It was afternoon beneath a warm sun, nothing but the Caribbean Sea for miles, and his favorite girl in a different bikini, this one a heart-stopping red. They were currently sitting on the swim deck off the back of the boat, dripping wet and breathing hard from a race, winner to collect the spoils of their choice. Hannah had beaten him, mostly because he couldn’t take his eyes off her as she swam, moving through the water while laughing so hard that she’d nearly drowned herself.
She was still laughing when she pushed her drenched hair from her face and met his gaze, her smile slowly fading.
“What?” he asked.
“I’m really sorry about this morning.”
“I don’t need an apology,” he said. He knew her well. When she wanted something badly enough, she made it happen for herself. If he was ever lucky enough to have it be him she wanted again, she’d let him know. “It’s okay, Hannah.”
“No, it’s not. I put work ahead of you and I shouldn’t have. It didn’t mean I didn’t want to be with you, not then and not at breakfast.”
“Work has been your life for a long time. It’s understandable that you’d put it first.”
“Well . . .” She smiled. “I’m not working right now.”
That adorably sexy smile was something his body remembered quite well, and damn, he loved Playful Sexy Hannah. “You’re not,” he said with a laugh. “And you have yet to claim your prize—even though you cheated.”
“I’d never cheat.” But she laughed.
“Uh-huh,” he said, unable to keep from laughing with her. She was . . . infectious. “So when you had a quick bikini-top malfunction out there and flashed me, that was entirely by accident?”
She lifted her chin, but her eyes revealed both heat and humor. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He moved closer, crowding her for the simple pleasure of having her close as he smiled into her face. “Maybe we should discuss this later in private, in greater detail.”
“I agree,” she said. “Lying down, in case I get . . . tired.”
“I like the way you think.” He touched the tip of her nose. “You need more sunblock.” He sat up and reached for the bottle.
“You just want to get your hands on me again.”
“One hundred percent. Lie down on your front.”
She hurried to do just that, wriggling into place and making him groan because she had the cutest, sexiest wedgie going. All too aware of the fact that her dad might very well have eyes on them, he did his best to make this a PG event, keeping his hands on her sun-warmed skin and not slipping beneath the itty-bitty bikini.
“I’ve got to tell my dad in the morning before we hit San Juan,” she murmured, eyes closed. “And then your parents will be here and you’ll have a chance to talk to your dad as well. Big day.”
“Yeah.”
She slipped her hand in his and sighed. “Back to real life.”
He drew a deep breath but didn’t say anything, and she looked over at him.
“I remember the last time we were lying right here,” he said.
She sat up and nodded. “It’d been a hard year for both of us.”
“Yeah,” he said. “My brother had died and the girl I loved dumped me and then ghosted me. As hard as a year ever gets.”
She stared at him. “You . . . loved me?”
“Does it matter now?”
She drew a deep breath. “Yes. And I didn’t dump you. It . . . didn’t work out.”
He snorted.
“It didn’t!” She pointed at him. “You wanted me to walk away from a college internship and travel the world, no questions asked, no plans, just fly by the seat of your pants. And I got that you were coming from a place of overwhelming grief, I really did, but I wanted . . . no, I needed to go home and take that internship so I could set myself up for the future. I understood what you had to do, but you didn’t even try to understand what I needed to do. You wanted to be happy. But everyone experiences happiness in different ways, James. Hard work and stability are more important to me than happiness. So is having a safety net.”
“It wasn’t just what I wanted, Hannah.” He paused and drew a deep breath because the last thing he wanted was for this week to end like the last one they were together. “I promised Jason that I’d spend New Year’s in Barbados, a place he’d always wanted to go, but could never get away from work to do it.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“Yeah, because at the end, he realized some things. That he’d worked too hard and too long and had never lived his life.”
She looked stunned. “You never said . . .”
“It’d been his choice, of course. But in the end, he knew he’d made mistakes. He had regrets, because he’d never done any of the things he would’ve put on a bucket list, including falling in love and having kids. He was always working and looking ahead, never in the moment.” He swallowed hard. “He made me promise I wouldn’t do that, that I’d live doing something that made me happy.”
“I . . . didn’t know that.”
“I know,” he said. “I told myself you never gave me the chance to tell you about it, but honestly?” He shrugged. “I guess I really just wanted you to choose me because you wanted to be with me, not because I guilted you into it with a promise I’d made to Jason.”
A tear slid down her cheek. “I wasn’t capable of making that decision,” she whispered. “Or even of traveling with you, because I knew the truth—that if I talked to you about it, I’d have walked away from the internship, no looking back. And I couldn’t live a Peter Pan life, James. I had to grow up.”
And there it was. He nodded. “Because one of us had to, right?”
She grimaced. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You did, but that’s okay.” He rose to his feet. “We each did what we had to do. No regrets, right?”
Some emotion crossed her face, but she cleared her expression and gave him a tight nod.
From a lower deck, Sally called out for James.
“Coming,” he called back, eyes on Hannah. Waiting for her to say . . . shit, he had no idea. But she said nothing, and he nodded, then walked away.
Chapter Twelve
WATCHING JAMES walk away, Hannah felt her heart break in two all over again. He’d loved her . . .
“Smalls.”
She kept her back to her dad. “It’s not a good time,” she managed to say.
“I just got a message from your mom.”
She closed her eyes, concentrating on the warm breeze caressing her face and the squawk of happy birds.
“WTF didn’t you tell me?” Harry asked.
She let out a mirthless laugh and dropped her head back to look up at the perfectly gorgeous blue sky. Where was a moody storm when she needed one? “Still not using that right, Dad.”
“Your mom’s divorcing me?”
Oh shit. She turned to face him and wanted to cry all over again at the look of utter devastation on his face.
“So it’s true?”