I frowned at him, though inside, my heart was racing at his close proximity. He smelled of soap and the rain outside and the cheddar cheese he’d grated. “You know I can’t keep that money.”
His lips were just inches from mine. “Why not?”
“Because there’s a conflict of interest.”
“And what is that?”
I set down my wineglass and pulled his face to mine. “This.”
The Moment by Will Price
“Come on, Johnny,” my sister said from her seat on the edge of my bed. “Please. You have to eat.”
But I couldn’t. Without Melanie, food had no flavor.
“Don’t do this to yourself,” Zoey pleaded. “I loved Melanie, too, but you’ve got to let her go. It’s over now.”
“Never.” I knew it wasn’t Zoey’s fault, but I couldn’t help it. “It’ll never be over! Melanie was everything to me—everything a guy could want in a girl. And now she’s gone, and you expect me to eat? What’s the point? What’s the point of even being alive?”
I slapped the bowl of mush out of Zoey’s hand, sending it flying. I heard the ceramic smash to bits on the floor a few yards away.
But when I turned my head to look at the broken shards—like the broken shards of my life—I saw there was a woman standing in the doorway. She had a veiled hat over her head, and a suitcase in her hand.
Slowly, she lifted the veil to reveal a pair of sparkling blue eyes and ruby-red lips.
“Well, I must say, Johnny.” She smiled at me. “You sure do know how to make a lady feel welcome.”
“Melanie!”
A moment later, she was in my arms. “Oh, Johnny! Johnny!” she cried, kissing my mouth, my cheeks, my ears, as tears rained down from her eyes. “They told me you were dead. But I knew it wasn’t true. I just knew it. It took forever for me to find you, but now that I have, I’ll never leave you again—never!”
“You better not,” I said.
And then I kissed her. And this time when I held her, I knew it would be forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I opened my eyes and squinted at the morning light filtering into the room. At first I couldn’t figure out where I was. This wasn’t the morning light that filled my Manhattan apartment. For one thing, I had blackout curtains, and I always remembered to close them before I went to sleep.
And for another, the air smelled different—heavy and wet, like the ocean. Plus, there were unfamiliar sounds, a sort of clanking—which wouldn’t have been unusual in Manhattan on garbage day. But farther off, there was a rhythmic whooshing.
What was making the whooshing? And whose satiny-soft gray sheets were these? And whose aggressively masculine digital alarm clock was that on the nightstand that said it was 8:05 in the morning? Who even had a digital alarm clock anymore, when everyone else had cell phones with alarms they could set to tell them to—
I sat straight up in bed, clutching the satiny-soft gray top sheet around me, since I’d realized I was naked. I was naked, sunlight was pouring in through floor-to-ceiling glass windows all around me, and I was in Will Price’s bed.
The whooshing sound was ocean waves, washing up against the shore of Will’s private island, and the clanking sound, I realized, as soon as I’d pulled on my clothes from the night before and stumbled into his kitchen, was Will, wearing only a pair of boxers, cooking breakfast.
“Oh, hullo,” he said cheerfully, when he saw me standing in the doorway. “You didn’t have to get up. I was going to bring you breakfast in bed. Coffee?”
I leaned in the doorway, trying to figure out if what I was seeing was real or still some part of a hallucinogenic dream I was having from the night before. Had Kellyjean put something other than essential oils in the diffuser in my room?
Then I realized how tender the skin along my face—and other places—felt from where Will had raked it with his lips. Beard burn.
Oh, no. This was real, all right.
Besides, Chloe’s dog, Susie, was panting at Will’s feet as he cooked, hoping for a bite of dropped bacon or something. I would never hallucinate a dog. Or sore lips. Or sore other parts. Wonderfully sore. Deliciously sore.
“Do you like your eggs scrambled or fried?” he asked. “I assume you like eggs. You seem to like everything else. There isn’t one thing I haven’t seen you put in your mouth—”
“Okay!” I sprang from the door and made a beeline for the Jura. “I will take you up on that coffee. Want one?”
“I’ve had two already. I’m an early riser. You?”
“No. Not at all. Not a morning person.”
“That’s a shame. And we’re so compatible in every other way.”
I snorted. “Where do you keep the—”
He caught me around the waist as I was reaching for a coffee cup, pulled me to that strong, broad chest against which I’d cried out so many times the night before in pure joy, and planted a hard, confident kiss on my mouth.
And every bone in my body melted, just as it had last night.
“Hello,” he said, grinning as the bacon on the eight-burner Viking range behind him sizzled.
“Hi.” I couldn’t keep from grinning back. “I think your bacon’s burning.”
“Let it. I like it crispy.”
“Well, I don’t. What, exactly, is all this?”
“What’s what?”
“This?” I gestured at the breakfast tray he’d been making for me, set with a yellow cloth napkin and a vase full of bougainvillea he’d clearly snipped from the vines out by the pool. I recognized the explosive pink. “Is this all because you still feel guilty about what you said to that reporter about my books?”
“Well,” he said. “No. This is because I think you’re very good in bed, and I’m hoping that if I keep you well fed, you’ll continue to have sex with me.”
“Interesting. What about The Moment, then?”
He raised an eyebrow. “The Moment?”
“Yes.” I hopped up onto the kitchen counter. “I found a copy last night when I was on my way to the bathroom—you do seem to have an awful lot of copies of your own books in this house. Have you ever considered donating some of them?—so I finished it.”
Now he raised both eyebrows. “And?”
“And I can’t believe you finally gave one of your books a happy ending.”
He switched off the burner beneath the bacon, then regarded me seriously. “I didn’t intend to. I wanted to kill Johnny. He deserved to die.”
“Did he? I don’t think so. What did he do that was so wrong?”
“He killed the thing that Melanie loved most in all the world.”
“No,” I said. I realized we weren’t actually discussing Melanie and Johnny anymore. “He only thought he did. And he didn’t mean to. And he was very sorry for it, and he tried to make it up to her as best he could. Maybe that’s why, in the end, you let him live.”
“Maybe.” Will gave me a piece of bacon. It was hot, but it was delicious.
“And in the end, Melanie forgave Johnny.”