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We’ve already stripped off our shoes and socks to walk on the damp, dark sand, carrying them along tucked under our arms. I abandon mine a little farther up the slope, in case the tide is coming in.
Dane takes my hand and begins to walk out into the water. The waves wash around our ankles, cold and foamy.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask a little nervously. “I don’t want to swim.”
I doubt the bay is warm in July, let alone October, and I’m still fully dressed, my jeans rolled up to the knee.
“We won’t be swimming,” Dane says, confidently striding deeper.
Only the water’s not actually getting deeper—as we walk out into the bay, the sand beneath my feet remains level and the waves hit no higher than my shins.
“What is this?”
“A sand spit,” he says. “The locals call it the Hellsbench.”
“How come?”
“You’ll see.”
We progress into the bay until all that surrounds us is flat, dark water. From the beach, it must look as if Dane and I are walking across the waves. I can imagine our silhouettes from the shore, Dane still holding his black umbrella over our heads, as if the umbrella is the mechanism for the miracle.
“This is crazy,” I murmur, gazing at the expanse of water all around.
I’m clinging to Dane’s arm, enthralled and a little terrified. The largest waves hit my knees, nearly knocking me off the spit. It’s narrower the farther out we get, now barely wide enough for us to walk side by side.
“This is why you can’t boat in the bay,” Dane says. “There are sandbars all over.”
This is the closest I’ve been to the resort. From here, I can see black-and-gray striped lounge chairs laid out on the neatly groomed sand and several tent-like cabanas with gauzy black canopies. The Onyx is a modern building made almost entirely of glossy dark glass. To me, it looks like a villain’s lair, but its cheapest room is $1200 a night, so I guess I’m not fancy enough to get it.
“You ever stay there?” I ask Dane.
He glances over, uninterested. “I’ve been inside. Never stayed the night.”
That gives me a bite of jealousy and a strange flush of arousal, too.
I sneak a glance at Dane. “Have you been fucking tourists?”
He shrugs. “Keeps things simple.”
I imagine him in one of those posh rooms with some gorgeous, wealthy woman, and my whole body gets hot like I swallowed a burning coal.
Everything about Dane is expensive and refined—his cashmere V-neck, his wool trousers…even the bone-handled umbrella looks like it belongs to an oil tycoon.
I’d barely feel comfortable walking down that end of the beach. I grew up around wealth, but I haven’t tasted it in a decade. I only know enough to know how much I don’t belong.
“What’s wrong?” Dane says.
“Oh…” I give a little laugh directed at myself. “I was thinking you should be lying on one of those loungers with some heiress.”
“Why?” Dane frowns.
“Because look at you…”
I glance up at his impossibly beautiful face, his wind-tossed hair with its streaks of silver, his elegant hand gripping the umbrella.
Dane takes my chin between his finger and thumb and holds me there so I have to look in his eyes and can’t turn away.
“What have I told you about talking down on yourself?”
