Page 27 of Stuck in Paradise with You

‘Whoops, I’ll be late for the masseuse. Let’s pick this up later.’ He starts galloping,gallopingaway toward the main house. Do pirates…gallop?

‘Joe, it’s just that I’d really like to…’ He’s out of sight. ‘Leave this goddamn island,’ I mutter to myself.

11

LUKE

‘I had some calls to make,’ Carrie says when she comes back into the meeting room, where I’m now alone and sitting back in my seat next to hers. ‘Shall we get back to it?’

I feel my eyes narrow on her. Something’s happened. There’s a shift in her mood from the woman who was laughing half an hour ago, though probably just back to the ice-queen version of her that I thought for a moment might be thawing under the Caribbean sun.

‘I ordered us lunch,’ I say, internally smug because I add, ‘Sushi but no sashimi salmon, only tuna. No egg and extra ginger.’

As fleeting as the break in her façade is, I notice it.Yeah, I remember that too. She hates the texture of raw salmon. She likes eggs but hates omelets with sushi. And though we debated it every time we ordered in sushi to my place or for supper on late nights working in the office, she uses pickled ginger as a side to her meal, rather than a palate cleanser.

‘I’ll take mine to go once we’re finished here.’ She takes her seat and starts fidgeting with things on the desk, shuffling pages this way and that. ‘I’d rather plough on and get this done.’

I roll my jaw tightly. ‘Thank you, Luke, for being so thoughtful. Iamhungry and I appreciate your efforts.’ My words drip in sarcasm like syrup from a pancake as I twist my pen through my fingers, back and forth.

She glowers at the pen until the force of her silent insistence makes me still. ‘You didn’t make the sushi, Luke; you made a request.’

A thoughtful request.‘Let me ask you something, Carrie. When did you last let your hair down?’

Finally, she looks up from the pen I’ve pressed to the desk and tells me, ‘My hair is down.’

Literally speaking, she’s got me there. Figuratively, I’d bet she wouldn’t know relaxed if it bit her on the ass.

She wouldn’t recognize the girl who sat astride me on my sofa and set down a challenge to see which of us could eat the most wasabi paste before crying tears of menacing green heat.

‘Luke!’ Noah shouts when he sees me heading down the steps to the beach where he and his siblings are playing. The dogs stand from where they were lying in cool sand where they’ve dug divots. Jessie bounds toward me and Woody stands his ground, barking at me, though his wagging tail is betraying him – he likes me.

‘Hey, girl.’ I bend to scratch Jessie’s ears, just the way she likes it.

‘Luke, Aunty Alisha said you’ll play football with me,’ Noah says. He means soccer, but Joe is a Brit who loves his football and outright refuses to call it by its name, no matter how many times he’s confused the heck out of me.

I really can’t be bothered. I feel physically and mentally drained after being locked in a room with Maleficent all day.

I was so tempted to eat her lunch out of spite, but I managed to get a handle on myself long enough for her to ask for it to be refrigerated and brought to her pod later.

But I need to set it all aside, shake it off, because I don’t get to hang out with my godson as much as I’d like. So, I ruffle his thick mane of dark hair, just like I did Jessie’s ears, and tell him, ‘Absolutely, buddy, that’s why I’m here.’

Ella and Alisha are digging holes with the two girls and I end up drawing out a soccer pitch by dragging my feet through the sand. As I’m doing so, Henry and Jenny (water crew), Glen (gardener), Roy (handyman) and Dionne (housemaid) appear with Joe, already roped into the game with Noah, Toby and me, so we have one team of four and one of five.

It occurs to me for a nanosecond that maybe we should have invited Carrie down to the beach with us. Not that I knew everyone would be here, but since we are, I don’t want her to feel like an outsider. If nothing else, she could have evened out the numbers.

She used to play lacrosse in college and was always pretty handy in corporate sports events at our firm. Though, who knows if she’d play these days. It’d be hard to run around with a metal stanchion up one’s ass.

Almost reflexively, I locate her pod on the hill, any shred of compassion I fleetingly felt gone. She was horrible today. I don’t want to use the B word, but she was acting like a gigantic B word.

‘She’s having some food, then she’s getting a massage,’ Joe tells me, trying and failing miserably at doing keepy-uppies with the soccer ball.

‘Who?’ I ask, stroking my neck as I feign nonchalance.

‘The woman you’re pining after,’ Joe says, now trying to flick the ball from the sand with his feet and ultimately kicking sandover Ella and his youngest, receiving a verbal battering from his wife in response. No one puts Joe in his box quite so well as Ella. She’s whip-smart and razor tongued.

Once everything has calmed, I tell him, ‘There isnopining happening from anyone, to anyone, by anyone. Carrie’s my distant past and very much not my present or future.’

‘Riiiiiight, yeah.’ He picks up the ball and starts jogging with high knees to the center of our small pitch. ‘Funny how you know who I’m talking about.’

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