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Without waiting for a reply, she ended the call and powered off the device.
“Who were you talking to?” Audra said, reentering the living area from her room.
“Oh, just one of the reasons I can’t afford a therapist.” Because of the money Lilly paid the Durands each month and because no amount of time with a mental health professional would manage to loosen the barbed wire binding her heart.
“Claude or Mariellen?” Audra asked, who knew nearly all of Lilly’s secrets.
“Mariellen. Claude’s truck broke down. Frank broke a tooth.”
“Let me guess. In a bar brawl over someone else’s girlfriend, the last buffalo wing on the platter, or what you do with grass when it gets too long.”
Lilly sent her friend a smile. “This is why we’re BFFs. Our minds work in such similar ways.”
“We are similar,” Audra agreed. “For different reasons, we’ve avoided taking risks and are over-anxious about the possibility of making mistakes.”
“Um, thanks for that,” Lilly said, now uncomfortable.
Audra shrugged. “I meant to ask before, have you heard anything from Alec? Anything about Jacob, I mean?”
Fresh guilt poured into Lilly. Not only had she not asked Alec if he’d heard from the ex-groom, but she’d still not told the other woman that the Thatchers were vacationing at The Hathaway and that she’d spent some time with them. “Um…well…”
She swallowed, hard, aware she was stalling like mad. “About Alec…”
Audra pointed a finger at her, gun-pantomime style. “‘Thinkin’ Bout You,’ Frank Ocean.”
Their game, the one that identified the right song for the precise moment. But if Lilly recalled, that song was about some guy mooning over a lover—or an ex-lover? In any case, it didn’t work in this case. “I’m not pining over Alec,” she said. “It’s just that…well…”
Audra just stared at her, unblinking.
Her friend’s pale blue eyes acted like interrogation lights and Lilly found herself babbling her confession. First, that he and his family were also staying at the resort. Next, that she’d found herself in his company more than once.
“He throws me off-course,” she told Audra. “I say I’m not going to be around him then he’s around and we’re talking and it’s fun and he seems like a nice guy, which is definitely all wrong for me.”
Audra raised her brows. “Why’s a nice guy all wrong for you?”
“Because…” Shaking her head, Lilly thought of that devastating kiss he’d laid on her, the way her pulse stumbled whenever he was near, the fact that he could recite the size of a blue whale’s penis from memory and the wicked glint in his eye as he’d shared the fact. “Because I sense he’s really not just ‘nice.’ There are depths there—”
“You have depths too.”
“Exactly why I don’t want to be involved with him. We might drown each other.”
For a moment, something sparked to life in Audra’s eyes. “Has involvement been mentioned?”
“Only in that we both don’t want a relationship. But, God, that doesn’t seem to stop—” She forced herself to take a breath, still bewildered by her over-the-top response to him. “Okay, the deal is, he’s hawt too and for some reason that’s messing me up.”
“Oh, dear—”
“But I’ll talk to him anyway,” Lilly hastened to say. She was supposed to be helping her friend, wasn’t she? “I’ll get what info I can about Jacob.”
“Then you’ll go back to avoiding Alec but failing?”
Before Lilly could respond with more than a grimace, Audra added two more cents. “Why don’t you stop fighting it and go get some regrets instead? For God’s sake, one of us should.”
“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” Alec said to his second cousin Jessie Hathaway, Kane’s sister.
“What are you talking about?” she replied, with all the enthusiasm of someone twenty-five and carelessly beautiful. “This is total fun.”
