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“Not big on beating around the bush, are you?” Zach said.
She shook her head. “Generally I find it just saves a lot of time to ask the question up front.”
“If you want to keep this secret, that’s fine with me,” Zach said.
He sounded casual enough, but she wasn’t entirely convinced he was telling the truth. Though, she couldn’t really figure out why he wasn’t perfectly happy to be agreeing to sneak around. Wasn’t that what guys wanted—hot sex with no commitments? No needy females demanding their attention all the time? She shook her head. She really hoped Zach wasn’t one of those guys. The rock star cliché. She didn’t want him to be the cliché. But then, why was it throwing her that he wasn’t behaving like one?
Maybe she was the one who was odd. But she couldn’t see any other way that this would work. Leaving aside the fact that Zach was Faith’s brother—and that was kind of awkward—Cloud Bay was too small a town to not expect everyone to get very interested very fast if Zach and Leah started dating in the open.
“Good,” she said eventually. “Then we’re agreed.”
Zach hitched a shoulder. Not exactly a full-blooded nod of agreement. But it would have to do.
“So how do you see this working?” he asked. “I mean, Faith and Mina both live right here, so it’s not exactly going to be easy to fly under the radar. Are you thinking we do this at your place?”
“God, no. My parents live only a few blocks away. And you know what Cloud Bay is like. You’d only have to drive your car up and park out front of my house once and the entire island would have us engaged in about five seconds flat.”
“Well, what then? I mean, I guess there’s always the studio. But sex on the carpet gets old pretty quick.” He grinned at her. “And it’s kind of hard to explain why you have carpet burns in awkward places.”
She considered the problem. She had to confess she hadn’t thought this part through. Because she hadn’t expected Zach to change his mind. Apparently she was a slow learner. “We going to be working pretty long hours, so that explains us hanging out. I mean, making music isn’t all about recording time. Faith is busy with CloudFest, and with the wedding, and Mina’s house could practically burn down around her ears when she’s painting. She’s got a show coming up soon. So I think, as long as we’re careful, it shouldn’t be a problem. We’ll figure something out. We seem to have gotten away with it tonight, anyway. Neither of your sisters have come knocking at your door, demanding to know if my intentions are honorable.”
“And if one of them did appear?”
“Then I guess we’ll deal with that when it happens,” she said. “But I’m a big believer in not borrowing trouble before you have to.”
“Okay, but if we get caught, then I’m telling them this was all your idea. After all, Faith is your best friend, so you get to be the one to deal with her.”
“She’s your sister,” Leah protested. “Why don’t you have to deal with her?”
“For one thing, I’m trying to mend fences with her. So I don’t think I need her getting mad at me for banging her best friend. If she asks, this was all your idea. You’re the one who’s the evil seducer in this scenario.”
Leah snorted. “Leaving aside how gross the term ‘banging’ is for a moment, I’m happy to tell Faith what happened. But let’s just make one thing clear—you’re the one who made the move this time.” She moved a little closer to him, stared up into his face, and lifted a hand to run her finger along the line of his six-pack under his T-shirt. The shiver that ran through him was pleasing, and it made her want to take things further. Which was a little unnerving, since she could already feel that she’d be sore in the morning. Sore in places that hadn’t been sore for quite some time. But here she was, wanting to get down and dirty with Zach all over again.
“Yeah,” he said smiling down at her. “I remember.”
“Me too,” she said. “So why don’t you take me back to bed?”
Chapter Ten
Apparently when you mixed hours of hard work at the studio and hot nights with Leah, time sped by. Zach felt like he’d blinked, and a week had passed. Apparently Leah’s theory had been right on the money. Things were easier between them while they were working—no more awkward pauses. But now he had a new problem, namely, that he had to work pretty damn hard to keep his hands off her. Which was a whole other kind of distraction.
They worked hard, but his attention still wandered. He found himself watching her, caught by the spill of dark hair down her shoulders or the curve of her mouth as she laughed or the way her hands cut through the air excitedly when she talked. But he wasn’t the only one who had more than just music on his mind. He caught Leah watching him too, and then their eyes would meet and the air would go thick and hot and still around them while color rose in her cheeks.
So far they’d managed to keep their hands off each other while they were working. Leah had put her foot down about fooling around in the studio, saying it was too risky—too easy for someone to come in and catch them. And lust was a lot easier to deal with when he knew that he’d have her in his bed again when they were done for the day. So he’d contented himself with hot looks and just enjoying being with her, and then waited for her to appear at the door of the guesthouse each night.
But on Thursday night Leah, having spent almost every night or part of it with him since they’d first gotten together, had left him to his own devices. She had to go home for a family dinner for her parents’ anniversary. Not an event that Zach could easily muscle in on without raising the sorts of questions from Leah’s folks that neither of them wanted to answer.
So he found himself at loose ends. And, naturally enough, ended up drifting back around to Billy’s house to hang out with Eli. He’d sort of fallen off the face of the earth for the last week, and hoped Eli and Billy wouldn’t have been wondering too hard about why.
But neither of them seemed particularly surprised to see him when he strolled out onto Billy’s deck to join them sometime around seven. Eli simply passed him a beer and pointed to the pizza boxes on the table. “Grab some if you haven’t eaten.”
“Thanks,” Zach said, scooping up a piece. He’d eaten lunch at some point, but the afternoon had sped by while he and Leah had wrestled the bridge of his current song into submission. He devoured the pizza in about five bites and reached for another slice.
“I was wondering when you were going to emerge from the depths of that studio,” Eli said with a grin. “I was starting to think that Leah must be a total slave driver.”
Zach shook his head, taking a seat on the lounge beside Eli and staring out over the ocean as he finished the second slice. Then he picked up the beer. “She’s damn good at her job, that’s what she is. But no, she is letting me set the pace.”
“But the recording’s going well?” Eli asked.
