Page 36 of The Billionaire Is Back

“Yeah. But I mean, the weather’s been so weird this summer—I want to go when it’s nice out. And I just want to get there early so Vera won’t be there.”

“Oh yeah? Vera from the bakery?”Claire’s Vera,I almost say. “Is she usually around for lobster practice?” It’s embarrassing how much my heart rate picks up just at the mention of someone who’s friends with Claire Sweeney.

“Not usually,” he says, fidgeting so much it’s shaking the car. “Sometimes.”

“Interesting.”

“Not really. Just annoying.” He taps his fingers against the dashboard rhythmically. A lot of nervous energy there. You’d think he was a drummer, not a guitar player. But he’s a brilliant guitar player—self-taught, of course. He might be an even better songwriter. But he’s never done anything with it. His biggest problem is that he doesn’t think his dreams are worth taking seriously. It has always frustrated me a lot more than it ever frustrated him.

“So, no more band, huh?”

I glance over and see him wrinkling his brow. He shrugs his shoulders. He looks out the window.

I guess that’s his answer.

“You still playing music?”

“Yeah. Sometimes. At Hair of the Sea Dog. Solo. I get offers to play in Portland sometimes, but…” He gestures toward me, indicating that he can’t drive there now.

“You still writing songs?”

“What do you care?”

“If you ever want to come to New York, you can stay with me. Or I can put you up at a hotel. I can make some calls, get you some gigs.”

“No, thanks.”

All righty, then. Change of tactic. Guess he’s not in the mood to be big-brothered. “So. Crustacean circadian rhythms, huh? Tell me about that. You got a strategy?”

Whatever light I snuffed out by being a concerned older sibling has been reignited by the subject of lobsters.

“Yeah, I’ve got a strategy. I use Clawdia to motivate Crustaceous Clay. Because nothing motivates a guy to do his best like trying to impress a chick. Did you know a male lobster is called a cock and the female is a hen?”

That can’t be right.“You don’t say. You aren’t worried about your guy being distracted by the female? Maybe going off course and chasing her instead of the prize?”

“I mean. If he ends up with her instead of the prize, he still wins.”

And that attitude right there is why Damien is an artist and I’m not.

When we get to the beach, I carry one of the lobster containers and follow my brother toward what he calls “the racetrack,” but he keeps craning his neck and looking around.

“What are you looking for?”

“Huh? Nobody,” he says, still scanning the beach from behind his aviators. Then he stops in his tracks, his jaw dropping open just a little.

I follow his gaze and see a crowd of guys—boys and men—who are casually standing around not far from where Vera is toweling herself off. She’s wearing a bikini that’s the same shade of blue as the chunky highlights in her hair. And now I know why Damien was in such a rush to get here. He must have gotten tipped off.

Then I realize that if Vera’s here, that must mean the bakery is closed today, which means…

Fuck me.

It meansfuck me.

That is all I’m thinking as I stand in the sand, along with about a dozen other guys, watching Claire emerge from the sea in a bikini. Her wet skin glistens in the late morning sun. There is such a strange dissonance between my memories of her as a girl and this woman I’m watching now. She is even more gorgeous than she was in my fantasy a couple of hours earlier. I can’t tell if she’s even aware of being the center of so much male attention, but I am positive that she will be the star of at least a dozen fantasies later today.

And that makes my skin heat up so much I’m afraid I’m going to cook whichever lobster is in this container I’m holding.

Claire has paused in her journey from the water’s edge to adjust her bikini bottom at the hip. This movement causes her tits to press together, and there is a chorus of sighs that is louder than the waves. I want tokick sand in the faces of every guy who’s gawking at her, but then I might accidentally get sand in my own eyes and not be able to see her body anymore, so—not worth it.

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