By all rights, I should hate him.
But even the memory of that one night—and its aftermath—didn’t outweigh his presence. Everything about Grant drew her to him.
He’s exuding pheromones, or something.
It had to be something chemical, right? Ava couldn’t actually identify a smell associated with him, but she would know his scent anywhere. Warm and enticing and entirely male.
She drew in a deep breath, then realized Grant was still watching her.
But as usual, he hadn’t actually asked her for anything.
Well. The days when she would jump in to offer whatever he needed were long gone.
He can damn well ask, for once.
“Those all sound fun,” she said, tilting her face up to the sun for a moment before leaning back into the chair and letting the hat settle over her face, covering a mischievous grin.
“I thought so,” Grant said hopefully.
Ava let the silence draw out.
She bent one knee and stretched out the other leg slowly, rotating her ankle luxuriously, and buried her toes in the sand. Then she lifted up her foot just high enough to let the sand run back off them when she tilted it a little.
“So,” Grant said after a while, “do any of them sound especially interesting?”
Ava tried to keep the smile out of her voice, working hard to sound unconcerned. “I think you should do whatever appeals to you most.” She straightened her other leg and began digging it into the sand, too.
If he wanted her to go with him, he would have to be more specific.
From now on, everything with Grant Porter would be spelled out beforehand.
Ava would never again be surprised when he didn’t want the same things she wanted. She closed her eyes and continued running the sun-warmed sand over her feet.
Dig. Lift. Tilt. Again.
“Would you be interested in going with me?” he asked.
“I might be interested,” she replied airily. “Depends on what you do.”
Cracking one eye open, she glanced at Grant. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, his dangling hands clasped loosely together. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, then said, in an overly precise tone, “If I pick an activity that interests me, would you be willing to go with me to do it?”
Unable to contain her laughter any longer, Ava sat up. “Yes. Of course. Go pick something. Then come back and tell me where we’re going and when.”
Grant jumped up to leave, a smug smile on his face. “You got it,” he said.
As he walked away, Ava couldn’t help but wonder what, precisely, she had agreed to.
Six
Ava gave the dive instructor a thumbs-up. He nodded and moved off to check on the rest of the group. Grant waved at her, his eyes bright and happy behind the clear plastic lenses of his dive mask. He pointed down at something on the ocean floor beneath them.
Ava scanned the dirt and rocks, but saw nothing. With a grin that crinkled his cheeks but left the regulator mouthpiece firmly in place, Grant waved her closer. She fluttered the fins on her feet and moved closer to the bottom, past long, wide fronds of seaweed waving in the ocean currents.
When she swam up next to him, Grant clasped her hand in his and then, so softly she wasn’t even sure it had made contact, he brushed the sand with their knuckles.
The sea-floor erupted in motion, the outline of an almost completely flat fish rising up and rippling away from them, its mottled brown coloring a perfect camouflage. Ava made a noise that on the surface would have been a squeal, but here produced little more than a squeak and a stream of bubbles.
Glancing around to find Seth and Kristin, Ava realized she couldn’t see anyone but Grant. Even in the clear, blue Caribbean water, visibility was limited. But the dive wasn’t deep, and Ava knew all she had to do was surface and one of the boat’s crew would help her.
She realized that she would feel safe even if there had been no one here but Grant. Even in this alien, underwater world, she trusted him to protect her. At least physically.
She wasn’t so sure she could trust him with her emotions. She had started to once, and he had walked away.
A flash of bright blue fin distracted her from her gloomy thoughts, and she tapped Grant’s arm, directing his attention to the school of tropical fish a few yards away, then flipping her own fins as she led him toward them.
When he had come back to her beach chair that morning, he had practically been bouncing, and his grin had turned from merely smug to almost insufferably pleased with himself. “Most of the tours were already booked solid,” he said, without preamble, then paused.
Ava blinked a few times as she tried to decide whether or not to play the game. “Okay,” she finally said. “Tell me what you found instead.”
“I talked to Seth and Kristin, and they’re going with us.”
“Oh, good,” she said.