Page 40 of So Close

They rode out until they were directly across from the rock, then came to a stop next to each other, facing the sea. The rock was hundreds of feet tall, jutting straight up out of the ocean, covered with seaweed and barnacles, circled by gulls and dotted with puffins. They stopped and Auburn offered Trey a drink from her water bottle and a chocolate chip cookie. His face was calm again, any trace of anger gone.

He took a big bite. “You know that scene in the Matrix where he eats the chocolate chip cookie?”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

“Is this like that? You’re the oracle? And you foretell my future?” The wind ruffled his hair and blew his t-shirt against his chest.

She shook her head. “It’s notthatkind of magic,” she said, echoing her words of the other day.

He took another bite and looked out to the horizon. It was blue as far as he could see. Good weather ahead.

He drew a deep breath.

“When we came here, Brynn and I would play on the beach. Even though at home she barely gave me the time of day because she was off with her friends. But here we’d play for hours. And I’d —”

He ducked his head.

“I remember thinking the beach could soak everything up. My dad’s crap and my mom’s unhappiness. All Brynn’s troublemaking. And my own—whatever. Everything.”

When he looked up at her again, his eyes were full of emotion. More than she’d ever seen there. She understood. For whatever reason—maybe evenhedidn’t understand why—he was giving her this.

“Beach magic,” she murmured.

He nodded. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Your parents. Your childhood.”

“My childhoodwasthe beach,” she said. “My parents owned Cape House. I thought everyone lived like I did, able to run out onto the beach any time they wanted. It was a big shock to me in college, the first time I met someone who’d never seen the ocean. I didn’t even want to believe that was a thing. It was like meeting someone who’d never seen the sun.”

“I never thought of that. What it would be like to grow up with that being your every day.”

“It was pretty idyllic. But my parents died when I was sixteen.”

He froze, the way people so often did when she dropped that bomb. It was part of why she so rarely brought it up. Because you couldn’t just let it slide into a conversation and not have that conversation be instantly transformed.

“They were killed in a boating accident.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Thanks. Levi—my oldest brother—inherited the hotel. And us. Chiara and I were old enough to basically take care of ourselves, but he had to try to be a dad to Mason—who was a tough teenager—and Hannah, who was six. She was an oops baby when we were all already almost out of elementary school. So, yeah. Everything changed then.”

He watched her with an indecipherable look on his face.

“It was a long time ago,” she said. Sometimes you had to say that to get people to stop looking at you like you were a piece of glass that was about to shatter. But Trey’s expression, the intensity of his gaze, didn’t soften.

The sun disappeared for an instant behind a cloud that hadn’t existed a minute ago. She shivered, suddenly, the sweat now drying on her skin.

“You’re freezing.”

“I’m fine,” she insisted.

His gaze fell to her arms, which were covered all over with goosebumps, the downy hairs standing on end.

With a single, smooth move, he reached behind him and tugged his long-sleeved t-shirt over his head and handed it her. “Here. Put this on.”

She was cold enough to reach for it, which was a mistake. When she had it in her hands, she could feel its warmth and softness and she could smell him on it, musky and overwhelmingly male. She sat there, shirt in hands, teetering on the recumbent bike seat, teetering in all sorts of ways. The wind had made his hair all windswept, and he looked like a beach rat instead of a billionaire—in the best possible way. His skin was golden, his pecs taut with muscle and dusted with darker-gold hair. A trail of that hair arrowed down and slipped beneath his waistband.

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