Page 31 of South Beach Bodyguards

“You’re the least high maintenance girl I’ve met,” he said. “If I had to guess, I’d say all you need is food, your dog, and that’s it. You don’t constantly check your phone, you don’t complain about the weather, you eat anything that is put in front of you. It’s nice.”

I was going to take it as a compliment, even though it made me sound very basic. “That does sound like me. But apparently I’m also clumsy and fall down stairs and give myself fake names.”

“Everybody trips once in awhile.”

“When was the last time you tripped?”

“I don’t know. But when I was a teenager I was falling all over the place. My legs and feet grew too fast for me to adjust to my new reality, you know what I mean?”

“That was me with my breasts.” I ate another grape and watched the waves rolling into the shore. “Do you know one time I went to California with my dad and the water isn’t blue there? It’s cold too. I was shocked and disappointed. I thought the ocean everywhere looked like it does here.”

“I’ve never seen snow. It’s a fantasy of mine to go snowboarding.” Ryan was sitting next to me, one knee up, his forearm resting on it. He barely fit on his towel and without his shoes on, I could see how huge his feet actually were. His mother may have not been a great parent post-birth, but whatever she had done while he was in utero it had created a giant.

“Snowboarding sounds like something I would suck at.” I waved away a few seagulls who were getting bold. They were well aware I had food and they were hoping I was a tourist who would feed them. Not a chance. I loved animals, but the seagulls were scavengers. Rats with wings. Once you fed them, they would never leave.

“Tell me what you’re good at.” Ryan had on sunglasses so I couldn’t see his eyes, but it just sounded like a conversational question. There didn’t seem to be any deep hidden meaning to it.

“School. Being on time. Taking care of animals. Cooking. Putting on lipstick without a mirror. Avoiding confrontation. You?”

“Winning fights. Bench pressing. Following my conscience. Interrogation. Laying on the beach.” He turned and gave me a smile. “Giving women orgasms.”

I should have known he would go there. Most guys did. “Interesting,” I said, purposefully not taking the bait. “Who do you interrogate?”

“Women who pretend they don’t want to have sex with me.”

I knew what he meant. It was supposed to be flirtatious. But I wasn’t biting, and honestly, he needed a little help with his delivery. Or maybe all women but me fell for that. But I still felt compelled to state a case for all women. “Then that makes you a creep. No means no.”

Ryan made a sound of impatience. “Okay, that is not what I meant. I am not some kind of sexual bully. In fact, I’m the fucking opposite of that.”

“You’re a sexual pacifist?”

“I’m a sexual savant. And you’re being a sexual brat.”

“Is that what you really think?” I dropped the grapes, admittedly a little hurt. “I’m not trying to be.”

“I know, I’m just giving you a hard time.” He reached over and snagged one of my grapes. “But you did throw sex out there more than once, then took it back. And refused to tell me why. But since I’m not pushy, I’m letting it go. Unless you don’t want me to let it go, which was what you said in the drugstore. But give me a clue here, Isabel, because I’ve never met anyone like you and I don’t know what to do.”

Was I such a great mystery? Maybe I was. But my thoughts seemed so clear and rational to me. “I changed my mind because I didn’t want you to have sex with me because you felt guilted in to doing it.”

Ryan took his sunglasses off so I could see his blue eyes. “I don’t do anything out of guilt. I want to. I want to even though I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do. I’m concerned about hurting you. I don’t understand why you don’t understand that.”

“Because you said so.” Men were the ones who just didn’t make sense. We were talking in circles. “Now can we just drop it?”

He put his sunglasses back over his eyes. “Consider it dropped.”

I lay down and closed my own eyes, dissatisfied. I didn’t want to spend the limited time I had with Ryan arguing about what I had said or hadn’t said and what he had meant or hadn’t meant. I was annoyed with myself for not just enjoying hanging out with him. Instead, I had pushed my own agenda, and now it was complicated. I put my T-shirt over my face, the sun blinding me. But then I jumped when something cold landed on my stomach.

My eyes flew open right as Ryan’s hand spread across my skin. “What are you doing?”

“You’re burning already. I’m putting sunscreen on you.”

There was absolutely nothing sexy about having my stomach touched, in theory, considering I always felt like it needed substantially more toning. But when those jumbo hands slid across my skin, slick with lotion, his thumbs running under the waistband of my bikini bottoms, it was a whole lot of hot. Flustered, I started to shift away, though where the hell I was going I had no clue. He pressed down on me, pinning me on the towel.

“Stop wiggling, Isabel.”

I stopped. Instead, I stared at the top of his head and tried not to imagine what it would be like to have him going down on me, his tongue sliding over my…

My knees came together, tightly. I had spent plenty of time having those thoughts when he wasn’t around. Experiencing them with him present seemed oddly embarrassing. So I turned my head and studied the cruise ships on the horizon, heading out to the open sea. All of those people cruising to Mexico, the Bahamas, Key West. It must be almost four o’clock. That’s when they started rolling out.

---