Page 8 of Beach Bum Billion-Heiress
5
Sage
I couldn't really feel my feet right about then, which was the least of my concerns at the moment, if you could believe that. I'd finally spit out all the water that was trying to drown my lungs while still maintaining control of my surf board. Okay, saying I had control of it was a little much. It was more like the thing was a floatation device and my ankle was attached to it and somehow both myself and the board had made it to shore at about the same time.
After I'd dragged that thing to dry land, I sat down to catch my breath and assess my body parts. That's when I realized my feet were tingly. Maybe I'd gotten tossed so many times out there, my tingle-meter had moved from my nose to my feet!
I chuckled out loud at my own joke. I got giggly in life threatening situations, what could I say?
The warm sun suddenly went away, causing me to lift my head and see what happened. In all his lifeguard glory stood my nemesis, blocking all warmth and brightness with his very presence.
"You all right?" His calm voice held an edge of sarcasm. I'm sure he could have towed me in far more efficiently and with less side effects to my lungs and feet, but I couldn't let yet another man tell me what to do. Been there, done that, trying to escape it.
I pushed my hair out of my eyes and let a smile light up my face. "I'm glorious. You?"
He let out a quick chuckle before sucking it back in and remembering he hated me. "How about I help you get that board back on your car and I meet you back at The Shack?"
I debated the merits of that suggestion. My first inclination was to tell him to go to hell, but then my arms remembered the weight of that board and I reconsidered my answer. It was a very kind offer, after all.
I tipped my head. "Thank you for offering. I'll take you up on that." Jumping to my feet, I wiped the sand off my butt and tried to get the leash off my ankle. My feet weren't quite back to normal though and I almost went down.
"You got a problem with your legs?" He was looking at me with one eyebrow up, probably remembering the frequency with which I weebled and wobbled around him.
My face flushed, realizing I looked like an idiot, nearly falling three times in one day. "New feet," I deadpanned.
Which earned me another chuckle before he wrangled his face back into a frown. That was exactly the reason his chi was blocked, but I figured I wouldn't bring that up again. He crouched down and grabbed the leash around my ankle. Before he ripped the velcro away, his skin brushed against mine, just for a quick second, but long enough to send more heat to my face.
This guy's touch was doing all sorts of weird things to my insides and I didn't even particularly like him.
He stood back up and wrapped the leash around the end of my board before picking it up and carrying it over his head to the red truck parked just up the sand. I followed behind, not even bothering to drag my eyes away from the muscles in his arms holding up the board, or the way his back tapered down into a trim waist before rounding back out in the shape of two muscular globes in his board shorts.
Under different circumstances, I would have been highly attracted to this man. Too bad I needed to engage in the most important business deal of my life with him. I couldn't keep acting like a bumbling school girl. I needed him to take my offer seriously. My entire future depended on it.
"You comin'?" he asked, breaking into my thoughts. He'd loaded my board onto the back of his truck and was standing by the cab of the truck, tilting his head toward the passenger door where I stood still like a statue.
I grinned and jumped to open the door before sliding in. We were out of the ocean and back on dry land. Time to take back the upper hand here.
He climbed in behind the wheel and the cab suddenly seemed a thousand times smaller. A pair of sky blue eyes looked at me expectantly. At this proximity, I could see scruff on his face that hadn't been there this morning. I had an insane urge to reach up and drag my hand along his jaw line, feeling the scratch of his beard with my fingertips.
"Where to?"
I pulled my gaze away and looked to the parking lot. Maybe not looking at him would help my train of thought. "My Bug is on the street. Metered parking."
In answer, the truck rolled over the mounds of sand, the speed nice and slow to prevent hitting any beach-goers.
"I'll pull up as close as I can. Then we'll walk the board to your car." His voice sounded louder and deeper in the confined space, doing more to cause my shivers than the wet hair and swimsuit clinging to my body.
The rest of the ride was filled with comfortable silence, broken up by the dispatcher on the radio calling out codes and things that made no sense to my ears.
"Have you worked as a lifeguard for awhile?" Might as well get some intel directly from the seller of the property I would soon own. The internet search in my hotel room earlier that day had only told me his name, Jax Stern. His father, Max, had owned The Surf Shack before him. As far as I could see, it was a fairly average rental shop in a beach town. His father didn't have any social media accounts that I could find and Jax only had one, which was private.
"Since high school when I was assigned a tower pretty far north in a quieter area. Over the years, I've completed training to get out on the rescue watercrafts, which I like better than sitting in a tower or breaking up drunken fights on the beach." Jax smiled while he talked about his lifeguarding, cluing me in that he enjoyed what he did.
Jax parked the truck right next to the cement strand running along the shoreline. I followed his lead and exited the truck, coming around the back to get the surf board.
"I got it." I tried to get the board out of Jax's grip but he jerked it back and hefted it over his head before I could put in a good fight. I didn't like men doing things that I could do myself, thank you very much. "Hey!"
He started walking off in the direction of the street, looking behind his shoulder at me with the most annoying smirk on his face. "You forget, this is actually my board and I don't want you to drop it trying to drag it out to your car."
