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“Do you know what? I find that very hard to believe.”
“It’s the truth,” he says.
“Well, you wouldn’t look at me twice if we met back home, so I guess we’re even.”
His brow furrows. “What does that mean?”
I take a long sip of my drink. It tastes like coffee set on fire.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “But I guess that means it’s a good thing we met in Barbados, then. As our vacation selves.”
“Mm-hmm. Although I can imagine—you’re cold,” he says, eyes on my arms. Goosebumps race across my skin.
“Just a bit. It’s okay.”
He sets down his cup in the sand and shrugs out of his thin jacket. I catch a sliver of muscled back as his T-shirt rides up a bit.
“Here,” he says.
My fingers dig into the soft material, warm from his body heat. “Won’t you be cold?”
“No. I’m my vacation self,” he says and rests an arm behind us. “And my vacation self is excellent at homeostasis.”
I stare at him.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just that you’re very funny. You just don’t let on.”
He snorts. “Honor my sacrifice and put on the jacket, Eden.”
I wrap it around myself. It smells like him, like soap and warm skin, and man. I wonder why men’s scents are often described in overwrought sentences, like a dewy morning or musky pine, when that’s never what they smell like. They smell so much better.
“Something wrong with it?”
I stop sniffing. “No. It’s warm. And, um, very nice fabric.”
“Good,” he says. There’s amusement in his voice. “So, we could be here all night then, waiting for the turtles to emerge?”
“Technically yes, I think. But that’s a small sacrifice.”
“Turtles hatched without our involvement for centuries,” he says. “I’m sure they’ll keep hatching during the next century, too.”
“Well, now there are all kinds of things threatening them, most put there by humans. We’re the biggest threat of them all.”
He raises an eyebrow, and the dimple is back. “That sounds a bit narcissistic. We’re not the greatest species, you know.”
“I know that, which is why we’re here toprotectthem. Come on, you’re just being a contrarian for the heck of it.” I wrap my hand around his wrist that’s resting on his knee. His skin is hot and firm to the touch. He’s all bone and muscle. “Tell me you’re not having fun.”
“Sitting on a sandy beach at midnight,” he says. But his eyes have softened around the corners.
My hand stays on his wrist. “Yeah. You could be doing worse things right now. Think of all the legal paperwork you could be filling out at work.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“All the gavels you could be using.”
“I’m not a judge, Eden.”
