Dax pointed to the lake. The ferry was halfway back to the mainland. “Okay, now concentrate,” he said. “Notice how oddly quiet it is, even though the city’s right there.”
He flopped onto his back and closed his eyes. It was fully dark now, but there was enough ambient light from the lit-up skyscrapers across the harbor that she could still make out his face. She knew he had laugh lines around his eyes, but in repose his face was unlined. Heavy black eyebrows punctuated his otherwise smooth face, and a lock of black hair fell down his forehead.
He opened one eye and caught her staring. “Are you listening?”
She nodded and, following his example, lay back on the grass. It was, as he’d suggested, silent except for the lapping of water against the shore. There were only a few stars in the sky—though the noise was blocked here, the city light was not. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. Not the trying-to-smell kind that he’d mocked, but a real one. This was a good place. A far cry from the suite at the Shangri-La Hotel suite she was supposed to be spending her wedding night in, but still. She turned her head and sneaked a glance at Dax, who was still lying there unmoving. He was an egotistical ass, but it had been good of him to rescue her. She would have to go home and face up to real life, but for now, she really did feel like she was a place apart. Like she’d escaped.
Escaped what, though? That was the question. The life she’d been so joyously moving toward when she woke up sixteen hours ago, the morning of her wedding day? Everything she’d been planning for, working toward, for the last seven years? Her entire life as she knew it? Perhaps “escape” wasn’t the word so much as was “exile.” She was an outsider in her own life now.
The tears started then. But they weren’t the great gasping sobs that had overtaken her at the bar, just hot, silent tears that flowed fast and uncontrollable. She could no more stop them than she could stop breathing. But she was okay to just lie here and cry for a while in the quiet night. Dax was a couple feet away from her, and he looked almost like he was sleeping. In fact, all the heat that had characterized their frantic make-out session on the boat seemed to have dissipated. It seemed almost comical now—or it would have, if she could manage to stop crying—that she’d come to the island with the intention of sleeping with him. At the time, it had seemed the perfect countermove. Get jilted. Have casual sex to prove a point. What point had that been? She wasn’t sure anymore. And really, she hadn’t been thinking about it those terms. She’d been so crazily, uncharacteristically attracted to Dax—Dax!—that she hadn’t really been thinking at all. Sure, the guy was good-looking. You’d have to be blind not to see that. But God, the way he’d talked to her. I don’t make love. I fuck. The feeling of his hands all over her on the boat, like he wanted to rip off her clothes. Like he couldn’t get enough.
The world had turned upside down. That was the only explanation. Sweet, steady Mason had left her, and a few hours after that, she’d been on a boat with her legs wrapped around Dax Harris, her office nemesis. The worst part was that even though she was still crying, her body remembered the feeling of being plastered against him, of rocking against his erection as his big, warm hands cupped her bottom.
She could almost feel him stroking her thigh even now.
“Jesus Christ, you’re freezing.”
“Ah!” He was stroking her thigh. She bolted to a sitting position, and since he’d moved to sit near her, they nearly knocked foreheads.
“And you’re crying?” He raked his hands through his hair. “I’m sorry.”
She swiped at her eyes and cursed her renegade body, which was still distinctly lust-addled. “It’s not your fault.”
He hopped to his feet. “Yeah, well, we can at least get you warm. I’m pretty sure the post-jilting etiquette handbook has a rule about not allowing the jiltee to freeze to death.”
She accepted his outstretched hand and let him help her up. “So now I’m the jiltee?” she said, her voice back to that humiliating chipmunk quality. She cleared her throat.