Page 65 of On The Beach

Normally, an annoyed woman was my cue to walk away—I wasn't one for drama. Butthisannoyed woman? She was sexy as hell.

"Do you know what it took for me to come back here?" I demanded.

"No one asked you to," she retorted, her arms folded. "You could've just sent the paperwork and stayed on your island drinking your days away with Franco and Cato and fucking the female tourist population."

She was furious with me, and rightfully so. I hadn't been particularly kind, and with good reason, right? So, why was I here begging for scraps? Why did I care so much?

The guy with the horns on my shoulders looked at his long nails and said, rather sardonically, "Because your sad ass fell in love, beach bum."

Christ! All those people who said love was the answer didn't know what the fucking question was. However, I had learned the hard way that it was:Do you want to be miserable until the end of days?Becauseafteryou fell in love, everything was shit. If you had her—then you hungered for her. If youdidn't have her, same result. After all these years of being smart, I'd fallen for the one woman who was so close to the life I'd left behind that it spoke volumes about my idiocy.

"Belle, I hatethis." I waved a hand around. "All of it."

"Then go," she challenged. "Go the fuck back, Mick."

"I can't," I replied honestly and rubbed a hand over my face. "You think I want this? I'm fucking miserable without you, and now here I'm with you, and it doesn't change. Jesus! Woman. You're not even my type."

Okay, so I'd been living on an island for three years, and in a lab before that, I wasn't what you called a stellar and articulate conversationalist; what I was wasbasic.

She threw the pen she was holding at me. It bounced off my chest. It was a lame move if I'd seen one. The pen was one of those light pilot ones that labs bought in bulk. It wouldn't hurt a fly.

"Didn't see you as being violent," I continued my mission to fuck up my life by not keeping my mouth shut.

"Are you kidding me?" She screeched. "Get the fuck out of my office, my lab, and my life."

"Office, yes. Lab, no. Life, definite no." I grinned at her, which annoyed her some more. I hadn't seen this Belle in Reef Harbor. There she'd been carefree; now she was carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. I knew the feeling and remembered it well. The stress of work, of schedules, project management, all of it. I didn't want this for her.Butas Cato had told me, what I wanted didn't matter; this was her life. It wasn't mine anymore, though, but I had to respect her passion for it.

"Belle, I left this world behind for a reason. I came back for you. I thought it would mean something to you."

She shook her head, looking away, her voice flat. "It means nothing if you're just going to manipulate the situation to stay here. This isn't love, Mick. This is just…control."

She walked away, leaving me standing alone in her office, feeling like the life I'd so carefully left behind had somehow dragged me back, heavy with its old expectations. But this time, it wasn't the work that weighed on me—it was Belle. And she was the one thing I couldn't bear to lose.

CHAPTER 22

the bottom fell out

BELLE

My sister insisted we meet for dinner in a restaurant. I'd have preferred takeout at my place, which she knew because then I could kick her out after half an hour and get back to work.

I was not in the mood,andshe knew that I didn't have the time. I had work. The clinical trials would start soon and there were a hundred million things to do. But Anna was more stubborn than me and better at emotional blackmail, which was why I was sulkily sitting across from her and my brother-in-law at Les Sablons. This was one of their favorite restaurants probably because they had a wine list that stretched longer than the Atlantic Ocean.

We'd already gone through one bottle of Burgundy (I only had a half glass), and Anna was glancing over the second like she was weighing the fate of the world. This was Anna: assessing, analyzing, calm. I, on the other hand, was venting as subtly as a loose steam valve.

"So, he'sjustin your lab?" Dan, Anna's husband of a decade, asked. They'd met in medical school. She was a pediatric surgeon, and he was a neurosurgeon.

"Yep, like it's perfectly normal." I took a deep breath, stabbing a fork into my plate ofsaladeLyonnaisewith more force than necessary. "Not only that—he's waltzing around the lab like he never left the world of academic brilliance for a beach chair in the sand. I mean, did he always plan to haunt me? He might as well rent an apartment down the hall."

Dan cut into his foie gras with the surgical precision he reserved for either neurosurgery or delicate cuisine and raised his eyebrows. "Maybe you shouldn't give him ideas…'cause he seems like the type who would move down the hall from you."

"I think you should give him the time of day. Think about it. This is the same guy who ghosted the medical world to surf and drink tropical cocktails, but he came back for you. It's romantic,” Anna mused. "I think the Gevrey Chambertin, Dan. Nineteen was a good year in Burgundy."

"But Belle is having sole," Dan protested.

"I'm done drinking," I told them. "I have to go back to the lab."

"Belle, we're all workaholics," Anna snapped. "You're worse than that. I don't know how it happened, but you're nuts."

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