“Shh.” She put a finger to his lips, her own curving up in a smile. “I get it. You’d rather separate the wheat from the chaff without billions of dollars in the middle. You don’t have to explain anything to me.”
That might be the sexiest thing she’d said to him yet. “What if I want to?”
She shrugged. “That’s okay too. But I’m not sitting over here stewing because you’re not spilling you guts while you’re screwing me. This is a vacation fling that starts and ends with sex. Secrets are okay.”
Something unfolded in his chest. Relief. A deep breath. “Really? You’re not wondering how I got this?”
He fingered the four inch long gash below his right nipple, where he’d tangled with the wrong end of an ISIS guard’s butcher knife at the perimeter of the compound his team had been sent to eliminate from the face of the earth.
As long as Charlie’s head was still attached, the scar was acceptable collateral damage.
Her smile widened. “I can do math, sweetie. Men who sit behind a desk don’t swim like you do or have such brutally honed muscles. You obviously didn’t follow your father’s footsteps into a boring corporate job, but whatever it is that you do, you must be good at it or you wouldn’t be here. That’s all I need to know.”
As complements went, he had more than enough testosterone pumping through his body to be enormously pleased with her analysis. Yeah, he was good at what he did, and her recognition of it without being told details was a huge turn-on. Audra might be the most perfect woman on the planet. And he wanted to demonstrate that to her in the most elemental way possible.
With a growl, he pulled her into his lap and got started on plowing his way through the better part of the first box of condoms.
The muscles in Audra’s body ached when she woke, but pleasantly so. If such a thing was possible.
She stretched, peeked over at Isaac still asleep in the other bed, and rolled from her own to take a long shower. Tiny abrasions on her breasts and thighs made her smile. If the day went according to plan, Charlie would be ready, willing, and able to kiss away the sting. First she had to take Isaac to Freeport as his return flight to Miami departed in a handful of hours.
Originally, she’d planned to stay in Freeport and spend a lot of time at the beach catching up on her reading. Alone. Charlie had nixed that idea firmly somewhere in the middle of her third orgasm last night and had pointed to the perfectly good empty side of his bed in the giant suite his friend Jared had gifted him. Why waste it?
Since she’d needed little persuading, he’d swayed her.
When she came out of the bathroom, Isaac was awake, dragging a T-shirt over his lanky body.
“Hey,” he called, scrubbing at his scraggly few hairs on his jaw that marked him an almost man. It was barely enough to shave, but he did so gleefully. “Thanks for staying gone last night. I um… had a guest.”
“I figured.” Grinning, she stuck her fingers in her ears. “Don’t say anything else. I don’t want to hear about it. Lalalala.”
His ready smile bloomed in return. “Same goes for you, Ms. Sneaks-In-At-Midnight, like I’m deaf and don’t know what those lyrics mean to that Beyoncé song you were humming. I won’t tell Mom if you don’t. She’d have a cow.”
She almost laughed at his wide blue eyes. They’d been each other’s everything for so long he’d likely forgotten she was eleven years older. An adult with every right to sleep with whomever she wished, whenever.
“Our secret.” Audra mimed turning a key in her mouth to indicate it was locked tight and pulled her little brother into a bear hug. Except he wasn’t so little and picked her up off her feet easily as he squished her. “Isaac! Put me down.”
He didn’t, opting to bounce up and down until she thought she’d throw up, but they were both laughing and horsing around and she reveled in it. Isaac was the only male in her life she loved without reservation—he’d never abandon her, not really. Their relationship might shift a little, like she’d bemoaned to Charlie, but she’d be there for him no matter what, and she trusted he felt the same.
They had breakfast and she helped him pack. “Help” turned out to mean that she’d do it solo while he said good-bye to Annalisa, the French girl. She didn’t mind; it had been a long time since she’d gotten to do small things for him, and they wouldn’t see each other again for several months. She didn’t plan to be back in the States until she had to argue her dissertation, hopefully at the end of the summer. And then she’d be Dr. Audra Reed, PhD.