Sex alone—sweat and tangled sheets and orgasms—wouldn’t satisfy her either. Not unless he included a corner of his tattered soul with his body.
And over the past twenty-four hours, he’d begun to think maybe—maybe—he should give it to her.
Because yes, she was a serious pain in his ass. Yes, she was entirely too fond of hurling her age between them like an insurmountable barrier, when it was nothing of the sort. Yes, she appeared to be both a workaholic and a woman with trust issues.
But she wasn’t wrong.
She saw him.
She saw beneath the Lucas he’d constructed over the past several years: shiftless, flirty, charming, and easygoing. A European playboy in search of a good time, a warm woman, and nothing more. All to compensate for the fact that he couldn’thavemore, at least not when it came to his career. All to ensure that even people who recognized him, who knew who and what he could have been without the endless parade of injuries, didn’t pity him.
They might want him. They might envy him. They might marvel at how content he seemed in such a different lifestyle. But they didn’t pity him, and they didn’t see him.
Tess did.
He saw her in return. Under all that defensiveness and ambition lay a warm, funny, perceptive woman with her own unique charm. And he wasn’t talking about her awe-inspiring breasts or her generous ass or her soft belly, although those were draws in their own right.
To be honest, he found her prickliness, that ambition, exciting too.
He was so tired of simple. He wanted complicated. He wanted a challenge. A battle, one-on-one, full of feints and openings and power moves and finesse and sheer, bloody tenacity. He’d always been able to endure pain to win a point, a game, a set, a match. Potential love, he figured, would be no different, and he didn’t want it to be.
No, he just wanted her. He wanted to know what they could have together. And if having her meant he’d need to peel some layers of protection from himself, he could try to do it. First thing in the morning, before he lost his nerve, and before he wasted more of their scant time together on the island.
And in the meantime, to calm his nerves, he could check out the couch selection on the IKEA website.
* * *
Loath to wakeTess’s neighbors, Lucas knocked softly on the door of Room 1249 the next morning.
Sure, a DO NOT DISTURB sign was hanging from the doorknob, but he knew she was an early riser from their topless ocean encounter. Hopefully she’d forgive him the dawn visit. Among other things.
He didn’t think he’d ever knocked on a guestroom door before, not in all his months of working on the island. If he wanted to speak to a client—to confirm or change an appointment, or for personal reasons—he called the appropriate hotel extension. If a particular client wanted more than just a conversation, they met somewhere more private than the cool hallways of a luxury resort.
As always, however, Tess was an exception.
When she didn’t answer the door after a minute, he knocked again. More loudly, this time.
The door swung open a few seconds later, revealing a very rumpled, aggrieved-looking woman wearing a silky, rose-colored robe. Not Tess.
That’s when his fuzzy, sleep-deprived brain finally registered his mistake: Oh, yeah. She’d come to the island with a friend. Belle. The woman he’d met the other day under decidedly more auspicious circumstances, when she’d been smiling rather than scowling at him.
She and Tess were probably roommates. And he was guessing only one of them was an early riser.
Belle’s brown eyes, already heavy with interrupted sleep, narrowed further on him.
This encounter was not starting well. No wonder he hadn’t knocked on guestroom doors before.
“Umm…” He shifted his weight. “I’m sorry to bother you. I was hoping to speak to Tess.”
“And you thought banging on her door shortly after sunrise during her well-earned vacation was the way to do it?” Belle cinched the waist of her robe tighter. “Especially after a disastrous late-night tennis lesson?”
Both women, it appeared, harbored serious doubts about his good judgment.
Whatever. He had his mission, and he was going to complete it, even if Tess and her outraged BFF roommate fought him the entire way.
“Evidently.” He waited a moment, but she didn’t move. “May I please talk to her?”
“Why?”
