“While I’m all tied up,” she said, “maybe you could show me what you do with that hand when you’re all alone.”
Oh, God. A monster had been created. “Audra—”
“You’re the one who brought up selfie Os.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head.
“Kane.” That lower lip of hers punched out and he could see the pleaser had turned the corner and now expected to be pleased, instead. “I want—”
“I know what you want,” he said roughly, and began crawling down her body toward the heaven between her thighs. “But I’m saving all my Os for you.”
It was a good thing she was going back to LA. Because with anything less than a hundred miles between them, he thought, breathing in the heady scent of her arousal, he’d never allow anyone else orgasm-close to Audra.
In the morning, he found the willpower to resist an offer of room service for breakfast and another round of sex for “second breakfast” as Audra suggested with a teasing smile. No, he’d insisted on taking her to the resort’s dining room for a seat at a public table while properly clothed. They were almost finished with their meal—eggs, bacon, and toast for him, fruit and waffles for Audra—when a cleared throat caught their attention.
They both looked up, but it was Audra who nearly squealed in happiness. “Lilly!”
Kane stood to greet his second cousin Alec and the spitfire brunette who’d caught the other man’s eye at the resort not long before. They’d gone from dancing around each other to dancing between the sheets and then to commitment in such a short time it had at first surprised Kane—but didn’t any longer. As he now well knew, love didn’t dawdle and it sure as hell didn’t ask for permission.
Kane bent to kiss Lilly’s cheek and then reached for Alec. The other man shook his outstretched hand then pulled his own back, shaking out his fingers as if Kane had squeezed the life from them. “What’s put a deathly grip in you?” he asked, then glanced at Audra.
Kane ignored the question, both explicit and implicit. He was supposed to be weaning himself off Audra—starting right now—and talking about her with his cousin/best friend who was as close as a brother would not get her out of his head or his heart. “What are you doing here?” he asked, to redirect the conversation.
“Tomorrow is somebody’s birthday celebration,” he said. “And Lilly wanted extra time to catch up with her BFF.”
The two women already had their heads together, mouths moving a mile a minute.
“Seems like they won’t come up for air anytime soon,” Kane observed.
“That leaves me and you,” Alec said, “to pass the time together.”
Kane didn’t like the gleam in the other man’s eye. “Then let’s go hunt down Amber and Jessie. I’m sure they’ll want to see you.”
His sisters managed to be maddeningly elusive for once. So he and his cousin took up space in the shade of an umbrella by the main pool and Kane kept up the conversation and kept it away from what—who—he didn’t want to talk about by telling his cousin first about the minor fire the night before, then the job offer from the eco-resorts people, and finally his decision to stay on with the family company.
Talking about it felt good to him, hearing it out loud again and the way he actually warmed at the thought of it let him know it was the right conclusion. With a new satisfaction, he watched a father and a couple of school-age kids set up camp at the other end of the pool, by the shallow beach entry.
He glanced around to make sure the resort lifeguards were in place and felt himself smile when the two kids leaped into the water with fierce shrieks of glee. The dad watched them, grinning, and Kane felt more warmth fill his chest. He got to be part of this.
Though he wouldn’t have Audra, he got to be part of this making of happy memories.
Then he became aware that Alec was frowning at him. “You’ve been struggling with this life decision for some time and you never said anything?” the other man said.
He shrugged. “You know me, I’m not much of a talker.”
“You’re not,” Alec agreed, his voice quiet. “Especially since we lost Simon.”
Kane swallowed, all the warmth inside him going out on a tide of pure sadness. “He was your brother.”
“As close as one could be to you, too.”
“Yeah.” Kane looked down at his hands, remembering the brother of another mother who’d been their ringleader, their cheerleader, their ringmaster. The man who would still walk among them if not for a drunk, wrong-way driver. “Fuck, Alec.”
“Sometimes that’s all we can say about it.”
Silence stretched between them that his second cousin finally broke. “But he’s gone and we’re family. You should talk to me when you have a need.”
“I don’t—”
“You should talk to me when you have a need.”
Kane tried to sneer, automatically on the defensive. “I think your mom read us that book around the campfire while we ate s’mores. You’ve got to be a friend to have a friend. Something like that.”
Alec sighed.
“Fuck, I’m sorry,” Kane said, and rubbed his face as if that could ease the sudden rush of guilt. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“And there it is.”
Kane’s hands dropped and he turned his head slowly to look at the other man. “What?” he asked, wary.
“That other big dilemma you’ve been grappling with.” He paused. “Or should I say that beautiful blonde you’ve been grappling.”
“I never mentioned it.”
“The one that’s the cause of your lack of sleep.”
“I never mentioned anything about that either.” Audra was not long for Kane’s world and talking about her wasn’t going to change a thing.
“That call I made to warn you she was looking to make some man fall in love with her—”
“Forget about that call.”
“Should I have warned Audra instead?” Alec asked quietly. “Upon reflection, she was talking a good game about getting her mojo back by breaking some guy’s heart, but she was in a very vulnerable place. Still is, I’m sure.”
Kane made fists, then spread out his fingers again. “I’d never hurt her. And she knows all about me.”
“Yeah?”
“Hard-to-Hold Hathaway. She’s called me that.”
“Okay.”
“She knows I said I’ll never fall in love.” Though that was before he did, damn it.
“Because you’re too selfish.”
“Right.” He stared out at the pool, noting the woman with the little towhead in a stroller was back. She joined the father and called out to the pair playing in the pool. That’s what Audra was going to have, in LA. There she’d find a man who would be a loving husband and textbook perfect father, something he knew nothing about.
“Love,” Kane grumbled. “What the hell is it, anyway? A man like me shouldn’t even believe in it.”
Alec snorted. “A man like you?”
Kane had half-forgotten his cousin was sitting there. “What’s that mean?”
“You believe, cuz. How could you not?”
In the distance, he saw Audra and Lilly strolling in their direction, and when he saw the blonde was smiling he had that feeling again. Sunshine in his pocket. Happiness on her face made him happy. God. Kane Hathaway, happy.
He watched the pair get closer and closer, and drank in Audra’s form, another memory to keep forever.
“Oh, yeah, you believe in love,” Alec said, his voice for Kane’s ears only. “A guy who thinks a pinch of salt will keep the devil away and that a rabbit’s foot can bring good luck…yeah, he knows there’s magic in the world.”
He glanced over at his cousin and his knowing expression, remembering why he tried to keep his superstitious side a secret. Over the years, though, Alec had seen him skirt an open ladder or two.
Well, if Kane believed in love then he had to believe he’d survive it. One hundred days, he decided.
A day for every mile that measured the distance she would put between them. By the end of a hundred days he’d be over her.
Lilly practically danced up to Alec, her wavy brunette hair as lively as the rest of her. She was talking a mile a minute as he pulled her down onto his lap. “What are you jabbering about?” He smiled and tucked a wayward lock of curling hair behind her ear.
“Audra’s going to start her own floral business.” She threw a smile at her friend. “Which will make her deliriously happy and I know she’ll be wildly successful.”
“That’s great,” Alec said.
“Not so great for me, though.” Lilly went from smiles to a frown in a heartbeat. “I’m losing her as my usual lunch date.”
“You can meet her outside the company cafeteria any time you want,” Alec said, kissing her temple. “No big.”
“No, I can’t. And it’s a hundred-mile big.”
Wait. What?
Kane glanced over at Audra, who watched her friend with a bemused expression. Then, as if she sensed him staring, her gaze switched to him.
Boom. Bang. Crash. The sounds of home truths colliding in his brain.
Over the noise of his personal disaster, he heard Lilly’s excited voice. “Audie’s starting her business here. In Santa Barbara.”
He shot from his chair, so fast the thing fell over and startled several finches from nearby shrubbery. Hyper-aware of the puzzled glances he was getting, he yanked out his phone and pretended to receive an important text.
“Gotta go,” he muttered, then gave Audra a last swift look before striding off.
One mile, one hundred miles. One day, ten years.
Kane was never going to get over her. Never fucking ever.
But a man had his pride and neither she nor anyone else was ever going to find that out.
On the couch in Audra’s bungalow, her brother Connor stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankle, his expression skeptical. “You just keep believing that, Pollyanna.”
She frowned at him, then downed the last of her first coffee of the morning. “Dad said. He told me Mom was going to be fine with me quitting the family company, moving a hundred miles north, and starting my own business.”
“Did you hear yourself just now? Especially the part about moving a hundred miles north?”
“It’s part of the plan,” she said. “I’ve done some preliminary research and it looks to be a good location to establish myself. Not too big a city but with lots of opportunities to ply my new trade.” Okay, the preliminary research might better be classified as rudimentary, and though she’d delve deeper, it already just felt right. And she did trust the opinion of Marie Stillwell, Kane’s florist for the resort.
Kane. When she’d floated the idea of a floral business, he’d been all for it. Then, when Lilly had blurted out the day before that Audra had decided to locate said business in Santa Barbara, he acted like he’d been scalded. His escape had been so rushed the bottoms of his shoes had practically left skid marks.
The man wasn’t in the market for a girlfriend. She knew that. Hadn’t she coined the nickname Hard-to-Hold Hathaway herself? But with the news that she was settling in his city, he’d obviously jumped to the conclusion that it was because she wanted more of him.
Okay, because she did want more of him.
Connor stood, crossed to the mini fridge, and began rummaging through the offerings. “You think I’m here at oh-too-early just to see if you have any of that iced tea I like? I was planning on sleeping in, but Mom called and arm-twisted. I’m supposed to encourage you to go back home. If you want to start a business, it will be better on familiar turf, she said to tell you.”
“See?” Audra jumped to her feet and threw out her arms. “That’s why I have to move. I love her dearly, but she’ll smother me before I’m thirty. She probably hopes I’ll move back in with her and Dad.”
Connor straightened, one of his coveted teas in hand. “I quote here—‘Moving home would be a cost-saver for a budding entrepreneur.’” He grinned. “God I love being the sibling that screwed up over and over. She’s happy as long as I’m not in jail or in the hospital and God forbid I ever move home and she has to witness my life firsthand.”
“You didn’t screw up. You made your own choices, damned the consequences, and somehow always came out on top.” Audra sighed. Con got all the brash Montgomery genes, while she’d spent as much time second-guessing as making an initial decision in the first place.
Like maybe she should go back to LA and restart her life there.
A little chill sent her scurrying to the bedroom to find a hoodie. Connor idly followed her, sipping from his can of iced tea. As she grabbed the garment from where it had been flung over a chair, her brother stiffened, then crossed to one of the nightstands. “What’s this?”
She glanced over, froze, then tried concocting a fib her brother would believe as to why a man’s money clip was on the table beside her mattress. As she frantically ran through several admittedly flimsy excuses, she saw him finger the few dollar bills that were folded over a couple of unused, foil-wrapped condoms.
It was Kane’s money clip, of course, that he’d left there the night before last, following the fire. After he’d doused the flames, he’d told her he was staying on at the resort and not leaving for that other job. Riding on the excitement of ducking near-disaster and maybe not exactly expecting but just kinda hoping for more from him beyond their casual sexcounters, she’d persuaded him back to her bed.
That she was in love with him, of course, had gone unsaid.
Would go on going unsaid, given that she now clearly knew he wouldn’t welcome that from her.
Connor wagged the money clip between two fingers. “I won’t bother advising you against getting too serious about anyone at this juncture…”
Audra swallowed.
“Jumping into something with someone you barely know is not what a smart, responsible person would do.”
“You might,” Audra said, stung. While she knew Kane wouldn’t welcome her feelings for him, that didn’t mean those feeling weren’t real, despite their short acquaintance. “You very well might jump into something, Con. Tell me I’m wrong.”
His mouth twisted. “You’re not wrong. But that’s how I roll. Face it, both Mom and Dad would lose their minds if their just-left-at-the-altar daughter, the ever-obliging and always-sensible sibling of the family, believed herself serious about a man so short a time later.”
“But doesn’t the left-at-the-altar business prove that months and months of knowing a person, as well as being engaged to a person for months and months, means you actually might not know a person no matter how much time passed? That time is not—”
“Audra.” He tossed the money clip back to the night table and shook his head. “Are you trying to tell me that mere days after a broken engagement you fancy you’re in love with this near-stranger? Come on, that’s not like you. Clearly, you don’t know your own mind.”
Her ringing phone interrupted her next salvo in what she could foresee was an unwinnable argument with her big brother.
Lilly calling. They’d spent yesterday and last night together and she’d heard all about the other woman’s future plans with Alec, while keeping mum about Kane. But now she needed to talk and swiped to accept the call.
“Hey—” Lilly began.
“Sofi Tukker, ‘Best Friend,’” Audra interrupted.
A short pause. “Does it count that we know that one from a phone commercial?” Her voice sounded amused.
“Lilly…” She needed a sympathetic ear and she needed it right now. “Please, I’m serious.”
“Okay, Audie, all right.” Her tone lost its lightheartedness. “You want to meet me at the lounge?”
She smiled in relief. By paraphrasing the lyrics, Lilly proved she understood the emotional moment Audra was describing when naming that song. “Yawp.”
In the lobby, her best friend held a steaming coffee in each hand. Upon
passing one over, Lilly shot her a quick look, taking her in from head-to-toe. “I can’t believe I’m saying this to Audra Montgomery, woman who rarely makes a misstep—but what have you done?”
She fought not to cringe. Was falling in love written all over her? “It’s that noticeable?”
“You’re wearing two different flip flops.”
God, she was. But she couldn’t go back to her room in case Con was still there and hanging in the resort’s public spaces in mismatched shoe-wear wasn’t what she wanted either. “Let’s walk on the beach,” she suggested, and Lilly nodded.
Once their feet hit the sand, her best friend had one word. “Spill.”
So, as they walked along the wide, pristine beach, Audra did, from mistaking Kane for Mr. Jones to finding that the plumber/hotelier was the man for her. The one who rang all her bells. The one with whom she wanted to spend the rest of her life, though he wouldn’t welcome those feelings, it seemed.
After a few beats of silence, Lilly drew in a long breath, let it out. “Okay. We can fix this.”
“We can?” Audra gazed on her loyal wingman since college freshman year with renewed appreciation. That fast, Lilly had a plan for Audra. A plan for Audra to have Kane for her own. Yay! “How so?”
“You’ll use your head!” the other woman practically yelled.
Audra jolted back.
“You don’t love this man. You love the non-selfie Os.”
Blushing, Audra suddenly wished she hadn’t shared that part.
“It’s not just sex.”
“It is. And if it’s not, you’re going to decide it’s just sex. You tell your brain and the rest of you will follow, Audra, because you’re a considerate daughter and a wonderful friend and you would never do this to us.”
“What wouldn’t I do to you?”
“Pine after a player like Kane Hathaway. He’s handsome as sin, I’ll give you that, and I believe all his sexy bona fides, but you won’t put the people who love you through the ringer of watching you angle for more disappointment. Not after what just happened. Jacob surprised us all by turning out to be a jerk. But we know Kane Hathaway hasn’t a serious, stick-with-one-woman bone in his body. We already know this.”
Me and Mr. Jones Page 19
