Page 10 of Nothing to Do

His eyes drifted to the sea. “I’m sorry… I know what that’s like.”

“How do you know what that’s like?” she asked, sliding down from the wall when it was clear his attention was elsewhere. There was nothing out on the waves, she double checked, so it had to be something in his head. “Zane?”

Like he’d forgotten she was there, his focus jumped to hers. “Sorry, I was somewhere else.”

“Tell me,” she said, sinking down to sit on the edge of his lounger. “Where were you?”

“My mother died in a vehicular accident.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, sensing it was still raw for him. “Recently?”

He smiled and breathed out a laugh. “No… A long time ago.”

Slipping a hand under his, she curled her fingers around his palm to take it to her lap. “You were close?”

He shrugged, fixated on their joined hands. “I was a kid. It blindsided me. Blindsided all of us… Didn’t appreciate what I had until it was gone.”

“We’re all guilty of that. Do you have siblings?”

“A brother,” he said. “Stepbrother.”

“Your father remarried. Do you get along?”

Bright amusement lit his face. “Rourke’s a law unto himself.”

“What about his mom?”

“Was she a good replacement for mine? Truth is we were sent off to boarding school. Most of our raising was done there.”

“By teachers?”

“Let’s go with that.”

“Now I’m intrigued,” she said. “My parents are still together. They can be pretty zany sometimes, but we had stability.”

Clearing his throat, he adjusted his angle. “Do you have a big family?”

“Not that we’re close to. You?”

“Rourke, cousins on my mom’s side.”

“That’s good. That you kept in contact with them.”

One side of his mouth tilted. Was there something more to those relationships? Watching him intently, drawn in, his eyes ascended to hers, his smile creeping higher. Yes, she was definitely missing… something.

“That mind of yours is working again,” he murmured, his voice a deeper purr than before.

She conceded a smile of her own. “You’re staring… at me.”

“I am,” he said without any hint of contrition.

In fact, he might actually be proud. Taking control of their joined hands, he guided hers up, laying it flat in the center of his torso. No colleague would do something so… intimate. Yet, as she watched his hand flatten over hers and felt its warmth, she admitted, only to herself, that she liked it.

Swallowing hard in hopes of calming the quickening of her heart, she took a slow, measured breath. “When will our sushi arrive?”

“Might be a while,” he said, sinking lower. “But don’t worry, we’ve got a lot of ground still to cover.”

Getting to know each other? It might be the longest lunch break she’d ever taken in her life, but they were in a tropical paradise—nothing was business as usual.

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