Page 68 of Sexy as Sin
Willow settled her tote bag more firmly on her shoulder. It had a rainbow on it, and it had her recipes in it. Her book of magic, and her Ziplock bag with her phone and her wallet.
So she wasn’t polished. So she wasn’t perfect. So what?
“Cook it yourself,” she said. And walked out.
Brett opened the door to find Willow standing on his porch, her rainbow tote over one shoulder and a small duffel in her other hand.
She didn’t give him a chance to say anything, just lifted the duffel and asked, “Still want me? Also, I may have lost eighty thousand dollars. Take care. Business failure may rub off.”
Brittle as auto glass after a rollover, a spiderweb of pebbles held together by the most fragile of bonds. If you touched it, it would shatter into a thousand pieces.
What better time for her to fall apart, though, than when he was here to help her put herself back together? He got his crutches balanced, put a gentle arm around her, kissed her warm, unpainted mouth, smiled into her green eyes, and said, “You bet I still want you. As far as the business failure—I doubt it. It’s what I told you. It’s a curvature in the plan, and the world keeps on turning. Come on in and put your toothbrush on my shelf and those real-deal thongs of yours in my closet, because I can’t wait to open a dresser drawer and see red lace. I have a call in twelve minutes, but when it’s over, we’ll sit on the porch, have some more of your coffee, look at the hills, and talk about that curvature.”
She headed down the hallway to the bedroom, but turned halfway down it and said, “I just realized I forgot my swim costume. Bugger. I went surfing this morning, and I need to swim again anyway. I’ve got...” She clutched at her hair and tugged. “Thisrage.If I don’t get rid of it, you’ll be changing your mind fast. But I was in a hurry to change and get out of the flat, and I forgot to stuff my bikini into my bag.”
“We’ll buy you a new one.” She was wearing her green shorts and a purple T-shirt printed with orchids, her hair wasn’t pulled back, and she looked messy and colorful and alive, like a wild woman who’d tossed all caution to the wind. He was a fan. “Meanwhile, I don’t seem to have any neighbors, so I’d suggest you go for it.”
She hesitated, still. “How many more minutes?”
He checked his watch. “Six.”
“I walked out. I need to say it out loud to somebody. You’re elected. Walked out without cooking for the weddings this weekend, and Amanda doesn’t have my recipes.”
He considered that. “Do you want to give her your recipes?”
“No. My recipes are my art and my life. And I don’t care if that’s too dramatic. You’re good at listening and watching and knowing where people want to live. I’m good at thinking up delicious things to eat. I can’t help it if your thing pays better.”
“So that’s your art, your life, and your business, then.”
She smiled, finally, like the mermaid she’d been born to be. “That too. It was unprofessional, though. And the firm...”
“Seems to me she should have thought more about the firm before now,” he said, “and keeping you in it. We got Azra away from the pressure. How about getting you there?”
Hesitation, but he could see some wanting to believe in there. He’d swear she was just about on her tiptoes, almost daring to reach for the moon. “One week,” he said. “See how much she bends when you and your recipes are gone. Negotiation’s all about being willing to walk away. Let’s get you walking away.”
Swimming without anything on felt as amazing as she’d imagined, from the second you dove in. Like the water was morethere,somehow, cooler and more liquid than it had ever been before, because there weren’t any barriers anymore. It felt so good, she had to swim all the way across the pool underwater.
It was hardly different at all from wearing a bikini, and it was completely different. Her hair was in her face, her arms and legs stroked through the water with power, and the pool was surfaced with pebbles, filled with salt water, extravagantly long, irregularly shaped, and crossed by a bridge. She wasn’t in the sea anymore, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t in a tropical paradise.
She had to do the backstroke, because she had to look at the sky and the clouds and the trees. It was going to rain, the clouds building and billowing, the sun gilding their edges. Banana plants and palms fringed a spa tub in the corner, bird of paradise flowers bloomed with abandon, and bougainvillea in the most vibrant fuchsia covered an entire stone wall. When she got to the end of the pool, she discovered that a waterfall splashed into it, because of course it did. That meant she had to stop under it, shove her hair back, and pretend she was Ariel having a shower. It was brilliant.
She did every stroke there was, and when the rain began, she let it splash on her bare back as she rose, again and again, in a butterfly stroke, all shoulders and core strength and power. It rained harder, and she ate up another four laps in a fast crawl, then switched to breaststroke so she could watch raindrops hit the water like bullets, therat-a-tat-tatof them echoing all the way through her body.
It probably took her a while to see Brett, because she’d been doing the backstroke again. When she did, she stopped swimming and treaded water.
He wasn’t at the edge of the pool, but he was close. Out from under the sheltered terrace, for some reason, and shouting. She swam over to him, heaved herself out of the pool with one shove of her palms, landed in a crouch, then stood up, opened her arms to the storm, laughed, and shouted, “What? Go back inside, you idiot! I’m fine. I’m brilliant. Look.” She let herself fall back, shrieked at the moment she lost her balance, hit the water hard, and was smiling as she came up again.
He wasn’t smiling back. He was scowling, in fact. She saw a flash out of the corner of her eye, and after a few seconds, a low rumble of thunder like some prehistoric beast so big, you could hear it coming from kilometers away. He said, loud enough for her to hear it over the drumming of the rain, “You’re swimming in a thunderstorm! Get inside! Come on!”
She was still laughing, but shoving herself up and out of the pool again anyway. “Keep your shirt on. It’s kilometers off.” Another flash, a louder crack, not just a rumble this time, and she said, “Right. That was closer. Andyoucome on, mate. You’re going to slip and fall.”
He kept standing there, though, his hair streaming with water, his T-shirt and shorts clinging to him, his feet bare. He wasn’t going in until she did, so she did it, at least far enough to get under cover. “Hang on,” she told him, loudly, because the rain was beating a tattoo on the tin roof like an entire drum corps. “I’ll run get us towels.”
He didn’t answer, just turned and headed up to the top level of the terrace, then sat down at the end of the modular sofa like he was tired of being on his crutches, which he probably was. How long had he stood there in the rain? She was walking past when he grabbed her hand and pulled her down to sit beside him. The lightning lit up the darkening sky, a thunderbolt split the day, and she jumped and he didn’t. His gray eyes were as stormy as the day, his dark hair sticking up in places, and his face nothing like civilized. He said, “You scared me. That was unnecessarily reckless.”
“Probably,” she said. For some reason, her heart had started to beat as hard as the rain on the roof, and she’d gone breathless. “It felt necessary, though. Standing at the edge of... danger. Sorry I scared you.”
“Not good enough,” he said.
