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“The first rule is, Po doesn’t come with me on the first day.”
“Why not? He loves Aunt Kaimana.”
Jun looked over at her boy playing with Kai’s aunt. “Yes, he does, but the first day, I...” I want to be alone with you. The thought popped into her head like a searing-hot admission of guilt. Was that what she wanted?
“I...don’t want any distractions.”
Kai raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Okay.”
“You’ll be ready at eight Saturday morning?”
Kai gave her a knowing smile. “Oh, I’ll be ready. Will you?”
Jun’s stomach lurched as she wondered if she’d just made the best—or worst—decision of her life.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JUN ARRIVED AT Kai’s beach house promptly at seven fifty Saturday morning, dressed in her best red-and-black-striped trainer’s outfit and matching running shoes, prepared for the worst. She’d left Po in her sister’s capable hands for yet another day. Her stomach felt alive with butterflies. Why hadn’t she insisted Po come with her that first day? Was it that she wanted Kai all to herself? Alone, at his beach house?
Was she going to cross a line already?
Her phone buzzed in her hand with an incoming text message from Tim.
Wish you’d reconsider working for that guy, he’d written.
He’d nearly gone through the roof when she’d told him about Kai’s job offer and her intent to take it. She didn’t blame him, as it left him one trainer short on not much notice, but it was more than professional annoyance at the root of his anger.
But she actually felt relief that she could leave. It was getting harder to ignore Tim’s advances and she dreaded having to tell him she just didn’t think of him that way.
“You can take a leave of absence without pay,” he’d said. “But when it doesn’t work out, you come back, okay?” The look of hope on his face had made her chest feel pinched. His crush just made her uncomfortable. Still, she hoped maybe she’d dodged a bullet. If Kai’s job worked out, she never had to go back to the gym.
Kai.
Her savior—and her tormentor?
His brilliant smile haunted her thoughts even now, as did the memory of his lean, muscled surfer’s body doing lunges in the gym. Something about him just drew her in. She’d worked out with plenty of guys who were in shape. Tim was, by objective standards, nearly a perfect male specimen, and yet she felt something intangible about Kai, some kind of magnetism, that just made him different. It had been so long since Jun had even experienced desire for a man that she had a hard time figuring out what to do about it. Up until now, ignoring men had come easy. But nothing about Kai was easy.
She wondered if she’d made the right decision working for him.
He saved Po. You owe him.
She just wished she could pay him back some other way, a way that didn’t involve handing her livelihood—her very independence—over to him.
But then, she’d seen how weak his knee was at the gym. He’d gotten hurt in the first place because he’d stayed behind to help Po. If he’d selfishly saved himself, he’d have had two working knees right now and would probably have been at the top of his surfing game. But could she heal him? Could she make him strong enough to compete?
Some injuries, she knew, were just too devastating for the body to fully recover from.
Yet she knew she had to try.
She grabbed her gym bag and headed to Kai’s front door. She rang the bell and waited. And waited some more.
Where was he?
She checked her watch. She wasn’t late. She was a few minutes early.
She peered into the floor-to-ceiling glass windows but saw no movement inside. A T-shirt lay over the top of his sleek modern couch, as did a hastily discarded pair of flip-flops. No half-naked women visible in the foyer anyway. That was a good thing. She glanced to the back of the room and saw that the retractable glass walls that would seal off the lanai from bad weather were wide-open. Of course they would be; the only neighbors around were the ocean and the lava rockface back there.
She tucked her bag on her shoulder and made her way around the house to the back patio. She couldn’t help but notice the magnificent view of the Pacific. When she turned, she could see the rest of the island rising up, the distant peak of Kilauea, one of the island’s active volcanoes, just visible. A mile or two down the shore, Jun noticed a couple of luxury hotels, including what she thought might be the Four Seasons.
