by Eliza Boyd
“Then who else sa—” As the words came out of his mouth, his brain clicked with the answer. “Oh. Gabe.”
“Yeah,” she said. “He showed up and lectured me about being out in the middle of nowhere by myself and how he’ll always be concerned about me… Yadda yadda.” She couldn’t have rolled her eyes any harder. “Then he threw the fact that you’re richer than he is in my face like that had anything to do with why we’re…” Gazing over his shoulder, she let her voice fade off.
Was she searching for a word for what they were doing? He hung on the silence between them, waiting for her to finish that sentence so he could make sure they were on the same page. But then her gaze drifted to where they were holding hands. For a moment, he thought he could feel her fingers squeeze his just like they had the day before while parasailing. Then she went so still that he almost couldn’t feel her anymore.
She yanked her hand backward as if shocked that they’d been touching. “I’m going to go shower and change. Do you need anything from me? Notes or to go on another excursion?” An all-business mask had taken her face over, no trace of the Alexis from before.
His stomach sank as his heart pinched. He wanted to show her that things could be different with him, but he’d had the same reaction Gabe had. And then she’d zoomed away from his grasp like he’d been on fire and she hadn’t wanted to ignite.
As he said, “No, that’s all for today,” he didn’t mean it. He didn’t need anything from her, but he sure did want her company. To make her feel better. Instead, he desperately needed to put out the flames.
Yet every new moment with her stoked them instead.
13
Showered and clean, Alexis braided her wet hair and put some comfy clothes on. She knew she was safe from Gabe if she stayed in the suite. Maxwell had nothing else for her to do, so she decided to call Heather. After everything Jeff had said—and her latest hand-holding encounter with Maxwell—she needed her best friend’s opinion.
It took four rings, but Heather answered the phone sounded run ragged. “Hello? Altwell Tax and—”
“It’s me, Heather. I don’t need the formal greeting.” Alexis pulled the phone away from her ear to check the number she’d dialed. “Plus, this is your personal cell, not your work phone,” she chuckled.
“Oh my goodness, girl.” Heather sighed down the line. “It’s been a long week and it’s…what? Wednesday?”
Alexis had just checked the schedule Maxwell had given her, so she knew what day it was. “Thursday, actually.”
“So you’ll be home in…three more days!” Her friend’s voice came through as cheerful and happy. “I can’t wait to see you! Do you have any juicy stories for me?”
She wasn’t ready to lead with the obvious, so she went with the safer crazy story. “Uh, yeah. Gabe followed me here.”
The silence that followed was deafening. And telling.
“You knew, didn’t you?” she accused her friend. “Why didn’t you warn me?”
“Ehhh.” Heather exhaled noisily. “I honestly wasn’t sure. I just heard that he was leaving, but I didn’t really think he’d try to join you on what was supposed to be your honeymoon.”
“Yeah, well, he did. Got his own key for the suite and everything.” Alexis pulled her legs under her on the bed and gazed out the window. Not a cloud in the sky. The day was beautiful, and she should have been on the beach, but that jerk of an ex of hers was making her life difficult.
“So, what did you do?” Heather asked. “I’m sure you aren’t letting him stay with you.”
“I assume he’s still in the suite. I actually don’t know.”
Heather went quiet again before she said, “Then where are you staying? Did you leave the resort?”
This was the reason she hadn’t wanted to call in the first place, but it was exactly the reason why she’d needed to. Perspective. That’d be helpful in her situation.
“Well, actually,” she answered, drawing the words out longer than she needed to, “I’m staying with someone else. Someone who’s helping me because he owed me a favor.”
“He?” Heather asked with emphasis.
Alexis rolled her eyes. “Yes, he.”
“Why did he owe you a favor, Alexis?”
She didn’t appreciate the accusatory tone in her friend’s voice. “You know me better than that. I know you do.”
“Whew.” Heather sounded relieved. “When I said I wanted juicy stories, I didn’t mean that kind.”
“And that’s not what you’re going to get,” Alexis explained. “He just happened to hit me with his car, so he owed me a favor.”
“What?”
The question was so loud that Alexis had to pull the phone away from her ear. When she brought it back, she absently picked at the blankets on the bed. “I’m fine, okay? It was just with the door, but it knocked me over. Frankly, it was more of a hit to my pride than anything.”
“Geez,” Heather said. “As long as you’re okay, I guess.” After a silent beat, though, she went on, sounding curious. “But what kind of favor did you get in return?”
“A job,” she deadpanned. “Nothing so salacious.”
Heather sighed. “Then where’s the good part? Getting a job on vacation is decidedly not a juicy story.”
Taking a deep breath, Alexis aimed her gaze at the ceiling. She wasn’t sure how to tell her friend what was happening. She didn’t know how to explain it or what to even say. But she needed some input so she could stop the floundering feeling in her chest. Input from someone who knew her, not someone she’d talked to in the car for twenty minutes.
“Well…”
She tried to relay what had happened: that she’d arrived, almost gotten knocked out, and persuaded Maxwell to give her the job he needed to fill for the week. They’d enjoyed splashing in the ocean before Gabe had shown up and ruined everything. Maxwell had acted a little cold after that. Then they’d gone parasailing and nearly kissed in the water. But then he’d defended Gabe, even if it had been to remind her that she was single. But then he’d held her hand and offered to take her away to she never had to see Gabe again.
Then she’d been the one to shut things down.
“I don’t see what the problem is,” Heather said after all of that. “You’re on vacation. You’re reeling after a breakup. A good whirlwind romance has been the cure for this kind of thing for ages. Let the man wine and dine you and then come back home.”
Maybe the woman had been dealing with numbers that easily added up for too long. Life wasn’t a math problem that could be solved and then tucked away. It was more complicated than that. What if she let him wine and dine her and then couldn’t come home? What if she did let Maxwell take her away from her old life and didn’t want to return to it? What if she wanted to stay with him permanently?
And what if he didn’t want that?
She couldn’t tell with his man. He ran hot and cold. Sometimes he was all business, and then other times he was holding her hand and almost kissing her. Sometimes he was telling her he’d call up his private plane so they could leave, and other times he was defending the actions of her ex. He wasn’t sure why he was so hard to read, but she’d had her share of confusing moments with him too. If she were honest, she’d admit that she’d been hard for him to read as well.
When she told Heather all of that, her friend quietly responded with, “Then maybe you need to open up. Tell him the truth about what happened.”
Alexis flopped back onto the bed, spreading her free hand wide. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Well, why haven’t you?” Heather asked. “What’s the harm?”
Staring at the ceiling, she thought about that. “The harm is that I can’t keep repeating the same mistakes. Plus, I just got out of a three-year relationship. I’m not even close to being ready for another. And we have such different lives. He’s, like, a millionaire while I’m jobless and aimless. He’s here for business, and I agreed to be his assistant, not fall
in love with him.”
The moment those words were out of her mouth, she wished she could snatch them out of the air and permanently erase them. She didn’t love Maxwell. That was impossible.
But was it impossible to think she could one day?
Before Heather could glom onto that bit of information, Alexis rushed out with, “Not that I love him or anything. I barely even know him. We’ve hardly talked much.”
“Your heart doesn’t need conversations to know what it feels, Alexis,” Heather wisely said. And then she took it into a direction Alexis hadn’t been expecting. “Think back to when you met Gabe. Did you fall head over heels with him at the beginning?”
Alexis took a deep breath, allowing her thoughts to go back to that day for the first time in a long time. She wanted to say yes, that she had known from the very moment she’d met him that she loved him. But she hadn’t. They’d met when he’d moved to her town to build his company’s headquarters. He’d needed an assistant, and she’d needed a job.
Honestly, it hadn’t been much different from how she’d met Maxwell. Which was probably why she’d been so weird around him. Was she simply repeating her past mistakes? Falling for yet another boss?
“No,” she said, her eyes closing at the sound of the word. She wasn’t sure if she’d answered Heather’s question or her own.
“Yet your heart is telling you something now, isn’t it?”
Taking Heather’s advice, she tried to tune into her heart. What was it saying? She couldn’t quite hear it beneath the crashing of the waves and the chatter of the resort guests having wonderful vacations outside her window.
“I don’t know.” Alexis flicked her gaze toward the door.
Maxwell was on the other side, somewhere in the suite. He wasn’t sitting around, wondering about her feelings toward him. He was working, buying resorts, building his business—not questioning his own heart. She was sure of it.
The next day, she had an excursion to go on. Snorkeling, and Maxwell wasn’t coming with to this one. He had other things on the schedule. So she’d go alone, take notes, and then tell him she couldn’t do this anymore. If she took the option completely off the table, she wouldn’t have to worry about any of it. She could go back home and figure her life out. Her real life. The one where her reality was bleak but her own. Where it was certain.
“Oh, Alexis,” Heather sighed. “I wish I could help.”
“Me too.”
“Can you at least enjoy the rest of your trip? Avoid Gabe as much as possible and have those margaritas?”
Flipping onto her stomach, she said, “I can try.”
She would. She would try to enjoy the rest of her stay in paradise.
Even if it meant avoiding two men to do it.
14
At breakfast the next morning, Maxwell waited for Alexis to get up. The snorkeling excursion she was checking out for him wasn’t until ten a.m., and it was only eight thirty. He didn’t have to wake her up to get the show on the road.
Even though he kind of wanted to.
He pretended it was because he wanted to finish their conversation from yesterday—the one where she’d almost defined their relationship. He didn’t want to admit that it had anything to do with just wanting to be around her.
If she hadn’t cut herself off, he could have had some clarity. He might have known how she really felt about what they were doing. He might have known her worries, her concerns, and her feelings. He wouldn’t have been worried himself.
He might have been crushed, but she wouldn’t have stopped her words if she hadn’t felt something like what he’d been feeling too. There would have been no reason for that. She could have just said so.
Unless she didn’t want to hurt him. But that hadn’t been high on her priority list. She’d spoken her mind about many other things already. Until now.
One thing stopping him was that she hadn’t been forthcoming. He’d asked a few times about her past, but she hadn’t wanted to talk about it. As much as he wanted to respect her privacy, it was getting in the way of…everything. His thoughts, his life, his business. Very easily, he could ask Phillip to investigate, but that wasn’t respecting her privacy. It would get him what he wanted to know, but at what cost?
To Maxwell’s surprise, he didn’t have to wait long for her to get up. At the table, he heard her bedroom door open and the shower turn on a few moments later. While she was in there, he ignored the way his pulse spiked at the thought of her coming down the stairs within minutes.
To busy himself, he prepped for the meeting he was going to have with Mr. Hartford, the owner of the Vermont ski resort he wanted to purchase. He’d been there several times, including twice during the past winter. Ana had been instrumental in helping him find the place and make the final decision. All he needed now was to make sure Mr. Hartford was on board.
The offer was right. The place was right.
But a nagging in his brain said that something else wasn’t.
He figured that it had something to do with the woman who’d just turned the shower off upstairs. But before he could make sense of any of that, she was padding over to the table, her wet hair framing her face.
“Morning,” she said, a shortness in her tone. She didn’t even look at him when she said it. Or when she started to make a plate.
“Let me guess,” he said, trying to inject a bit of lightness into their mood. “A bagel with no cream cheese or peanut butter and a whole bunch of fruit.” As he flipped through the stack of papers in front of him, he peeked up at her to see her reaction.
And she didn’t disappoint. “Maybe.” She cracked a small smile, the corners of her lips fighting not to curve upward. Then she grabbed one of the fruit-filled pastries. “Or maybe I’ll switch it up with this.” Raising her eyebrows, she gave him an expression that said I dare you to predict my next move again.
That made him chuckle. “You do realize that’s basically a fruit-covered bagel, right?”
Her small smile fell right from her face, which made another laugh bubble up from his chest.
“It’s okay. We like what we like,” he told her. But then his own words had his smile falling from his own face. Something about that rang so true to him.
In silence, she slipped into the chair across from him and picked at her breakfast. While she did that, he admired her, pretending not to by keeping his head dipped low like he was concentrating on the information in front of him. He had a lot of catching up to do to make sure he had everything ready for his meeting in a couple of hours. If he wanted this purchase, he had to be prepared and have his facts straight.
But he couldn’t think straight at all with her so close. Almost a whole day away from her hadn’t doused the flames. They still burned brightly, which was highly inconvenient. It was yet another problem he couldn’t throw money at. He hadn’t realized how much he did that until her. So, basically, she was highly inconvenient.
Things had been different before her. He’d been able to skate through life, investing in different companies that made him richer and richer. With that money, he’d been able to buy the things he needed and wanted—like the homes he hadn’t told her about in Rome and New Zealand. And the things that hadn’t gone his way at first ended up finding a way to do so when his money entered the picture.
And then there was her and every problem he’d encountered since he’d met her.
Plus the one in his past he’d tried to forget about. Emily.
Alexis got up from the table, making his ex-girlfriend fly far away from his thoughts. As quickly as he could, he flicked his gaze down to the paper, but he had a feeling she’d caught him looking. Her chair’s legs scraped across the hardwood floor beneath them, and when she pushed her chair in, she paused, her hands curling over the back. He thought she might call him out for staring, but that’s not what she said at all.
“I know this is a lot to ask,” she started in a quiet voice. Then she gestured to the file in front of him. �
�You have other business today, and I know I’m supposed to go on that snorkeling excursion, but…” As she trailed off, she twisted her fingers, fidgeting.
Maxwell placed his forearms over the papers and clasped his hands on the table. “But what? Do you not want to go?”
Slowly, she shook her head. A sadness glazed her eyes. “I left the resort and Gabe still found me. The beach right down at the end of the path isn’t far enough or closed off enough to stay away from him. I really don’t want to see him today.”
His heart stung at the thought of her that worried about running into her ex. As he thought over his options, what he could do to keep her from that predicament, she went on.
“I’m supposed to be your assistant, but all I’ve done is taken and taken from you. Between the room and persuading you to get this job…” Her chest filled as she took a deep breath. “At this point, I think I owe you money.”
“Nonsense,” he said immediately, because it was. There was no universe where she would ever owe him a dime.
“No, seriously,” she insisted, gripping the back of the chair again. She pressed up onto her toes, appearing more nervous than he’d ever seen her. “This is the one thing I’m good at. I can answer phones, make Excel spreadsheets, type up emails, send newsletters, and take really detailed notes.”
Sitting up straighter, he told her, “I can attest to the detailed notes. I’ve read some of the things you’ve written down for me.” He reached for the black binder and flipped through some of the pages. Then he looked up at her again. “It’s been extremely helpful.”
“I’m glad.”
“But it’s not the only thing you’re good at, Alexis,” he said softly before he thought better of it.
One look at her face made him glad he hadn’t stopped himself. Her expression went from determined to awed. But then it dipped into the realm of sadness as tears pooled in her eyes. The vulnerability in her gaze hit him square in his chest.
“Gabe would disagree.” She wiped the wetness off her cheeks as one tear spilled down.
