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

by Pamela Browning

  “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.

  IT 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.

  5

  YOU’VE GOT MAIL!

  To: A_OConnor@wixler.org

  From: H_Wixler@wixler.org

  Subject: Client

  A.J.,

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

  Repeat: VERY IMPORTANT.

  Harry Wixler

  OKAY, AZURE 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 t
he 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.