Finding the one woman you want when you have nothing to give. If the universe has a sense of humor, I imagine it’s laughing at me now.
“What a world,” I mutter to the dog by my feet. Ace hasn’t left my side since we arrived at the beach, despite watching the seagulls wading along the water’s edge with a hunter’s intensity.
“You failed at being a seeing eye dog, and I’m failing at being sighted. We’re a solid pair.”
His head turns up at my voice and dark dog eyes meet mine.So what,he seems to be saying.We’re on the beach. Enjoy it.
Perhaps he’s right about that, or perhaps I’ve lost my mind to be considering what a dog might be thinking. His mind is probably focused on belly rubs and meaty bones.
I shade my eyes and look out across the waves. Summer’s wading in the shallows. She’s in a wet-suit despite the warmth in the air, an instructor on either side of her. All three are laughing at the latest tumble she’d taken off the surfboard, their wet suits like second skins.
Not for the first time today, I’m wondering how the hell I was so stupid as to not book myself in for the session as well. Have I become such a fun-hating curmudgeon? Already?
She’d kissed me last night.
The tentative hope in her eyes as she did it, stretching up, taking the leap, had stunned me. Apart from the tipsy question she’d asked me after that beer tasting, my thoughts hadn’t allowed me to consider the fact that she might genuinely want something.
Want me.
Or want who she thought I was, at any rate.
I should have let her run back inside, to safety, nursing nothing more than faint embarrassment. But after that first, tantalizing taste…
And now I can’t concentrate for shit.
I close my laptop and surrender to the joy of watching her out in the water.
She’s grinning when she walks up the beach to me later. Tendrils of wet blonde hair snake over her neck and hang in a braid down her back.
“That,” she says, “was awesome.”
“It looked like it.”
“Were you watching the whole time? You must have seen me fall off a bajillion times.”
I shake my head. “You did great by the end. Even the instructors thought so.”
She snorts and looks over her shoulder to where they’re disassembling the windsurfing board. “Brody has surfed since he could walk, and Luke has competed for the state. Twice. How did you manage to getthemto instruct me?”
“Just made the right phone call,” I say. Her smile makes it all worth it.
“That must have taken several phone calls. God, Anthony, I’m so full of adrenaline I feel like I could run along this beach or scale a skyscraper.”
“There are none of those here.”
She turns around, offering me her back, and lifts her braid out of the way. “Help me with the zipper?”
I grasp the metal between my fingers and tug the wet fabric down. It splits in a straight line down the curve of her spine, all the way to her red bikini bottoms. Two small dimples rest on either side of her spine, right there, at the low of her back.
“There you go.”
She struggles out of the arms of the wet suit and laughs when it gets stuck. “These are great when they’re on and awful pretty much all the time when they’re not.”
“I remember.”
“You’ve surfed too?”
“Yes, but it was a long time ago.”