Love Letters in Fortune's Bay: A Fortune's Bay Novella

by Maria Luis

  “I’ll drive us to the Rosedale.”

  Daisy’s gaze cut to him. “The Rosedale? You mean, for dinner?”

  Reese twisted at the waist to stare at her. In the stormy shadows, his expression was completely obscure. He was a silhouette against the backdrop of an energy-charged sky. “We’re going to spend the night.”

  Oh.

  Oh.

  Was that her belly fluttering in anticipation? It was. It definitely was. She’d never allowed herself to even think about the possibility of sleeping in the same bed as Reese Harvey, but now that the visual was there, vivid as the lightning streaking across the sky, she couldn’t push it away. Her heartbeat accelerated, and she wet her lips. “Really? I mean, I guess that makes sense. Why waste company money by booking two—”

  He strode past her. “Two rooms, Mae. That’s the way this works.”

  It was a slap in the face, a reminder that she was calling the shots.

  She couldn’t remember a decision she regretted making more.

  Chapter Ten

  Dinner was beyond awkward.

  Almost as awkward as all those comedy sketches Daisy had once poured her heart into. Not even her glass of merlot could temper the way her knee bobbed under the table or her gaze constantly jumped to Reese.

  She stared.

  He ate his food.

  She wondered why in the world he’d fallen in love with her of all people and came to the conclusion that he had to be missing a screw or two up there.

  He made small talk about his cousin, Gage, and Gage’s wife Lizzie. He mentioned Gage’s twin, Owen, and how he was a tattoo artist over in New Orleans.

  She was a hot mess, torn between her heart and her head.

  In the end, she let her tongue do the talking. Or maybe it was the wine.

  “Say New Orleans again.”

  Reese cringed, his hand faltering as he reached for his longneck beer bottle. “You’re adding a heck of a lot of e’s in there.”

  She cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

  The mouth of the beer bottle kissed his lips, and for a moment, Daisy let herself imagine what it would be like if this was a real date and not just an unfortunate circumstance of being stuck on an island and having nowhere else to go. Her toes curled in her flats, still damp from sprinting across the front lawn of the Victorian to where Reese had parked his truck.

  He’d offered to come around and pick her up at the front door.

  Daisy had wanted nothing more than to let the rain slick her fears away into the soil beneath her feet.

  Reese set the bottle on the pristine, white tablecloth. “You gotta say it like it’s one word. Let it roll off your tongue.”

  Ignoring the absurd urge to do one of her old warmups for a show—one that involved a lot of arm-thrusting in the air and a butt wiggle or two—Daisy tried again. “Neworleenz.”

  With his lips, he made a bzzzt! sound, then followed it up with a clap of his hand on the table. Daisy jumped a little at that hand-to-table contact but smoothed away her skittishness with a sip of her favorite girl—merlot.

  “Anytime a person says eenz, a Mardi Gras king loses his crown.”

  Just like that, some of the tension in the air dissipated as they both laughed. She let her gaze roam his familiar face—the slightly crooked nose, the dark, beautiful eyes, the slight jut of his chin. When he smiled big, as he had often this last week, dimples creased his cheeks, threatening every woman in a fifty-foot radius of finding herself staring at Reese Harvey, tongue lolling out of her mouth.

  Why do you have to be my boss?

  It’d be so much easier if he wasn’t. If she didn’t have a track record of wanting men who paid her. If she didn’t want to know so very desperately how his lips might feel pressed against hers, those dimples of his on full display as he kissed her.

  “Say it for me, then,” she finally told him, propping her chin on an upturned palm, her elbow planted squarely on the table next to her plate of Bolognese pasta.

  After another swig of beer, Reese leaned in, forearms on the table, bottle clasped loosely between his hands. Daisy blindly sought out her wine, drawing a large sip to calm her nerves.

  She dropped her eyes to his mouth in wait.

  Over the years, she’d heard him say “New Orleans” a thousand times over. But it never failed to make her grin when he shivered at her blatantly wrong pronunciations. And she absolutely could not get enough of watching him speak. Maybe it was because his accent was a strange cross between New Jersey and Southern drawl.

  It had always been sexy to her, even when she’d done her best to pretend otherwise.

  “Watch my mouth,” he said, and, oh boy, did she. Rapt, she rested her wine glass against her collarbone. She should have gone with a chilled chardonnay. As it was, the dark berry hints, mixed with a Chilean spice, heated her like a furnace.

  Liar. It’s him that makes you feel this way.

  He opened his mouth, and Daisy did her best not to guzzle her wine. Or pour it over her head, along with every glass of ice water at the table.

  “N’Orlenz,” he husked. Daisy nodded and twirled her finger at him to do it again. So, he did: “N’Orlenz.”

  Sigh, just as good as a British accent.

  “It’s sounds like a magical place.”

  Reese buttered his warm French bread, then popped a bite into his mouth. Washed it all down with beer. “Fortune’s Bay is my home.”

  “Why did you leave”—she threw him a wink—“New Orleenz?”

  His bark of laughter rang through the hotel’s fancy dining room. “You just trying to push my buttons?”

  Daisy shrugged. “I like it when you react.” Realizing how awful that sounded, she hurried to add, “What I meant to say is, you’re always so self-composed. I’m a wreck compared to you. I guess that I’ve always assumed you don’t have any buttons to push.”

  “Trust me,” Reese drawled, “I have them.” He said it in such a way that she thought maybe he was referring to her.

  Intrigued, Daisy leaned in. “Like what?”

  He studied her then, dark eyes narrowed as though he was determined to figure out if she was just messing with him. He must have deemed her good to go because he set down his knife and fork and drew the beer bottle back to his mouth again. His head tipped back, Adam’s apple working with each long swallow, and Daisy shifted in her stiff chair.

  Finally, he set the bottle down, but kept his hand wrapped around it, fingers drumming against the perspiring label. “Growing up, I wasn’t the biggest kid. I was short, scrawny.” He tilted his head to the side, his brows lowered. “My family, we didn’t have much. Blue collar in every sense of the word, especially after my dad got hurt on the job. I was lucky enough to get a scholarship at a prestigious private school in the city, but . . .”

  When he trailed off, Daisy tried to piece together the small crumbs he’d left for her. She stared at his fingers, which were now rubbing the beer label, back and forth, back and forth, so that the edge of the sticker began to peel. Temptation lit inside her like a silent, dangerous motivator, demanding that she reach out and take his hand.

  Offer him comfort.

  Soothe his hurts.

  She sat on her hand, determined to keep to her side of the table.

  “Was it hard?” she asked, then clarified, “adjusting, I mean. Was adjusting to the school hard?”

  His mouth pulled up in a humorless grin that hurt her heart. “You could say that.” He met her gaze. “Bullies will be bullies. Thing is, I had a temper like no other. Quick as a fuse. But I could never quite get my dad out of my head.”

  “What do you mean?”

  With a hand to the back of his neck, his still-damp T-shirt bunched around his bicep, Reese went on. “Pop worked on the oil rigs in the Gulf. It was exhausting work. He’d be gone for two to three weeks, but each time he was ready to head out the door, he’d bend down and”—Reese drew in a deep breath, his broad chest expanding—“remind me
that I had to be the man of the house while he was gone. I had to look out for my mom, be responsible, do whatever was needed of me. So, yeah, my buttons were pushed a lot growing up, given the circumstances.”

  “But you never lost your cool.”

  “Never. I don’t like to lose control.”

  He had, though, back at the Victorian. When she’d dogged his heels, Reese had come undone. Eyes wild, hands shoving up in the air, his big body pressing her against one of the three remaining walls in that dining room.

  Daisy’s grasp on her fork tightened, and she felt a little lightheaded at the implication of what that meant. Still, she forced herself to keep the conversation on track. He was opening up to her, and she loved every moment. “Is your dad okay now, I hope? You don’t talk about them much, so I’d always assumed . . . I guess I’d always assumed they’d passed, since they haven’t come to visit.”

  Reese watched her, each second bleeding into the next, and then he glanced away. “He isn’t relegated to the wheelchair anymore, so that’s good. But, no, him and my mom prefer to stay in N’Orleans. They like it there; it’s their home. Neither of them are major risk-takers, though my dad does get his rocks off on hitting up bingo every Friday and Saturday night.”

  “A man living life on the edge.” Holding back a smile, she pressed a hand over her heart, which thudded under her palm. “Are he and your mom still living in the house you grew up in, right in N’Orlenz?”

  That earned her a husky chuckle. “Nah, I set them up in a nice condo in the French Quarter, just like they always dreamed.”

  Daisy wasn’t quite sure what possessed her to say it, but to hear him speak so wistfully about his family, there was no way she could keep her thoughts on lockdown. “Would you ever move back?” She desperately wanted him to say no. It was more than just a love for her job. She truly hadn’t been lying when she’d said he was one of her closest friends. “Or do you think Fortune’s Bay works for you?”

  “I used to think that I’d never leave Fortune’s Bay. The water, the sand, the good weather all year round.” He fiddled with the beer’s label, flicking it back and forth with the pad of his thumb. “Sometimes, though, sometimes I think it’d be nice to be surrounded by family.” He shrugged, then drained the rest of the bottle. “I have no plans to leave, but you never really know where life will bring you. I’m a man living life on the edge.”

  He flashed her a hot look then, and it took everything in Daisy not to blush. Okay, maybe she did. Just a little. Licking her lips, she murmured, “I want to be a woman living life on the edge.”

  Reese offered a slow, easy grin. “No one’s stopping you, Mae.”

  He was one-hundred percent right. No one was stopping her, which meant that the ball was in her court.

  And she needed to decide what to do about it.

  Chapter Eleven

  Reese was in hell—or, at least, as close to hell as he could be while staying the night at Fortune’s Bay’s fanciest hotel. The storm outside had yet to lessen, and the pitter-patter of rain droplets slapping against the windows was his only symphony as he stripped off his T-shirt and tossed it on the floor beside the king-sized bed.

  Dinner hadn’t gone as planned.

  All right, confession: the whole day had gone to shit the moment he’d opened up to Daisy at the Victorian.

  His employee.

  Of course, she wouldn’t want anything more with him. Knowing that her refusal sat on the sins of another didn’t make him feel even a lick better. Wanting Daisy and working with Daisy—in his head, at least—were two separate things. He could do one without damaging the other.

  “She obviously doesn’t think the same,” he muttered under his breath. “Idiot.”

  Yup, that was him all right.

  He caught sight of his haggard appearance in the hotel room’s gilded mirror. Messy hair, broken nose. His shoulders were broad, though his frame strayed more toward bulky muscle than the lean, model variety.

  Reese used his body for a living, and even though he’d never been a lady’s man, he knew women found him attractive.

  As for Daisy . . .

  With a curse, he turned from his reflection and popped the brass button of his jeans. He’d need to get his act together before the morning. Figure out a way to exorcise her from his thoughts on a permanent basis. Because he didn’t need to be staring after her all day, hoping that she might change her mind.

  That she might want him.

  Shoving his jeans down the length of his legs, he let the denim hit the floor. His damp socks were next, and then he was sitting on the edge of the bed, knees splayed, elbows planted on his thighs.

  All in all, it could have gone worse today. Daisy could have quit. She could have stormed out, hailed an Uber, and taken the first water taxi to the mainland.

  Instead, she’d been locked on Shelter Island with him.

  And now . . . Reese cocked his head, straining his ears to listen for any movement in the hotel room to the left of his. Daisy’s room. In another lifetime, he’d rap on her door and step inside. He’d sweep her off her feet, toss her on the bed. Worship her in the way he’d dreamed about for the last three years and counting.

  But he wasn’t that kind of guy, and when he saw her tomorrow morning at the office, he’d give her a smile. He’d make easy conversation about the crazy weather. And then he’d take the first water taxi back to Shelter Island to continue working on the Victorian that would never be theirs, as he’d ignorantly convinced himself it would be.

  Man, he’d been wrong about a lot lately—

  His head jerked toward the door at the sound of light knocking.

  “Reese?”

  Like the door wasn’t a physical divider at all, he heard the nerves in her sweet voice. What was she doing here?

  He didn’t give himself the chance to dwell on the question.

  Rising to his feet, he strode straight for the door. One step. Two steps. Three steps, and he was yanking open the door and drinking in the sight of her before him.

  Hair wavy from sprinting through the rainstorm.

  A fluffy, white hotel bathrobe that was tied in tight at the waist. The hem hung to mid-thigh and she’d rolled the sleeves up to her elbows.

  Reese swallowed.

  “Oh.” The word fled her mouth in a puff of air as her gaze darted downward, sweeping over him.

  “Oh?” he repeated gruffly. Aiming for act-casual, he leaned against the doorframe and folded his arms across his chest.

  Daisy’s dark eyes didn’t budge from his abs. She licked her lips, hands lifting to pull the V of her bathrobe tight like polyester armor. “You’re naked.”

  It was official. She was going to be the death of him. He cleared his throat, both in an attempt to encourage her gaze to lift to his face and because he wasn’t sure he had the strength to speak right now. That look of hers . . . there was only one place a look like that said it wanted to go, and she’d already put the X on that future—no bedtime activities with the boss.

  He’d heard that loud and clear.

  “Pretend they’re swim trunks,” he suggested, stilling his hands from reaching down to cover both his stomach and crotch. There was seriously only so much a guy could take, and he was already teetering on the edge of control.

  “Unless you’re European, those aren’t swim trunks.” She didn’t point at him, but she sure as heck swung her gaze down. Then, as though realizing that she’d been staring too hard, she tipped her chin back to look at the ceiling. Her hands covered her face, fingers hiding her pretty dark eyes from view.

  Like that wasn’t inconspicuous. Reese bit back laughter.

  “Is this where you want me to apologize for disliking boxers?” He shifted against the door, and, okay, yeah, so maybe he angled his body for a better look . . . if she ever stopped searching for answers from the ceiling.

  Daisy groaned. “This is where I ask for a redo and go back into my room.”

  “No can do, Mae,�
� Reese drawled, then leaned in to repeat, slower this time, “no . . . can . . . do.”

  “I knew I’d regret this.”

  A flush had worked itself over her neck, and for the first time, Reese grinned. Truly grinned.

  Looks like Miss I-Don’t-Want-You did, in fact, want him.

  His heart thumped in his chest, taking its first steps, it seemed, since she’d shut him down earlier that afternoon.

  “You don’t regret a thing.”

  “I do, really.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yup!” she chirped like a liar.

  Reese’s gaze caught on the hem of her bathrobe, and he checked back a tortured groan at how it had ridden up her smooth thighs. “You regret skipping on the underwear too?”

  That got her attention.

  Her hands fell from her face and that flush morphed into something deeper, redder, and then she whipped around and lunged for the doorknob to her room, the back of her bathrobe lifting with the movement.

  Giving him the perfect view of her . . . kiwi.

  Reese couldn’t help it—he laughed, loud, throaty, a deep rumble that echoed in the hallway. Pure joy, that’s exactly what he felt to the deepest part of his soul. Daisy did that to him, even when she was turning tail and scampering back into the safety of her perfect, uncomplicated world.

  The door slammed shut behind her, the lock sliding into place with a definitive click.

  A beat passed and then another, and then it snapped open with an audible whoosh. Daisy peeked her head out. “You’re still there.”

  Reese felt himself smile. “I figured you’d be back.”

  Her lips parted. “I-I—”

  Dipping his chin, he murmured, “Don’t worry, I’ll wait.”

  Her eyes went wide.

  Back stiffened.

  Dug into the front pocket of her bathrobe to reveal a folded piece of paper, which she shoved at his chest with the order to “read it.”