But standing in front of Brooke and waiting for her answer made me feel like a kid trying to make amends for breaking a priceless family heirloom.
“Okay,” Brooke said. “Give me your phone.”
I handed her my phone and she quickly tapped her number into it. I grinned down at her, watching as she walked back to her best friend. The two of them linked arms before they started walking down the beach.
I watched until they disappeared from sight, then I looked down at my phone.
I had Brooke’s number.
And I fully intended to use it.
Her heart was clearly still broken from what I did, and her recent ex.
Now, it was my mission to mend it back together.
CHAPTER 4
BROOKE
I always relished the stillness of the morning.
Though, as I sat at my laptop, a sense of dread came over me while I stared at the blinking cursor.
The coffee pot in my room was filling the hut with its glorious perfume as the sun slowly rose up over the water. The crystal-clear mirror of the ocean was unwavering.
It was early, too early for anyone else on vacation to be up, which made it the perfect time of day to try and get some writing in. I wanted nothing more than to finish a book and get it published. It was the perfect story: a woman seeking love in all the wrong places, who finally comes to find that the only person she really needed to love was herself.
Something witty and fun, but also relatable, tugging at the heartstrings of readers.
Leaning forward, I managed to pound out another paragraph before the coffee pot beeped.
I got up to make a cup as I leaned against the wall. Nassau Island was picturesque, and the perfect place to write my first novel to publish. I wanted something that would introduce me to the market in the light I wanted to be painted. I wanted to write books that people could relate to, books with characters they could understand and lessons they could carry with them. I wanted to give advice they could take for whenever they needed it.
I didn’t want to write for the money or the fame. I wanted to write to pull people from their lives and delve with them into truths we don’t always want to admit to ourselves.
And in the process, what I wanted most was to discover more about myself.
After finishing my cup of coffee, I sat back down and stared at the page. An opening line and one paragraph, and I didn’t know how to continue from there. Why in the world was this so hard? In college, I could rattle three hundred pages away in a month.
No problem.
Writer’s block had never been an issue, but now it seemed to be a major struggle. The one thing keeping me from writing what my fingers wanted desperately to communicate.
I leaned back into my chair as the sun rose above the water. People were beginning to stir and now the mirrored reflection of the ocean was muddled with vacationers diving in. The island was coming alive with children and families, and it forced my mind back to the other night.
Back to Kevin and his kids and that mouth-watering dessert.
I’d had so much fun. Even though that wasn’t the purpose of the outing, I did enjoy my time with Kevin. I’d forgotten how easy it was to talk with him, how safe I felt whenever I was around him. The conversation was light-hearted and easy, and his children were little carbon copies of him. Sydney, with that confident sass and Daniel with his sincere express
ions.
Despite what I chose to focus on, my time with Kevin hadn’t been all bad.
I closed my eyes and slipped back in time to college, to the first time I’d seen Kevin in that bar. His chiseled jaw and high cheekbones showcased his dominance, but it was his large hand that caught my eye. It dwarfed the glass he was drinking from and made me painfully aware of other things that could dwarf me if I had the chance to get underneath his clothes. His chest pulled at the shirt he was wearing, and his shoulders were swollen with muscles.
Even as I sat in my chair in my bedroom, heat surged between my legs.
I’d fallen for him quickly in the three months we’d known one another, which was new territory for me and something I’d never done before. I’d had my share of flings as a wild college girl, but I’d never allowed myself to fall for any of them.