“Not too far.” He took my arm and walked me in the opposite direction of the front door.
“Wait. I thought we were going out.”
“We are, just not out that way.” He walked us towards the sliding door that led onto the deck. He pulled the curtains aside and gestured for me to step through, and when I popped out on the other side and saw what he’d done for me, a small explosion went off in my heart.
“When did you do this?” I ran my eyes over the blanket and pillows, the flowers and candles and the bottle of champagne on the small table chilling in ice.
“When you were napping and bathing, I called the hotel and arranged it. Picnic by the beach.”
“It’s perfect,” I whispered, watching the orange flame from one of the floating candles dance across the top of the water.
“I figured you would prefer this,” he said.
“How did you know that?”
“I think I’ve gotten to know you better than you think.”
I looked back at the romantic scene in front of me. This was so much better than any book I’d ever read. Perhaps better than any book that had ever been written. No writer could do this moment justice by putting words to it. Because there were not enough words in the universe to describe all the feelings rushing through me.
Noah helped me down onto the picnic blanket then reached for two other small blankets and spread one out across my knees once I’d gotten comfortable. I leaned back against the pillow and looked out over the dark sea in front of us. It looked so vast, spreading out from here all the way to the horizon, where it vanished into the night sky, joined it as if they were one. Noah popped the champagne and poured us two glasses. He passed one to me and then paused.
“What?” I asked.
“I want to say something, but it might sound strange.” The warm orange glow from the candles made his eyes a completely different shade of blue now.
“Say it.”
“I don’t know if you believe in stuff like this, but I do.”
“Believe in what?”
“You know I told you that it felt like Sindi was always meant to be my sister,” he said.
“Yes.”
“It’s just that . . .” He shrugged and went silent for a moment. “You know, I wasn’t meant to be on duty that day that you had your accident. I was meant to be on leave already. The only reason I came in was because two people got sick that day. Two people had to get sick on the same day for me to have to go to work.”
“Really?”
“And if I had been on duty, I don’t work that part of town. What I’m trying to say is that I feel like we were meant to meet each other. That’s all.” He looked at me expectantly, but I didn’t say anything. “Sorry, was that too much? Too deep? Did I get carried away there with meaning or—”
“No.” I cut him off. “You didn’t. It’s just weird, because I was feeling the same way. I mean, what are the chances of getting stuck in an elevator, and then hearing you say your address so randomly, and then waking up and that being the only thing I really remembered?” I paused. “It’s been a weird two weeks, that’s for sure.”
“It has. But really, really good.”
“Really good,” I echoed.
He held his glass up and I clinked mine against his. “To weird, fateful meetings,” he said.
“To weird, fateful meetings,” I repeated, taking a sip of the champagne. The bubbles burst against my lips and tongue, and each one felt like it contained a little magical possibility.
CHAPTER 66
We didn’t do much eating, we didn’t do much drinking or talking, for that matter. In fact, we’d spent most of the evening doing nothing more than staring at each other in the dim, warm candlelight. The only sounds around us were the rhythmic breaking of the waves, and the sound of our breathing. When a breeze picked up, rushing through the palm trees and causing our candles to dance frantically, I shivered. Noah walked over to the edge of the pool and dragged his fingers over the water.
“It’s heated,” he said.
I didn’t know much about the world ofrealromance and seduction, but I knew enough to know that the fact the pool was heated wasn’t really the pertinent point that Noah was trying to make. It being heated was almost irrelevant, the question and intention lay more in thewhatwere we going to do about the fact it was heated?
