A Holiday Romance (10 page)

“You’ll stay in Maine?”

“Maybe. I’m considering Vermont or upstate New York, too.” His question made her wonder why she hadn’t been more venturesome. This was her chance, finally, to go wherever the whim took her. “I guess I was thinking I should stick close to my family. But…” She gazed across the amazing vista of the desert, energized by its unfamiliarity. “It wouldn’t hurt to widen my horizons. I’m learning how invigorating change can be.”

“Up to a point. I’ve moved around a lot with Prince Montez, working my way up the corporate ladder, and after a while, well, you start to long for permanence.”

“Really? You seem like the ambitious young executive, dedicated to the job 24/7. Always on call. Ever the professional.”

“Right. That’s me.” His mouth quirked.

“Where’s your family? I mean—” she raised her eyebrows “—the
rest
of them.”

“Still in Nevada. My sister lives with our mother just
over the border, in a small town called Elk River. We’re not close.”

“And your father?”

“Haven’t heard from him in years.” Kyle moved away, his mouth turned down at the corners. “We really should go back. The others will wonder what happened to us.”

“There’s no rush. The guide said we could go where we wanted, as long as we stayed on the trails and didn’t wander too far away.” They’d left the group behind at least a mile back, in an area of low rolling dunes where the driving was great fun, extremely dusty, but not very challenging.

“Except you
didn’t
stay on the trail. And we’re not even within sight of the group.”

She tossed her head. “So what? There’s a map in the Razor. I know exactly where we are.” She grinned. “I bet you always colored within the lines, didn’t you?”

“And measured my margins with a ruler.”

“I know what that’s like.” She remembered his happy shout when the Razor got some air, shooting over the dunes. And how he’d egged her on when they’d led the group on a wild ride along a straightaway. “Thanks for lightening up with me.”

“It was a helluva ride.”

“We’re not done yet. Come on.” She reached to tug on his arm, but somehow ended up with his hand, instead. “I think I saw some saguaro cacti back in the other direction. If you take my picture with one, I can cross another item off my list.”

Kyle checked his watch. “We’ll have to hurry. I don’t like the look of those clouds. We might be in for a monsoon. The wind and sand can be wicked out here if you’re outdoors without shelter.”

Alice ignored him. She was thinking how she’d like to rip his watch off and toss it into the canyon. A flash flood might wash it away forever.

“I’m not worried,” she said. There’d been several short hard rainstorms since her arrival.

“You should be. The desert is a dangerous place for the—”

“I know, I know! There are rattlesnakes and scorpions.” She laughed. “Rock slides and flash floods. Drama and danger at every turn.” She even skipped a little as they approached the ATV.

He squeezed her hand before releasing it. “You almost sound like you’re inviting disaster to make your vacation more memorable.”

“Well…not really. I don’t want to be hurt.” Out of nowhere, the truth of the innocent comment socked her in the solar plexus. The more she knew Kyle, the more she liked him both as an attractive man and a friend, which meant that her emotions were becoming involved. If that happened, she would be hurt when her vacation was over, she just knew it.

She skidded on the pebbles. He caught her arm. “You okay?”

She sucked in a gulp of the hot air and nodded. “Sure.” On the island, she breathed cool moisture, sea brine, the spicy aroma of the pines. She kept her feet on the ground. Her balance never wobbled.

“I’m driving,” Kyle said.

She agreed.
Get a grip. You’re reading too much into a whole lot of nothing.

He helped her into the passenger seat. She liked his courtly manners, the care he took with her. The evening with Denver had been fun, too, but in a different way.
On the drive home, he’d sung along with the radio and howled with the coyotes. Mostly as a result of all the beer and whiskey chasers, but the exuberance had been infectious.

She gripped the T-bar under the dash, expecting a hairy ride down the steep hillside. But Kyle only picked up speed when they were on flat ground again.

He glanced at the approaching thunderheads. “Look at that. I told you. There’s going to be a storm any minute now.”

Earlier, they’d put up the roof of the vehicle to protect them from the sun. But it wasn’t enough against rain, especially with the open sides. “A little rain won’t hurt us,” she said confidently.

A gust of wind rattled the roof covering. “It’s not the rain that’ll get you, it’s the wind and the sand.” Kyle swerved off the course she’d set to reconnect with the trail.

“Where are you going?” Less confidence.

“See the cliff face? We’ll have better shelter there. We can wait out the storm.”

The sand had risen up around them, whipped by the wind. She coughed, choking on the grit. “Pull your bandanna over your face,” he instructed. “Your sunglasses will help protect your eyes. Do you have a jacket?”

She spoke through the cloth. “A windbreaker in the back.”

“Hold on.” He sped toward the rocks, dodging the hoodoo rock formations and bucketing in and out of gullies. She ducked down behind the windshield as they were pelted by the stinging sand. A dust devil spun across a span of open ground, spitting fine gravel. She watched in amazement.

The Razor climbed a steep hill to reach the canyon
wall, well out of the path of flash floods. Kyle parked beneath a thick overhang of rock, then reached into the rear compartment to haul up the cooler and her tote. In short order, he had her wrapped in the windbreaker, the hood pulled taut around her face.

Raindrops began to pelt the vehicle. They were tiny and sharp, but preferable to the sand. She pulled down the bandanna. “What about you?”

He’d turned in the seat to keep his back to the rain. “I’m fine.”

“Take this.” She yanked a sweatshirt out of her bag, thankful she’d gone through the desert survival guide she’d found in the Raffertys’ condo and packed accordingly, no matter how silly it seemed to lug along so much extra clothing. “And this.” A baseball cap.

“Thanks.”

The rain continued to pound the earth in nearly vertical sheets. They were soon soaked through, despite their attempts to huddle together. She drew her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

Kyle’s body was warm, his encircling arms a comfort. And then after ten minutes, the rain began to abate. He put his mouth near her ear. “How are you enjoying your vacation, Miss Potter?”

She lifted her head, bumping first his nose, then the hat brim. Despite the chill and the damp, their circle had become almost steamy. “The extremes are really quite extreme,” she said primly.

He chuckled. “You should come back in the spring for wildflower season. We’d treat you more gently then.” The rain had stopped as quickly as it started, but he didn’t loosen the embrace.

“Next time,” she whispered, wishing she knew whether there’d be a next time. There could if she made it happen.

“What do you have planned for the rest of your stay?”

“Some people at the condo have invited me out for a day of boating and barbecue. Then there’s a dawn hike up Camelback and mountain biking. Chloe says I should go skydiving. I say she’s nuts.”

“Hmm. Don’t forget—the spa is running specials. No exertion required.”

“You still think I’m the spa type?”

With one finger, he scraped a strand of wet hair off her cheek. His breathing rasped in and out. “Not so much at the moment.”

Her heartbeat drummed. “I’m sure I’m a mess,” she whispered, tingling at his touch. She waited a couple of seconds that seemed like minutes. “You can let go now.”

“Not yet. We have unfinished business.”

She went still, except for the pulse that thrummed through her body.

He prodded her chin until she raised it. “You owe me a kiss.”

“I don’t
owe
you.”

“No, you’re right there, but will you give me one, anyway?”

She wanted to. Achingly. “What about company policy? What about Denver?”

“I won’t tell if you don’t.”

“A secret.” Forbidden. Clandestine. Illicit. She turned the concept over in her mind. Not the stuff of her romantic daydreams, exactly, but there was a certain appeal. A vacation-fling appeal.

She’d expected
that
kind of move out of Denver.

“Just a kiss,” Kyle said. He stopped stroking her cheek.

She was losing him, thanks to her hesitancy.

Alice turned and seized his face between her hands. She laid a bold juicy kiss on him. Their lips smacked loudly. Not the stuff of her romantic daydreams, either, but it’d do.

He smiled, and she was dazzled to discover that she felt the smile through her palms. It traveled up her arms, spread a sweet balm across her nervousness.

“I’m not a number to be crossed off your list,” he said.

She blinked.

“And I’m not a challenge to overcome.”

“Of course not. I just thought…”

“You’d take the matter into your own hands?” He was still smiling, telling her that even her awkwardness and uncertainty were all right.

She started to take away her hands, but he said, “No, don’t move.” He caressed her face. His gaze wandered across it before landing, significantly, on her lips.

She licked them. She and Kyle were intertwined. Cocooned in heat and humid desire. He was, after all, the stuff of her romantic dreams.

Light filled her when he placed his lips over hers. Like the sun beaming out from behind a thundercloud. There was a grittiness to the kiss, seeing as they were both covered in a fine layer of sand, but everything else about it was as sweet and soft and smooth as a summer breeze.

Kyle was, without a doubt, a great kisser. The end of their kiss, the end of the vacation, even the end of her loneliness, were the furthest things from her mind. For now, the moment was enough.

At least they rested their cheeks together. Rain dripped from the stone wall. A lizard skittered along the wet pebbles of the wash.

“We should probably start back,” Kyle said after a while. “They might be looking for us.”

Reluctantly, they broke apart. She found the cooler, shoved into leg well of the ATV, and offered him a bottle of water. They drank, then used her bandanna to wash the sand off their faces and necks. She broke out the packets of trail mix, peeled and sectioned an orange. It was absolutely the sweetest and juiciest orange she’d ever tasted.

They chatted about nothing special. Afterward, she couldn’t remember what they’d said, except for being certain that not one word was about hotel policy or Denver.

S
INCE THEIR DESERT
kiss, Kyle had stayed away from Alice for fifty-seven hours and thirty-two minutes. He wasn’t counting the seconds. Despite Lani’s prodding, he hadn’t talked about her, either. When his secretary had gleefully reported that he’d been seen at the condos, he’d played that off as a “meeting” with Denver. Just as his off-road outing had been quality control. If Lani knew that he and Alice had disappeared for an hour on their own in an ATV, she, for once, hadn’t had the cheek to question him.

He wasn’t as lucky with Gavin.

“Smooth move.” Gavin looked down at Kyle on the weight bench and laughed. “Real smooth. The old let-me-save-you-from-the-storm ploy. Let-me-shelter-you-in-my-arms-of-steel. Yep. Works every time.”

Kyle’s arms seemed made of linguini now. He clenched his jaw and pumped out three more reps before allowing Gavin to take the barbell and replace it on the stand.

He needed to play this off, too, but somehow he couldn’t do it. The fifty-seven hours and thirty-two minutes had weakened his resolve.

He blotted his face with a towel and heard himself saying, “That’s not the way it was.”

“That’s the way it always is.”

“Alice is different.”

They switched places. “I’ll give you that point,” Gavin said, straining against the weights as Kyle spotted. “From what I hear, she’s Jenna’s complete opposite. Not that there’s any significance to that.”

Jenna Malloy was five-eleven, blond, slim, every inch the high-fashion model she aspired to become even though this was Phoenix and she was mainly booked for catalog and local advertising work. Kyle had dated her casually for three months last spring.

“Jenna who?” he said.

Gavin grunted. “You know, that high-maintenance chick who was supposed to be your perfect relationship.”

At the time Kyle’s idea of perfection had been a beautiful and sophisticated woman who was as detached from real involvement as he was. He wasn’t sure when that had changed, but it must have, because Alice was no Jenna.

Gavin finished his reps. Kyle unclamped the weights, considered dropping them on his friend’s head.

“What are you harping at me for?” Kyle placed the forty-pound weights in a neat row, then the twenties. “You’ve been singing the praises of making a commitment ever since you got down on one knee to Melina.”

Gavin sat up. “Yeah, well, we’re coming up on our seven-week anniversary, and you’ve had no action of significance in longer than that. I’m getting bored.”

“What are you saying? The honeymoon’s over already?”

“Not over. We’re just kind of settling in, you know? Mel’s stopped thinking my whiskers in the bathroom sink are cute.”

Kyle cuffed Gavin’s shoulder. “Came to her senses, huh?”

“It had to happen.” Gavin sighed forlornly. “No more
elaborate home-cooked meals, either. Goodbye souvlaki and that custard-pie thing with phyllo. I gained five pounds and she gained three. We’re eating healthy from now on.”

“Damn, man. That sounds hellish. I really feel for you.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

They walked to the utilitarian staff-only locker room, which was unoccupied and silent as a tomb except for a drip in one of the shower stalls. Kyle worked the padlock on his locker. “They say the first year of marriage is the hardest.”

“Thanks, Dr. Phil.” Gavin had brought a basketball in with him and proceeded to bounce it on the tile floor. The sound ricocheted around the room. “How about a few games of horse before we go?”

Kyle looked at his watch. “Where’s Melina?”

“Out with the girls. She’s ‘reclaiming her independence,’ whatever that means.”

“That means you should be waiting for her at home. With a big bunch of flowers and the bed turned down.”

Gavin’s brow furrowed.

“She’ll be tipsy,” Kyle explained.

“Hey, that’s right.” Gavin brightened. “The honeymoon’s back on, baby.”

Kyle yanked off his T-shirt, then took out a towel. He glanced at his watch again. Fifty-seven hours, fifty-five minutes. That ought to be long enough to prove he wasn’t smitten like a schoolboy, despite his recent ill-advised actions. He’d wash and dress in his suite and then maybe, since he wasn’t going to bed anytime soon, find Alice.

Gavin caught the gesture. “Got a late date with the anti-Jenna?” he called.

“You know I can’t date a guest.”

“Ah, the sweet irony of life.”

Kyle was not amused. He would be the laughingstock of his staff if he broke the very rules he’d laid down. Then there was the job review, his coveted promotion to corporate. Everything he valued, hanging in the balance.

Because of one beguiling woman. One amazing kiss.

“What the hell,” Gavin said. “Maybe the taboo is what you like about her.”

It’s not.

“’Cause, gotta tell you, guy, I’m not seeing it.”

Kyle was momentarily flummoxed. Then he remembered. “You know what? That’s exactly what I said when you told me Melina was the one.”

“Wait a minute.” Gavin stood and tossed his smelly sneakers into the locker. The basketball rolled off the bench and toward the shower stalls. “You can’t mean this Alice chick is the type of woman you’d fall in love with.”

“Of course not.” Kyle kicked the ball away.
I don’t have the time or inclination for that, but if I did, she wouldn’t be the
type.
She’d be the
one.

He looked at his watch once more. The hour hand was directly on eleven. Fifty-eight hours.

Maybe he did have the time.

The inclination would require more reflection.

A
GROUP OF CELEBRANTS
had spilled out of the doors at Hoodoo. Their voices carried on the night air to Alice as she watched from her vantage point on the elevated terrace outside the Manzanita Lounge. The celebrants faded into the darkness, but laughter and catcalls marked their progress. Soon headlights appeared in the night as the group drove from the parking lot onto the curving road between the palms.

“Hiya, Alice. You don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself.” Chloe stood beside the table, holding a margarita glass half-filled with a lime-green concoction.

“No, I am,” Alice said quickly, lightly. Chloe had been so solicitous, Alice didn’t want to give the impression that she wasn’t satisfied with her stay. “I’m just not up to dancing tonight. All that energy…” She waved toward the club. “Mine’s spent.”

“I hope that means your day went well.”

“It did, except for my sunburn.” Alice motioned for Chloe to sit. The terrace tables were filled now that the heat had broken.

“Doesn’t look too bad.” Chloe took a chair. “Slather on the aloe and you’ll be fine.” She glanced longingly toward the nightclub while picking grains of salt from the rim of her glass. “Are you sure you don’t want to go dancing?”

“Not tonight.”

“Too sore?”

Alice allowed herself a groan. Then a slump. “All
these sports activities are catching up with me. I can hardly move.”

Chloe reached for her evening bag. “I’ll schedule you for a massage at the spa tomorrow. In fact, it looks like you deserve an entire day of pampering.” She pecked notes into her PDA. “What’s your preference? Hot stone, Swedish or shiatsu?”

“I have no idea. I’ve never had a massage.”

“Never? Wow, you’re in for a treat. What about a brown-sugar-scrub facial? Or a body wrap—they do a mesquite clay wrap with warm jojoba body butter that’s out of this world.”

Alice touched her cheek, remembering how Kyle had held her face in his hands when they’d kissed. He hadn’t seemed to mind that she’d been coated in sand. “I could use one, I guess. But can you make the appointments before noon? The rest of my day is already promised.”

Chloe’s eyes lit up. “Ooh, to whom?”

“The Cocktail Shakers. The St. Gregorys, Harrie, Mary Grace—that group. We’re going boating. I think it’ll be fun. More relaxing, anyway, than another desert hike.”

“Maybe they’ll bring along a young person for you.”

“Actually, uh, Harrie mentioned a nephew. And Mags said something about a grandson, but he could turn out to be anywhere from ten to forty.”

Chloe chortled. “Blind-date boating! I love it.” She drained her glass. “I’ve got to run. It’s my first night off in a week and for once I get to have some fun, instead of scheduling it.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize you weren’t working. I’m sorry to have kept you.”

“Stop it.” Chloe tipped up her chin, making her
dangle earrings shimmer in the fairy lights strung along the railing. “You’re my pet project.”

Alice smiled, though her enthusiasm had waxed and waned. Particularly with the Jarreau brothers, she’d been distracted from her goal for the trip. “I have to confess—I spent the entire day at the pool, writing postcards to my niece and nephews in between dips.”

“There’s no need to feel guilty. The heat is draining even when you’re acclimated.” Chloe instructed Alice to check her messages in the morning for her appointment times, then set off in the direction of the nightclub.

Alice sat unmoving for several minutes, watching the palms sway.
Priorities. Keep your priorities.

She snatched her handbag off the back of the chair and took out the list she’d written on her first evening at the resort. Many of her subsequent experiences weren’t on it.
Good.
Her life on Osprey Island hadn’t allowed for much spontaneity. Every trip away from home had to be carefully planned, especially doctor appointments for her mother. Ferry schedules, mainland transportation, frequent rest stops.

To be young and free again was a wonderful thing. She had to do it right, which did not mean fretting over a man. Either man.

She stood and went directly to the desk in the lobby. “Hi. I want to…I’m not sure how this works, but how do I call someone here at the hotel?”

“Another guest, ma’am?” the young male clerk asked.

“Um, no. Someone on staff.”

“I see. Is there something I might help you with?”

“No, thanks. It’s personal. I mean, private.”

“You may use the house phone, but I’ll need a name
or an extension number. And since it’s after hours, you’ll most likely get voice mail.”

Alice hesitated. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. “You know,” she said, “it might be better if I wait until morning.”

There she went, equivocating again.

“On second thought.” She squared her shoulders. A simple phone call was no big deal. “The name is Jarreau.”

S
HE GOT
,
as predicted, voice mail. The desk clerk moved off to help another guest, but his head still seemed cocked in Alice’s direction.

“Hello.” She cupped the receiver. “This is Alice. I hope it’s okay that I’m calling. I just wanted to—” deep breath “—wanted to say that I’d like to see you again. Maybe you’re avoiding me, I don’t know. Maybe that’s the way it has to be. If that’s how it is and you’re staying away on purpose, I, uh, understand. I guess. I don’t want to cause trouble. But I wish…no, I
want,
if it’s possible, to see you again. I’m only here for five more days. It wouldn’t be so terrible, would it, if we got to be friends?” Her eyes veered to the clerk. Busy. “But I wouldn’t say no to something—”