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“Ssshhh.” I tucked next to a palm tree, instinct driving my shoulders into a hunch. Just this morning, a couple of the women behind me had been chattering about what a beautiful betranli Ambyr was going to make for Shiraz. If they knew what another American hussy had been doing night before last with their sweet Cimarron boy…
Yikes.
Melted over a casserole of ohhhhh crap.
“Ssshhh?” Ez volleyed. “But all I said was…”
“I know what you said. Just tell me why.” After ten seconds of his thick silence stretched into fifteen, I persisted, “Ez?”
“Still here.”
Though now his voice rattled with the same anxiety prickling my chest, betraying how much he almost wished that wasn’t true. If we got lucky, the connection would poop out now and he wouldn’t have to utter what he did next.
No such luck.
Dammit.
“Fuck me, Luce. Please tell me you’re going all secret spy voice on me because five guys in black trench coats are tailing you—not because you cracked that boy’s virgin bat.”
I crouched lower over my phone. “I don’t think anyone on this island owns a trench coat, Ez.”
“Holy. Shit.”
Pissy huff. Really pissy. “Seriously? This? After sending me a thousand gawk-and-stalk pictures of the man before I left LA? After all the wet codpiece jokes once I was here?”
He sighed. Muttered dismally, “At least you waited until after Expectation was dead on the vine anyway.”
“Stop,” I bit out. “We’re not dead.” Burrowed my toes into the sand, drawing strength from the grainy warmth against my toes. “Not yet.”
“Sure. Because you stand a chance of landing that wedding contract now, after grabbing Shiraz’s cherry for your fruit bowl?”
“After you kept telling me to push the bowl at him?”
“Because that’s the kind of shit I always say—and then you always ignore.”
“You’re going with that one too?”
“Sounds better than ‘I couldn’t resist his gorgeous Arcadian cock, Ez.’”
I swung my gaze toward the water. Silently asked the sea for even a fraction of its azure serenity, but my fury was too intense. “Was that fucking necessary?”
Ezra grunted. “Was fucking him necessary?”
“Maybe it was.” I knocked the side of my fist into the tree, bracing for more of his tirade. When it didn’t come, and the line was only filled with his weird, sad silence, I braced even harder. Even got a little afraid.
“Luce?”
I let my butt slide down the palm. Plunked into the sand, hitting with heavy resignation. “Yeah?”
“You’re not even sorry for it, are you?”
I inhaled. Exhaled. Let him hear both breaths. Gazed again toward the water. Identified at once with a massive knot of kelp, newly dumped on the shore. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
I’d do it again with all my heartbeats.
With every fiber of the body only Shiraz awakened so well. Every neuron of the mind he challenged. Every part of the soul he just…knew.
“I was really afraid of that,” Ez muttered.
