Maximum Exposure

by Alison Kent

  “Like that matters?” What, she couldn’t be sorry, because it was ancient history? Or was it because it hurt him anew for her to know? For her sympathy to take him back to a place he’d left behind?

  She knelt to wash his buttocks, his thighs, his calves, his feet. The last thing she wanted was to cause him more pain. “I hate to think about you and your family suffering through that, experiencing that loss. That’s all.”

  “Is that the sort of thing they teach you to say in charm school? To give the poor, grieving soul your condolences? To prostrate yourself and wash his feet?”

  What the hell? “Excuse me?”

  He turned, then swiftly found her shoulders and jerked her up. “You don’t know my family, Jodi. You don’t know me.”

  “Not yet,” was all she got out before he pushed her away and climbed out of the tub, still soapy and dripping.

  “Don’t feed me that bullshit about suffering and loss when you don’t have a clue what it’s like to watch a man plunge a knife into your kid brother’s gut and slice all the way to his throat.”

  Twenty-seven

  Though he admittedly hating leaving Olivia in Miami, Finn was damn glad to get back to his beach. He thought after this photography gig was over, he’d stick close to home for a while.

  Yeah, it might take longer to earn enough cash to finish the work on the beach house, but there was something to be said for living life in the slow, lazy lane, and slow, Miami was not.

  And it wasn’t just the slow-lane thing or the lazy thing. He was having trouble figuring out Olivia, and she was way too complicated a woman for him to be feeling the things he was feeling for her with so much of who she was up in the air.

  Hell, half the reason he’d wanted to do the beach shoot here was so he could get her out of her comfort zone and see how she fit in his.

  He walked down to the water’s edge, loving that he could do that here without dozens of oiled-up, hard bodies competing for space.

  He squatted on his haunches, then gave it up and just sat, crossing his legs, hunched forward and drinking his coffee, and knowing he was going to have to shower again before Olivia got here, or deal with tracking sand through the house all day.

  After Saturday and whatever the hell had happened then, he’d expected her to cancel. He didn’t know what she’d seen in the warehouse shots that had scared her or hurt her or whatever.

  He still didn’t know. She hadn’t told him a thing. She’d closed the computer, closed herself, and left, just like that. Like she really did have nothing else on her mind than getting ready to enjoy her day off. He didn’t buy that crap for a minute.

  Something in those pictures had triggered her fight-or-flight response. He’d seen it in the calculated way she’d closed the laptop and got to her feet, making certain there was nothing in her appearance to criticize, smoothing and straightening as if the fate of the world depended on her clothes being wrinkle free and her body covered.

  He understood that she had an image to maintain, that she needed to look her best as the owner of Splash & Flambé. But they’d been on an impromptu picnic, sharing cold beer and hot pizza on a blanket on the floor. The only business she’d done was look at his pictures. Something about them had her pulling her protective shell tight.

  For the life of him, he couldn’t see the danger. But then, he hadn’t been the one out there on the floor, the one letting down his hair and sweating through the clothes he was wearing and moving his body until he could barely stand straight.

  The only scary thing he could imagine the photographs bringing to mind was how he’d slammed her into the wall and banged her until his legs were the ones ready to give out. Yeah, that had not been one of his proudest moments, even if it had been one of the most amazing.

  He watched the steady pulse of waves, the clouds that hung low and obscured the sky, the white Vs of gulls against the gray and thought again of chemistry. His and Olivia’s. The chemistry even Dustin Parks had noticed and thought would make for the perfect working relationship.

  Finn sipped at his coffee, supposing sex had been inevitable. He’d definitely had it on his mind since that first morning in front of the bistro. All that caramel and brown-sugar hair and sweet toffee skin and eyes the color of chocolate. He’d wanted to feast on her, eat her up, lose himself in all that luscious stuff.

  But a warehouse wall? A stage floor?

  Chemistry or not, he could’ve done a whole lot better than that, could’ve shown her that he wasn’t the thoughtless, horny louse she had ever right to peg him as.

  He really did know how to treat a woman, even if his actions with Olivia—beer and pizza on Styrofoam plates and a blanket on a hardwood floor—proved otherwise.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  Whoa! Just whoa. He hadn’t heard her tires on the drive, her car door, his front door…. “Sure. I see you found the place okay.”

  “I also found your coffeepot,” she said, crossing her ankles and dropping down beside him in one fluid motion, her long, full skirt ballooning in the breeze. She patted it down and never spilled a drop from her mug. “And I have a bone to pick with you and your beach house.”

  “Oh?”

  She gestured over her shoulder with her chin. “I pictured a couple of rooms on stilts. Not, what? Four bedrooms? A wraparound deck? A professional kitchen and a main room large enough for two full sofas and a big-screen TV? Not to mention the pool table.”

  He brought his mug to his mouth and smiled. “Yeah, but it’s all up on stilts.”

  “As everything down here should be. You’re a surprise at every turn. A mystery man. A Renaissance man.”

  The surprise was that she was here. He still hadn’t shaken the shock. “I wasn’t sure you would come.”

  “I told you I would,” she said, both hands cupping her mug as she blew across the top.

  “Yeah, but things haven’t exactly been comfortable between us.” He waited for her to contradict him. She didn’t. “I didn’t know how you were going to feel about bunking here.”

  She straightened out her legs, toed off her sandals, dug her feet into the sand, and sighed deeply. “First of all, I assume my bunking here comes with my own bed, or at least my own sofa.”

  “It does.”

  “And obviously, I have my choice of rooms.”

  “You do, though they’re not all furnished.”

  “Well, at least neither one of us will feel crowded.”

  The way he’d crowded her up against the wall in the warehouse?

  “Secondly,” she went on to say. “The comfortable thing? My fault, and I apologize.”

  Uh, no. He wasn’t going to let her blanket things that easily with her one-size-fits-all apology. “I’m not sure what you think is your fault, but it’s my fault that things at the photo shoot got out of hand.”

  He saw in his periphery when she pursed her mouth, hiding it behind her mug and sipping before she spoke. “So we’re going to go there, are we?”

  Yeah. They were. “I think we have to.”

  She waited a moment before asking, “You’re accepting responsibility but not apologizing?”

  “I apologize for the when and the where and the uncomfortable how, but not for the fact that it happened,” he said and waited, wondering if she was going to try and make the pleasure they’d shared into something less.

  She tried, but it was a weak effort. “It wasn’t an anomaly? A moment out of time?”

  “God, I hope not.”

  And at that, she laughed. “See, that’s what I adore about you, Finn McLain. You’re so honest.”

  “That’s me. Honest and happy to be adored.”

  “Better than being abhorred, wouldn’t you say?”

  He would, and she didn’t have to be so quick to dash his hopes that she felt more for him than adoration. He certainly felt more for her, though he hadn’t defined it, because it was too wrapped up in lust. “The way you abhorred the pictures, you mean?”

 
She dug her toes more deeply into the sand until all he could see were her heels and her ankles. “It’s not that I didn’t like them. I certainly didn’t abhor them. It was just seeing them like that…seeing myself like that…It wasn’t easy. It brought back some stuff I try not to think about.”

  “Like me ruining your outfit and not even offering to pay for it?”

  Her smile was brief. “No. Not you. Just some ancient history that belongs in the past.”

  The set of her mouth, her shoulders, the deep V wrinkling her brow…the way she sat hunched in on herself, buried under her skirt and in the sand…This was bigger than he’d been digging for.

  He’d thought this thing between them was about chemistry exploding into sex. That could’ve been what sparked it, but this was way more. “Is it something you should think about? Maybe dump it once and for all?”

  “I don’t think this can be dumped. I’ve been trying since I was fourteen.”

  He mused on that for a moment…. “A few years ago, I was living in Texas and was on the road with my sister. We stopped for a burger at this out-of-the-way diner. My sister…she’s a treasure hunter, antiquities, antiques, historical papers, stuff like that.

  “Anyway, this small-time thug was following her. Someone had paid him to find the same thing she was after. He and his cronies stormed the diner. They held three of us hostage and sent her and this other dude after the documents.”

  “What? Are you kidding me?” She turned her entire body to face him, settling in as if sitting around a campfire, listening to his tale. “What happened? Obviously, things came out okay for you. What about your sister?”

  “She’s fine. She even married the guy who helped her hunt down the artifacts.”

  “Wow. That’s a plot for a romance novel if I’ve ever heard one.”

  “Yeah. It is,” he said, thinking that Georgia and Harry had gotten their happily ever after.

  “Were you scared?”

  “Some of the time, sure. Mostly, I tried to figure a way out of there. My life didn’t exactly flash before my eyes, but I had three long days to think about things. My mom dying young. My dad dying in prison, where he was serving a life sentence for betraying his country.”

  “Finn. Jesus.” She reached over, squeezed his wrist. “And here I thought you were just a guy remodeling his beach house.”

  Finn captured Olivia’s fingers before she could get away. “I am just a guy remodeling his beach house. But every once in a while, I pull out some crap from the past to see how it’s sitting. If I’ve grown enough so that it doesn’t bother me anymore, or if I still need to work on the fit so it’s not choking me.”

  Olivia stared at their joined hands, toyed with his fingers, finally looked out over the water, where a ray of sunshine had sliced through the clouds and turned the surface of the ocean to glittering gold.

  Several minutes passed before she glanced back, and then the sadness in her eyes nearly killed him.

  Twenty-eight

  Livia had thought a couple of times since Saturday’s pizza with Finn that she should cancel the trip to Key Largo. She’d ended up making the drive down for two reasons.

  One, the photo shoot wouldn’t mean more than one night spent away from Splash & Flambé. Two, she couldn’t avoid this thing growing between her and Finn forever.

  And, yes. That was the main reason she’d ignored all her doubts and come.

  But she’d never envisioned herself revealing to him what had happened to her years ago. “Tell me something.”

  “Anything,” he said, squeezing her hand.

  “Is confession really good for the soul?”

  “Guess that depends if what you’re confessing is weighing you down so much that you can’t get on with your life.”

  Ouch. “The stuff with your father—”

  “My father being a traitor, you mean?”

  She nodded, wondering how long it had taken him to speak of it so bluntly. “I’m not prying. It’s just an example of something pretty big that you had to deal with. Even though you weren’t at fault.”

  “That’s life, Olivia.” He shrugged, let her go, and stretched out on his side. “Stuff happens, and we’re stuck with the fallout.”

  True enough. “So, did it help? To talk about it?”

  “What’s helped the most is time. But, yeah. It’s nice to be reminded that what he did was his choice, not mine.”

  He made it sound so cut and dried, when for her, things had always seemed so much…stickier. “What happened to me…It wasn’t my choice, either. I was told over and over that it wasn’t my fault, but I’ve always wondered perhaps if I’d behaved differently, if the outcome would have been the same.”

  “That’s legitimate. I’ve thought a lot how I complained all the time about money. About me not having any,” he said, and she laughed.

  “That sounds like a typical teenager.”

  “Yeah, but if I hadn’t been such a selfish prick about the guitar I wanted and the shoes and the car, would my dad have done what he did? Or was he just making up for being a single parent?” He snorted. “Like money could take the place of our mom.”

  Hearing him talk so freely about what he’d suffered at the hands of a loved one, and knowing what she did about how easygoing he was, made opening up so natural.

  She breathed deeply and went for it. “I’m the baby of the family, and that meant I got a lot of attention. As in a lot of attention. Everything I did was cute and perfect, and I was praised for things so insignificant that I had no perspective. I could do no wrong, and I loved it. All of it. I wanted more, so…”

  “You did what you could to get it.”

  “Put simply, yes.” But it wasn’t simple at all. “I excelled in school, was involved in anything extracurricular possible, and I dressed in clothes that I knew girls would envy, and boys—”

  “Would want to get into.”

  “Uh, yeah,” she said, with a sigh. “You’re not the only girl who ever did.”

  “Maybe not, but how many kept it up after being called a cock tease, a slut, and things so humiliating I really have erased them?”

  “That’s a tricky one. I’m guessing you kept it up to prove them wrong?”

  “That was part of it, I suppose, but mostly, it was the only thing I knew. The more outlandishly I acted as a kid, the more hugs and pinched cheeks and pats on the head everyone gave me.”

  “Olivia could do no wrong.”

  “Exactly.” She wasn’t at fault. She wasn’t to blame. “She was an overachiever, and acting out had never resulted in anything but positive feedback.”

  “Enter the cock tease and slut accusations.”

  Okay, now this was getting hard. She got to her feet, walked to the water’s edge, let the water lap at her feet and eventually her hem.

  “Who hurt you?” Finn asked, his voice pitched low and coming from just behind her.

  She kicked at a cloud of bubbly foam. “A friend of my father’s. He said I invited his advances. Told me I’d asked for it with the way I flounced around half undressed.”

  “You know you didn’t. No woman asks for a sexual assault.”

  She tried to shrug off his words. “He didn’t really hurt me—”

  “Of course, he did. If not physically, then emotionally. How old were you?”

  “Fourteen. Old enough to know better.”

  “Olivia—”

  “He was right. About that much, anyway. I’d seen him looking at me. I knew what he was thinking.” She lifted her face, letting the breeze cool her. “But he wasn’t going to have any say in what I wore. I had the right to wear anything I wanted to, damn him, to expose as much of my body as society said was decent. I’d show him. And I did. Until he showed me.”

  She didn’t move when she sensed Finn coming closer. She didn’t freeze or flinch. She wanted him there. Wanted the comfort he offered when he stood behind her and wrapped her up in his arms.

  She closed hers on top of his a
nd held him there, sinking into him, needing the support of his body, but needing even more the emotional rock he offered.

  They stood like that for several minutes, rocking back and forth with the waves. The sadness she’d been feeling seeped away, leaving what she hoped would grow into a fuller contentment.

  For now, she’d take the sense of calm. It seemed a good start—though it would’ve been nice to have it last a little longer.

  Finn apparently didn’t see things her way. “So when you came to Dustin’s condo and kept your sarong wrapped tight, what were you showing me?”

  “Obviously, I was showing you nothing,” she said, defusing him since he wasn’t going to let it go.

  “Yeah, I get the covered-up part. That’s not what I meant.”

  “I don’t know.” Was being in the dark such a bad thing? “I’m not even sure it was a conscious decision, but I do know you confuse me.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  He was such a man. “Yeah. You would.”

  “Hey, confusing you means I’m making you think.”

  And he sounded so proud. “Is that what a photographer’s supposed to do? Make his client think?”

  At that, he hugged her tighter, brought his mouth closer to her ear. “What I think is that we haven’t been just a client and her photographer for a very long time.”

  “Is that because you’re not a photographer?”

  He slid his hands lower, found the hem of her tunic top, and worked his way beneath. “I looked at the photos after you left. PI or not, I take a fierce picture.”

  “You had a fierce subject,” she said, trying not to shiver when his fingers found her skin.

  “I can see why Dustin’s been bugging you about this. Your eyes are phenomenal. You show everything you’re feeling.”

  He might think that phenomenal. She found it unnerving, and there was absolutely no way he was getting her to turn around. “Did you see it at the time?”

  He flattened his palms on her rib cage. His voice was gruff when he answered. “Are you really asking me that question?”

  That was what she’d thought. “Has Dustin seen them?”