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“We can’t. What if it’s alarmed?”
Automatically, I began looking for wires, contacts, but Hawk was one step ahead of me.
“It isn’t; I already checked.”
Of course he did.
He grabbed my hand, and I ran down the steps alongside him in childish glee, thinking of the times I’d skipped English lessons at school because I really wasn’t a Shakespeare fan. If teachers wanted kids to read, why not give them a book that wasn’t four hundred years old? Okay, he had some great one-liners, but…
“Where are we going?” Hawk asked.
“Somewhere. Anywhere. I don’t care.”
“Aren’t you going to speak with your family at all?”
“I texted Mom and my sisters to say we’d arrived.” None of them had responded. “The boat ride is optional—I double-checked the final itinerary—and we’ll see them at dinner. The thing is, they don’t actually care that I’m here.”
“I thought Odette insisted on you coming?”
“She did, but only because she’d have felt insulted if her own flesh and blood skipped her big day. It’s about her self-esteem, not my company.”
We’d ended up on the lawn that ran from the rear of the hotel down to the beach at the water’s edge. To the left, the wedding pergola stood bare on a terrace, waiting to be decorated with Odette’s roses and peonies and snapdragons. The terrace was bordered by neatly pruned shrubbery in brick-edged beds, and an ornamental pool with a heart-shaped fountain and fake koi—because it was illegal to keep real koi in an outdoor pond in Maine—provided a backdrop for the all-important wedding photos. A stiff breeze blew, and I hoped the stylist planned to bring a good supply of hairspray, or the pictures would need a whole bunch of photoshopping before Odette could post them on Instagram.
“Want to go for a walk?” Hawk asked. “There’s a small café beside the lighthouse at the other end of the island, and we could get breakfast.”
“I’d like that.”
He didn’t let go of my hand as we ambled past the golf course next door and along the shore, our silence comfortable rather than strained. The sun came out, and if it hadn’t been for the whole wedding thing and Kellan’s “accident,” I might actually have enjoyed the trip. I’d always been curious about what it would be like to spend more time with Hawk. Over the year we’d been screwing, my feelings had evolved from “phew, I’ve found a man who wants what I do” to “I wish he’d stay for longer than a few hours.” But I appreciated that he’d never pushed me, and in return, I’d given him the space he wanted.
Now, there was no space. After he steadied me over a rocky section, he tucked his arm around me, and I leaned into him, grateful for the warmth. There was still a chill in the air, and I hadn’t brought a jacket.
The café was a tiny tourist place with a dozen tables outside, sheltered from the wind by a thick hedge. Only two of them were occupied—one by a young family, and the other by a group of girls taking photos of themselves, the lighthouse, their drinks, and the water. When the waitress came over, one of them asked if they could get free breakfasts in exchange for “exposure.”
Hawk snorted. “Pay for the food, ladies. Exposure doesn’t cover the bills.”
That earned him a synchronised glare from the girls and a grateful smile from the waitress. They did grudgingly agree to pay, though.
Today’s Hawk was more chilled than I’d ever seen him. Sure, he relaxed in the office with his team and occasionally joined pick-up basketball games, and I’d heard he spent time in the clubhouse at The Darkness MC’s compound, but his smiles seemed to come more readily here.
“You want waffles again?” he asked.
“Or pancakes. Whatever they have. But I’ll pay today—it’s the least I can do after I dragged you away from the free breakfast in the hotel.”
“No, you won’t. And you didn’t drag me anywhere.”
Okay, he definitely hadn’t eased up on the stubbornness.
The waitress poured us coffee and then wrote down our orders, and I took some time to admire the scenery. A rare moment of peace in a life of chaos. Steppen Island was pretty in a wild, windswept kind of way, and I could see why Odette had chosen this place for her wedding, even if I couldn’t understand why she wanted to marry Stu in the first place.
“One day down, five to go,” I murmured to myself.
“You don’t get along with your family?” Hawk asked.
“Nope. And it’s not just that we don’t get along; we don’t have a single thing in common either.”
“Couldn’t get into flower arranging, huh?”
“It goes deeper than that. Our whole psyches are wired up different. Sometimes, I wonder if I was adopted.”
