Life Is A Beach (Mills & Boon Silhouette): Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling (26 page)

“Hey, that’s not necessary,” Gruber said, but he took the money anyway. Lee had noticed ever since he’d had
money to spare that not many people turned it down when he tried to give it away.

“Now if you’ll excuse us,” Lee said, “we’ll pick up where we left off.”

“Kink
-y,
” said Gruber with barely concealed admiration.

Lee gave him a cocky thumbs-up, and then he went back inside the building and locked the door behind him just to make sure that Gruber didn’t decide to follow him for purposes of observation. That would prove, he thought, slightly more kinky than he had in mind.

A
S SOON AS
L
EE AND THEIR
visitor stepped outside, Azure shrugged out of her coveralls and found a rest room opening off the back corner of the storeroom. It was equipped with a sink and a soap dispenser, so she began to scrub the latex-based paint off her hands and wrists. She was studying the end of her ponytail and contemplating various ways to remove the paint when Lee called from the other side of the door, “Azure?”

“In here,” she said, swinging the door open. “So are we busted?”

He nodded ruefully. “We’re through for the day, that’s for sure.”

“Are you in trouble?” Her eyes were wide and solemn, though she appeared slightly comical with splotches of mauve and yellow paint embellishing her forehead and chin.

“No, everything’s fine. Is the paint coming off okay?”

She held up the end of her ponytail. “Look. What do you think?”

He smiled. “I think you look beautiful with green hair.”

She stared at him and for a moment he thought she was
going to hit him with a sharp retort, but instead she grinned.

“You have weird taste,” she said.

“Want me to help?” he asked.

“Help? I was helping you, and look where that got us.”

He edged around her to turn on the water at the sink. “Bend over. I’ll get that paint out for you.”

After a dubious look, she leaned over the sink. He punched the soap dispenser a few times, releasing the antiseptic scent of institutional handwashing into the small room, and she wrinkled her nose. “I hate that smell.”

“They don’t provide orange blossom-jojoba shampoo in places like this.” He held the end of her ponytail under the stream of water, carefully working the soap through the ends. The paint began to dissolve and wash away.

“How’s it doing?” Her voice echoed hollowly back from the sink bowl, but he was so captivated by the pale skin of her nape and the softness of her hair that he didn’t answer. It would be so easy to slide the restraining rubber band off her hair and let it tumble around her shoulders, a sight that he had been imagining ever since he spotted her standing so cool and aloof at her sister’s wedding.

“I said, how’s it doing?”

“Almost all through,” he said, trying not to reveal how mesmerized he was by the intimacy of this service he was performing.

“Can you hurry it up?”

He squeezed the water out of her hair and grabbed a paper towel, sliding it around her ponytail so there wouldn’t be any drips. She straightened and blotted at her hair for a moment and said, “Now you.”

There was the problem of that mauve spot on the back of his neck. They traded places so he could stand in front of the sink, and he
bent and held his head under the faucet. He closed his eyes and let the warm water sluice over his face; he felt a trickle of it running down his chest, but he forgot all about it when her felt her fingers massaging the back of his neck. They were gentle, and soft, and it wasn’t much of a leap to imagine how they would feel if they were touching other and more sensitive parts of his anatomy. He pictured it in his mind, lying completely naked under a palm tree on a deserted beach, reaching for her, pressing her close as she caressed him and whispered sexy sweet nothings in his ear.

Which was filling with water as it sloshed off his neck. He adjusted the slant of his head, and Azure said much too brightly, “All finished!”

He brought his head up and she handed him a paper towel. “I know an easier way,” he said, and he turned on the hot-air hand dryer and turned the nozzle so that it was aimed at his head. He still had to crouch for the air to hit his hair, though, but this position had its advantages because it put his eyes on the exact level of Azure’s breasts. Considering that he’d had his fill in the last couple of weeks of admiring the silicone implants that bloomed all up and down Miami Beach, it was heartening to see a pair that looked utterly and entirely natural.

She seemed unaware of his admiration. In fact, she was leaning toward the mirror, scrubbing at a small spatter of yellow paint. He concentrated on fingercombing his hair into the proper disarray a la Fleck, and when he straightened, he didn’t realize that she would be leaning in his direction in order to toss a damp paper towel into the trash bin. Their heads collided with a solid
thwack!

Lee didn’t exactly see stars. The images that obscured his vision were more like spiraling luminous jellybeans.

“Lee? Lee! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to do
that!”

When his vision cleared, when the jellybeans dissolved into the ether, he was surprised to see two of Azure, which was something of a benefit as far as he was concerned. Double eyes, lovely. Double nose, delightful. Double little pointed chin and high cheekbones and pale hair, all gorgeous. Both of her were staring up at him in horror, and that gleam of caring or solicitousness or whatever it was that had so attracted him at the wedding had kindled in her eyes, doubly.

To steady himself, he had no choice but to grasp her shoulders and lean slightly forward as the two of her slowly converged into the usual one. It may have been his imagination, but Azure seemed to lean toward him, too. Or else he was unsteady on his feet, which could be the case. It had been a fairly powerful punch.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice coming out in a husky whisper. He wouldn’t doubt that the crack on the side of her head hurt as much as the one he’d taken on his jaw.

She rubbed the side of her head. “No, not much. I should have been more careful.”

His hands slowly came up and cupped her face. Pain receded, desire rushed in. He was so close that he could kiss her without the slightest inconvenience. And she was staring up at him, lips moist and slightly parted. Her skin felt soft as rose petals beneath his hands, soft as—

“Don’t you think we’d better leave? The painters will be back soon.”

This brought him sharply back to his senses. He didn’t want to have to explain again, this time to the subcontractor painting crew, why he and Azure were on the premises. And this wasn’t the most romantic place in the world for their first kiss, which he would prefer to be a momentous
occasion that rocked her to the depths of her soul, one that she would remember for all time.

He dropped his hands. “I’ll go clean up some of the mess,” he said.

She was still staring at him, her eyes unfathomable pools of light. “Good idea,” she breathed, but he realized in that moment that she didn’t think it was a good idea at all. He knew then that she would rather be kissed, and he felt a surge of triumph at having brought her to this point against all odds.

He backed away, came up against the closed door. “So I’ll go and do it.”

She drew a deep breath. “I—I’ll dry my hair.” She gestured toward the hand dryer. “Under there.”

He afforded her a sharp nod and backed slowly out the door, letting it close softly behind him while her eyes were still captured by his. Moments later, he heard the rush of air from the dryer.

He hammered the lids back on paint cans, tossed the coveralls in the corner where they had found them, and when Azure came out of the rest room and said she was going to go sit in the car, he told her he’d be out in a minute.

But before he joined her, he couldn’t resist picking up one of the paintbrushes and scrawling a large and jubilant “Yesss!” on the blank white wall.

A
ZURE DIDN’T KNOW WHY
she was doing this. She didn’t know why she was attracted to this guy. She didn’t know why she was, at that very moment, walking beside him into a noisy barbecue restaurant on U.S. 1.

She did know why she was ordering the honey-roasted baby back ribs, however, and it was because the waitress
recommended them. At least some sanity remained to her, she thought. At least she was still sensible enough to gather data, evaluate it, and make a reasonable decision. She hadn’t totally succumbed to this guy’s considerable allure.

He sipped a beer and smiled at her from across the table, which was a picnic table covered with brown butcher paper. Beer arrived in large pitchers, country music blared from a loudspeaker on the other side of the big room, and people tossed their chewed-up rib bones in large buckets on the floor. It wasn’t the kind of place that she would normally frequent much less have a good time, but nothing about her life was normal lately. This episode with Lee only underscored that fact.

It was an episode that she didn’t regret so far. In fact, she joined him in laughing about her consternation when Jake Gruber showed up and tried to throw them out.

“I couldn’t believe we’d been caught,” she said.

“Did you see the look on his face? He looked so angry I thought he might have swallowed his tongue.”

“His face changed colors. It was mauve. And neither of us even painted him!”

Lee laughed, but he sobered quickly enough. “I had fun,” he said quietly, his eyes seeking and holding hers.

“So did I,” she said. “It was good to be someone I’m not, if only for a little while.”

“I know what you mean,” Lee said softly.

She wondered why she couldn’t look away from him. It was as if he had some sort of magnet behind his eyeballs, a pull that was impossible to ignore. At the same time, she was fully aware of his nose, so fine and straight, of his eyebrows, so expressive, of his mouth, so full and so—kissable? Was she
actually thinking about how it would feel to kiss him?

Shaken by the rush of yearning that inexplicably welled up from someplace deep inside, she forced herself to look away, to gaze out the window at the heavy traffic, at the cashier stationed next to the door, at the child who was standing on the picnic bench across the room and being urged by his father to sit down.

Fortunately, before she could explore her thoughts too deeply, the waitress bore two huge platters of ribs to their table, and Azure discovered that she was starving. And if she had any idea of getting something on with Lust Puppy, surely watching him eat ribs would bring her to her senses. A man with grease dripping down his chin and barbecue sauce up to his elbows was usually not the most romantic sight in the world.

I
T WAS A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER
when Lee pulled the Mustang into the Blue Moon’s parking area and cut the engine. “Well. Here we are.”

“Yes. We are.”

“I—well.” He cleared his throat.

Azure knew that she should get out of the car and walk inside, but she realized with a jolt that she didn’t want to leave Lee yet. She also knew that she couldn’t very well ask him upstairs for a nightcap with Paulette in residence. And maybe she didn’t want to. Maybe she never wanted to see Lee again.

But he had passed the barbecue test. That there was such a test surprised her because she had never thought in terms of eliminating men from her list of dating prospects because of the way they ate barbecue. She had prepared herself to be revulsed. Yet Lee had eaten those ribs so neatly! It wasn’t that he’d been prissy about it—far from it. It was more that he had bitten the meat off the bone carefully and
not in large chunks. He hadn’t ripped, torn, or gnawed. He had nibbled, licked, and sucked in a mannerly fashion without looking like the maw of a huge garbage truck, and grease hadn’t run down his chin—not one drop.

Furthermore, the barbecue sauce had stayed on the ribs until he’d finished with them. He hadn’t employed his tongue in place of a napkin, either. For some reason, his expertise in rib eating said a lot about the man. It bespoke an upbringing where manners were important. It showed that he was neat and methodical. In short, if the way he ate barbecued ribs was any indication, he was the type of man she liked.

But he was an unlikely ne’er-do-well! A corporate dropout! He worked as a painter, for heaven’s sake! Was this someone who could appeal to her?

No.

Yes.

Well, maybe.

On the street, the overabundant neon of South Beach lent a glitzy glow to the night. Above them, the moon was a pale crescent swinging above the far horizon; palm fronds framed swirls of stars spinning through a cloudless sky. She sneaked a look at Lee’s silhouette outlined in the pale bluish light, thinking how much she was attracted to him. She breathed deeply of salt air, acknowledging how much more salubrious it was than the fume-laden air of Boston. She felt so relaxed, for once calm and tranquil and not thinking about work. What she
was
thinking was that she wanted to be kissed.

“It’s still early,” Lee said carefully. “We could go for a walk on the beach if you’d like.”

She thought about it for only a split second. “Okay,”
she said. She wasn’t ready to go back to Paulette’s claustrophobic apartment. She didn’t want to abbreviate her feelings of well being and rare connectedness with another human being.

Lee looked jubilant, and she realized with a start that he’d thought she was going to say no. Only this morning, she would have. She couldn’t have imagined at that time that she would want to be near this guy and moreover preparing to take a romantic walk down the beach with him. Usually a woman didn’t walk down the beach with a man unless she wanted something more to happen between them. It was an intimate endeavor, a walk down the beach, and not to be entered into lightly.

It was also a chance to find out if his nibbling, licking and sucking abilities extended to his mastery of another
skill—kissing.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL!

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: Client

A.J.,

Let me know as soon as you touch base with Santori. VERY IMPORTANT.

Repeat: VERY IMPORTANT.

Harry Wixler

O
KAY
, A
ZURE THOUGHT
as she and Lee kicked off their shoes at the end of the boardwalk, maybe having a fling while on vacation would get the lingering bad taste of Charming Paco out of her mouth. Maybe it was what she needed before she went back to Boston, where she saw Paco almost every day in the building where they both worked, not to mention Ms. 40DD. If she returned home with fond memories of her brief dalliance with a hunky beach boy, perhaps even showed pictures of the two of them together around the office, word would get back to Paco and he would realize that she was lost to him forever.

Be real,
she scolded herself.
It’s not about Paco. It’s about me, and that’s the best reason of all to be doing this.

Lee strolled alongside her, his solid bulk outlined against
the haze of moonglow. Her eyes cut toward him and danced away before he noticed her looking. Not that he would mind, she was sure, that she thought he had an attractive chin—chunky, but not to the point of looking like a boulder that had attached itself below his mouth. She liked chins that were firm but not prognathously Neanderthal. She liked noses that were slim and elegant, not crudely bulbous. She liked eyes that held a hint of innate intelligence and a mind that knew how to put that intelligence to good use. Her friend Dorrie had commented several times that as single women who had reached the ripe and knowledgable age of thirty, they both knew too much about what they didn’t like in men, and they often reminded each other that lots of women their age had not seen much about the opposite sex to like at all.

Azure had long ago realized that one of the advantages of being experienced with men is that each time one disappointed you, it became easier to cut your losses and move on. But Lee, having disappointed her right from the beginning, was a different kind of animal altogether, mostly because he got better instead of worse. This was unexpected as well as confusing and confounding and kind of crazy.

One thing was clear: They would have to go through all the polite preliminaries before getting down to what they both were here for—a kiss. It was part of the unwritten code once you got past ninth grade that certain niceties had to be observed between the sexes.

You couldn’t simply, when the notion to kiss hit either party, glom onto each other and indulge. No, first there was The Look. Two sets of eyes had to hold long enough to express interest but not so long that the other person thought that kissing would be a sure thing. Then there was The Look With A Smile—not exposing a lot of teeth, and
not a lot of look, either. After that some form of The Touch usually followed, and it might be the simple inadvertent brushing of hands or even the palm-to-palm intimacy of hand-holding.

Finally a more highly developed form of touching was necessary. It might be The Grasp Of Shoulders Or Forearms. It might be The Full-Flung Embrace, with arms twined around each other. And then there was the thrilling
Yow!
stage, when the kiss was all but inevitable. The general idea behind all of this was that lips couldn’t meet lips without some other part of the anatomy meeting an equivalent part of the other person’s anatomy beforehand. It was a matter of etiquette.

Did the touching when she and Lee were cleaning up back in the rest room of the commercial building in Miami count? Probably not. Too much time had intervened since then.

“Thank you for buying me dinner,” she said, and not only because it was part of the expected protocol. She was grateful for the meal, especially since she had an idea that she was more qualified to pay the check than he was. Back in the restaurant after the check had arrived at their table, she had held her breath, unsure whether to offer to pay her share, but Lee had slapped the money down before she’d been able to get the words out of her mouth.

“You’re welcome, Azure. I’m glad we went.”

“I—um—I apologize for how I acted this morning. I was rude.”

A faint smile played around his lips. “Were you? I thought you were only providing me with a challenge.”

“You did? Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“You didn’t think I meant
for you to leave me alone?”

“I thought
you
thought you really meant it.”

This deflated her somewhat, but perhaps he was right. Maybe she hadn’t been entirely serious about wanting him to go away. If she had been, she would have declined his offer of a ride and continued to search for another rental company that could deliver her car immediately.

She kept her eyes on the outline of a lifeguard stand ahead. Even the lifeguard stands here were art deco, she thought distractedly as they grew closer and she saw that it was painted sunshine-yellow with dark blue trim.

“Was I really so transparent?” she asked.

He grinned, and his eyes slid toward hers at the same time that she was looking at him. Good! The Look. They were making progress. “What do you think?”

“I think,” she said evenly, “you’re entirely too shrewd,” and this provoked the next step: The Look With A Smile.

A wave washed up and threatened to reach their feet, and they both jogged slightly sideways to avoid it. Azure—by design or by chance—moved more slowly than Lee, and this resulted in their hands brushing. Fantastic! she thought. The Touch.

“Oops! Sorry,” he said, reaching out to keep her from falling. She stumbled slightly and voila! The Grasp of Forearms.
Wow,
she thought,
this is going pretty fast.

He said suddenly, “You know, Azure, I feel comfortable with you.”

This, coming out of the clear blue as it did, caught her by surprise, and she didn’t know what to say. “You do?”

“Yes, and I think you feel comfortable with me.”

It occurred to her that she did. It was amazing and unexpected, but all this stuff about looking and hand-holding
and touching and even kissing did not make her feel at all anxious as she usually did.

“You know,” she said, her wonderment expressing itself in her voice, “I
do
feel comfortable with you, Lee.”

“You seem surprised.”

“I am, especially after—” She caught herself up short.

“After—?” He shot an emotionally penetrating glance in her direction, and for a moment their eyes locked.

“You probably wouldn’t want to hear about it,” she said, glancing away quickly.

He squeezed her hand in reassurance. “If it’s important to you, I would.”

She managed a rueful laugh. “It’s not important anymore.
He’s
not important.”

“Oh,” Lee said, his heart sinking. “A man.” He should have guessed that there was someone else. Why wouldn’t there be? Azure was beautiful and intelligent, the kind of woman any man would want.

“Yes, but he’s past tense. He cheated on me with one of my best friends.”

“I see,” he said, although he couldn’t imagine how anyone lucky enough to be the main man in Azure O’Connor’s life could betray her.

“I’ve beaten myself up with wondering what I did wrong or if I could have done anything to keep him. I thought he loved me. I
knew
I loved him.”

The pain in her voice gave him pause, made him look at her, really look at her. A tear slowly trickled down her cheek, and she brushed it away, reminding him of the day when he first saw her, her sister’s wedding day. In that moment, his heart
went out to her because now he knew why she had been so sad.

“He should have appreciated you more, loved you more.”

She tried to make light of it. “Easy for you to say.”

“I mean it, Azure. You’re a kind, caring woman, and you’re lovely besides.”

“I know I concentrate on work too much.” She admitted this stolidly, without emotion.

“That’s no reason for a guy to cheat,” he said.

“Still,” she said. “If I hadn’t been busy with work, he wouldn’t have—”

“Azure,” Lee said in measured tones. “Stop it. If he’d been a decent guy, he wouldn’t have cheated on you. Period.”

She was grateful for what he had said. For too long she had been blaming herself for Paco’s mistake, and now Lee was giving her permission to think about the whole sorry episode in a different way. Not that she had needed permission. She could have stopped blaming herself at any time. But she hadn’t until now.

He slowed his walk, stopped, faced her. His eyes seemed to have stolen the glow from the moonlight, and they mesmerized her with their magic. He slid his hands up her arms, generating a hum of electricity beneath the surface of her skin, and even though she was almost to the point of suspending all thought, she was luxuriously aware that they were rapidly approaching the
Yow!
stage.

As that realization settled into her mindset, she began to feel exhilarated beyond common sense. Something important, something earthshaking and significant was about to happen in her life—she knew it. How she knew it was certainly open to conjecture. Was it by telepathy? Intuition? Reading the body language of someone whose body might be more fun to read using
the Braille method? Or what?

He moved so close that his breath caressed her lips. “Have you ever been totally out of control, Azure?”

“N-no.”

“Would you like to be?”

“I don’t know.”

“We could start with a kiss and go from there.”

“Yes,” she said. “Are you, um, waiting for permission?”

“No,” he said seriously. “I’m putting you on notice.” And then he slowly wrapped his arms around her and drew her close to his chest in a Full-Fledged Embrace. She tilted her head back to look up at him, and when she looked into his eyes, they seemed so deep that all she wanted to do was sink into them. She felt slightly incredulous that he had awakened such a need in her, and her head angled into position almost without her direction. Lee’s mouth closed over hers, gentle at first, tasting of the mints they had eaten at the restaurant, then exploring with exquisite skill. At his urging, her mouth blossomed beneath his until she found herself swept up into an arousing, overpowering kiss that made total surrender seem like a really great idea.

After one kiss? How could that be? She clutched at his shoulders to steady herself, but it only made him renew the kiss. Not that she minded. He was even better at kissing than he was at eating barbecue in a neat and mannerly way. There was nothing really mannerly about this kiss, however. It was a kiss that signaled imminent conquest, a kiss that made it clear what he wanted. But did she want what he wanted? Which was everything?

She opened her mouth slightly, inviting his kiss to lengthen, deepen. Her thoughts seemed to wash away with the tide, and the only remnant of consciousness that she had left became a slow tingle in her belly, working its way
downward until she fairly ached with the longing to be touched.

His hands came around and skimmed the outsides of her breasts briefly, and she placed the heels of her hands against his chest and slowly pushed herself a few inches away. At that moment, a family group came laughing down a nearby boardwalk leading to a hotel, and Azure and Lee self-consciously broke apart.

When the family had moved on, Lee turned to her and said, “Well? Do you suppose we could get a beach blanket?”

Azure licked her lips. Due to the interruption, her heartbeat had stopped thundering in her ears, and she could almost think again. “What—what for?”

He slid an arm around her shoulders. “I think you know what for.”

It was true. She did. She was already picturing that blanket in her mind and imagining what the two of them would do on it. Imagining her fingers tangling in his hair, his hands hot beneath her clothes, the shedding of clothing and sanity. Is that what she wanted? Wild sex on the beach? With a guy who wasn’t her usual?

She bit her lip. “Couldn’t—couldn’t we go to your place?” It seemed like a reasonable suggestion, considering that wherever he was staying would be more private than the beach, though making love out under the stars had its romantic points.

Her suggestion seemed to give him pause, and she thought for a moment that a panicky look flitted across his eyes. “Not a good idea,” he said gruffly. “My roommate will be
there.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go back to the Blue Moon. I’ll get a blanket from Paulette.”

“Maybe she won’t be home.”

Azure glanced at her watch. “Oh, she’ll be there at this hour. She had to take a lot of time off from Rent-a-Yenta during the wedding festivities, so she’ll be in the apartment making phone calls and checking application forms.”

They encountered the family whose passing had broken their lip lock earlier, and one of the women sang out, “Lovely night, isn’t it?”

Azure replied with a smile, “Yes, it is,” and they kept walking. But Lee couldn’t help thinking how much more lovely it would be on the
Samoa
right now, not to mention convenient. Onboard, stewards attended to every wish. They disappeared discreetly when he was having a private moment with a woman. His bed in the master stateroom was wide and comfortable with smooth sheets of very high thread count, and making love was enhanced by the rocking of the ship at anchor.

But he couldn’t very well take Azure there—it would be a dead giveaway. Plus he doubted Fleck’s acting ability. Fleck might be able to play the part of a billionaire as long as he was on his own, but once Lee showed up, Fleck would falter in his unaccustomed role.

Azure led the way down a narrow alleyway where they soon came to the back door of the Blue Moon.

“Shh,” she said as she punched a code into the lock. “You wait here, and I’ll slip up the stairs without saying hello to Goldy. She’s likely to be watching TV and probably won’t hear me.”

But as soon as the back door of the Blue Moon swung open, Lee’s expectations plummeted as he recognized the O’Connors’s Uncle Nate leaning on the counter above Goldy’s desk and chatting.