Page 6 of One Unexpected Kiss

It couldn’t be… could it?I didn’t know why the hell not. She’d come to the Carolina Banks once before. There was no reason for her not to show up again sooner or later.

Except she hadn’t seemed interested in returning. My mind had to be playing tricks on me.

Her eyes met mine in the mirror she’d been speaking into, and they widened. Clutching her towel against her chest, she screamed.

Putting my hands up in the universal signal for “I mean no harm”—which was pointless considering she couldn’t see me—I backpedaled and nearly toppled down the stairs.

Her door slammed, and the lock engaged. “I’m calling the cops!” she shrieked.

Shit.Lyra was going to have to find a backup for her backup guy, because no way in hell was I doing this again.

“No need to do that!” I called. “I’m just here to fix the toilet. I knocked, but no one answered.”

“I’m calling them!”

I sighed. What a fan-fucking-tastic situation my sister had gotten me into. Hopefully, the dispatcher would send Wes. On second thought, I hoped they would send anyone but Wes. He would never let me live this down.

“Call my sister Lyra at Croft Vacation Rentals. She can vouch for me. If it helps, I’ll wait outside by my truck until you feel safe.”

The door flew open, and she stood, one hand holding a phone and the other outstretched with a can of pepper spray attached to a keyring. “I don’t think so, pervert. You stay right here until—” She peered at me. “Wait… Bennett?”

Itisher.Big blue eyes, long blond hair that curled at the ends when it was wet, and a mouth that was made for sin. My gaze drifted lower to where the towel was tucked in place across her chest. One tug was all it would take to have it pooled on the floor.

Swallowing thickly, I forced my gaze to her face. “Nice to see you, too, Claire.”

***

Claire

I GAPED AThim. “What are you doing here?”

I figured I’d see Bennett eventually, but I also thought it would be later rather than sooner. His mouth stretched into a slow grin that I remembered all too well, and damn if I didn’t go a little weak in the knees.

“I told you… I’m here to fix the toilet.”

I frowned. “There’s no broken… oh, wait. You mean downstairs? I already fixed it. It just needed—” I mimed taking the tank lid off and jiggling the inside parts. In the process, I almost lost my towel.

In my panic over the intruder, I’d forgotten about my state of undress. This was not how I’d anticipated seeing Bennett Ramsey again after almost a decade. And I definitely hadn’t anticipated how my body—my almostnakedbody—would react to him.

I looked down at my towel then back up at him. “Uh…” I took a few steps backward into the bedroom and closed the door behind me.

“I guess I’m, uh, done here, then,” Bennett called through the door as I frantically tried to locate a pair of pants. “So I—”

“Hang on!” I shoved my legs into the yoga pants I’d worn on the drive the previous day. When I was finally presentable—meaning, my body was covered—I opened the door and tried for a smile that more than likely came across as a grimace. “Sorry.”

Good thing I was a mature woman of twenty-eight and not the nineteen-year-old who’d spent an entire summer crushing on him, or I might have wished for the floor to swallow me whole. The summer after my freshman year in college, my mother was between husbands, which meant she was on the hunt and not pleasant to be around. My college roommate got the crazy idea to spend the break in the Carolina Banks—a line of barrier islands on the North Carolina coast. By some miracle, we’d managed to find jobs and a room to rent. So this wasn’t my first stint with bunk beds on the island. Life had come full circle.

That had been a wild summer. I worked harder than I ever had in my life but played just as hard. Most of that play involved Bennett. We had a flirtatious will-they-or-won’t-they relationship, which sadly ended withwon’twhen I returned to school in late August. I’d always wondered what might have happened if I’d stayed longer. Maybe that question could finally be answered. I subtly glanced at Bennett’s left hand—no wedding ring. Not that that was a definitive test. Lots of married men didn’t wear wedding rings.

Nope. Don’t even think about it. You swore off men, remember?Besides, I didn’t need the distraction on my first assignment for Markham Corporation.

Bennett’s eyes locked on mine, and my stomach did a flip-flop. It was crazy to think that after all these years, my body had fallen into its old pattern, with my knees going weak in this man’s presence.

“You have nothing to be sorry about,” he said.

Now that my lizard brain realized I wasn’t about to be raped and murdered and I’d had a second to get over the shock of Bennett appearing outside my door, I took a moment to look at him. He’d aged.Duh.So had I. That was what years did to a person. An image of my nineteen-year-old self came to mind, and I wondered how I looked from his point of view. My boobs and ass weren’t as perky as they had been, but that was due to lying around and eating too much ice cream while feeling sorry for myself these past few months. Well, at least that was true for the ass. There was nothing I could do about the gravitational pull time had over my boobs.

He still wore his hair shaggy, but I suspected that was due to laziness in getting a haircut rather than any sort of style. He’d bulked, though. Through his flannel shirt, I could make out the outline of biceps he hadn’t had at twenty. Perhaps the biggest change was his scruffy face. He would never admit it at the time, but when I’d known him before, he couldn’t grow a full beard. Now there was no trace of boy left. I squinted as I studied his chin, fighting the urge to take it in two fingers.

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