Page 14 of Our Chaotic Love Affair

When I came back inside, she was still at the bottom of the stairs. She looked faintly annoyed that I’d actually done it.

“You didn’t have to carry all of them at once.”

“I’m bringing in your bags. I don’t think you get to decide how I do it.”

She didn’t have an answer for that, so she just took the canvas tote from me and started up the stairs. I followed with the other two bags.

Her room was on the second floor, far side of the house—the quiet side, away from where Kent and Sylvie were. Austin and Melody had the ground floor to themselves. I set her bags inside her door and stepped back.

She stood in the doorway, looking tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. “Goodnight,” she said.

“Goodnight.” I turned and started toward the stairs. It was one flight up to my suite, a shower, and several hours of sleep before tomorrow’s golf game. Simple. Clean. Exactly what I should do.

I made it four steps before I stopped. Looked back. She was still standing in her doorway, one hand on the door frame, not quite ready to go inside. She looked terribly sad. Not crying. Not falling apart. Just quietly, privately sad in the way of someone who’d been holding something heavy for too long and was too stubborn to put it down.

I stood there for a moment, genuinely uncertain. This wasn’t my terrain. I didn’t do this. I didn’t notice women’s sadness and feel compelled to address it. That was a different kind of man. A softer kind.

But she was still standing there, and I was still looking. And I wasn’t ready for bed. I needed to wind down. I rarely crawled into bed before one in the morning. Usually I was working, dealing with people in different time zones.

“There’s prosecco in the fridge,” I said. “Upstairs. I asked for it specifically.”

She looked at me like I had sprouted a second head. The silence stretched long enough that I was certain she would say no. I started composing a reasonable exit from the offer that didn’t involve explaining myself. I felt like an idiot. Why would the woman, who made her disgust for me known, want to have a drink with me?

“Okay,” she said.

I had to replay the word in my head to make sure I heard it right. Well, shit. That was not what I’d expected.

CHAPTER 6

CLEO

This was a bad idea. I knew it was a bad idea. But I still followed Cash Bancroft up the stairs to his suite on the third floor. My heart was doing some weird donkey-kick thing against my chest. I was choosing to attribute the sporadic rhythm to the climb rather than the man leading the way.

The top floor of the beach house was insane. Like, genuinely, absurdly, obscenely nice. It was the entire sprawling third floor converted into what could only be described as a master suite on steroids. Vaulted ceilings. Floor-to-ceiling windows on three sides. A king bed that looked like it had been carved from a single piece of driftwood. A sitting area with furniture that looked gorgeous and comfortable, which was a pretty difficult feat.

And the views. God, the views.

The ocean stretched out endlessly. The beach below was empty except for the solar lights softly illuminating the path from the house. The sky was absolutely packed with stars, more than I ever saw in the city.

I wondered why Melody and Austin didn’t take the room? Then I remembered she was pregnant, and knowing Austin, he was going to be very overprotective. She would never climb stairs again. At least not while she was pregnant.

I stood there soaking it all in while Cash moved to the mini-bar area tucked into one corner. He pulled out a bottle of prosecco from the small fridge, and I watched as he expertly removed the foil and wire cage.

The cork popped with a satisfying sound, and he poured two glasses, the bubbles catching the light from the single lamp in the corner. It was good lighting. Soft. None of that LED nonsense. The kind of lighting that made a girl look nice instead of washed out.

I shook off the thought. It was my job to notice lighting but I wasn’t working. I was just having a drink with a super-hot dude that I despised. Most of the time.

He handed me a glass without a word. I took a sip. It was crisp and cold and exactly what I needed right then.

I turned slightly, catching Cash’s reflection in a large mirror mounted on the wall. His back was to me as he set down the bottle and reached up to undo the top few buttons of his shirt. I couldn’t look away.

His fingers moved to his cuffs. He rolled up his sleeves one at a time, methodically folding the fabric until it was just below his elbows, exposing his forearms.

Yummm-mmyyy.

The word echoed in my head as I watched the muscles in his forearms flex with each movement. Why were forearms so hot? Biceps were not what caught my eye when I checked out a man. It was forearms. I usually liked mine with a tat or two, but his were very nice. Veiny. Strong.

I could see the way his shoulder blades moved beneath his white shirt, the fabric pulling taut across his back. He was built like someone who didn’t just sit behind a desk all day. There was actual strength there, actual definition. The kind of body that required maintenance and effort and probably a personal trainer who cost more per session than I spent on groceries in a month.