my body needed. Of course, I made sure that my back was turned away from Damian at all times, and for added security, I’d dimmed the lights. This time, if there were any “accidents,” he still wouldn’t see anything.

  We sat in complete silence, and I tried not to make any suddenly movements that would draw additional attention to me. “How’s the bath?” he finally spoke, which I was glad about, because it was all starting to feel pretty damn capital A.

  “Good.” Monosyllabic answer, I didn’t want to encourage too much interaction in my current state of total and utter nakedness.

  “Good.” A monosyllabic answer back.

  Then more silence.

  Is there some foolproof method for diffusing an awkward situation? Are there no self-help books about this common subject? Perhaps I could steer the conversation in another, surprising direction. “So what about that death penalty, hey?” I was fast running out of ideas when…

  Crash! “Holy fuck.” I instinctually screamed and leapt out of the bath as an enormous bolt of lightening felt like it hit our room. The thunder was deafening and everything went very bright. Luckily, in that moment, I’d remembered something from my geography class about water and lightning not being the best of friends—and it was this thought that had sent me scrambling for dry land. Everything then went very black as all the lights flickered and died.

  “Are you okay, Lilly?”

  “Um…” My heart was pounding. “Well, I didn’t get hit or anything.”

  “It felt like it hit the room,” Damian said, clearly sounding unnerved.

  “Where are you?”

  I looked into the darkness—my eyes had not yet adjusted and it was pitch black. “I don’t know.” And then I suddenly realized that I was completely naked. I gasped, “Oh my God!”