And then he walked briskly back to his house, hearing the motorboat pull away.
Without unpacking the groceries, he headed back to the cottage on the cliff. Why there was even a cottage on the island he didn’t know. It hadn’t been habitable when he first got here and it wasn’t much better now, the windows long since having lost their glass and the stone walls crumbling a bit. But he had put a padded bench in and a table and some other bare necessities. He liked to read in there once in a while. And now that he had finished every home improvement imaginable on the lighthouse itself, he didn’t doubt that he would turn to this structure next. He needed physical labor to keep him occupied.
Wondering if Andrea had fallen asleep, he found her wide awake as he entered the cottage, watching him. “She’s gone now,” he said.
She nodded. “Is that your girlfriend?”
“Cassie? Hell no.”
“Why not? It seems like it would be extremely convenient.”
“On the contrary, it would be extremely inconvenient.”
“Meaning what? You’d have to see her after you had sex with her because she delivers the groceries?”
“Yeah,” he said immediately, only at the last second realizing what a jerk that made him seem like. But hell, it was true. “Her father owns the main store in the nearest town and she’s barely legal.”
“She looked pretty legal to me. Or do you really just sleep with whores?”
Actually, he pretty much did these days, Andrea Prentiss being the glaring exception even if he hadn’t been clued in to that fact initially. He chose not to take her comment as picking a fight with him. “I’m not interested in relationships with women usually, just sex. Paying for it seems fairer all around.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.”
“Come on. Let’s go back to the house.”
“Are you sure your little blonde girlfriend isn’t lurking around?”
“What the hell’s your problem, Andrea? You saw the boat drive away. Don’t get paranoid on me. Or even more paranoid than you already are.”
“Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not out to get me.”
“Thanks for those words of wisdom.”
“I don’t believe in monogamy,” she offered, apropos of nothing.
“What?”
“Really. It’s always seemed the most ridiculous concept in the world to me.”
“I’m not sleeping with Cassie.”
She laughed—a funny, completely-not-like-her sound. There was too much wildness in it to sound like Andrea Prentiss. “I mean it. I really don’t care. I always wondered why men got so caught up on the concept.”
Evan neglected to point out that men usually weren’t the ones caught up on that, but he wasn’t following her train of thought too well anyway, so he hesitated to jump in.
“I mean ‘crime of passion’ and all that. Why would anyone really care if they came home and found their spouse in bed with somebody else? What the hell difference would that make to anything?”
Well, he sort of saw why it might be annoying.
“I mean if you loved the person, what would it matter? And if you didn’t love the person, well…what would it matter? Sex has nothing to do with anything.”
“Let’s go back to the lighthouse. I think you need a nap.”
“I’m not your fucking puppy!”
He went for her arm and she slapped him, hard. So hard it whipped his head back and he gasped. Nobody had ever hit him. He didn’t have a very physical family and he was never the roughhousing kind of boy at school. As an adult, he wasn’t exactly the kind of guy who got in bar fights either or anything.
So, shit, he never realized how much it hurt to get hit like that. He held a hand up to his burning cheek. “Why the hell did you do that?”
She went to slap him again and he caught her hand, bewildered. “What is wrong with you?”
“You have no idea,” she spat out.
It was a struggle to keep her from hitting him again and he wound up just putting his arms around her in a bizarre parody of a hug, holding her so tight to his body she couldn’t get a hand free to lash out at him again. But it didn’t turn him on. Sex was the last thing on his mind. She was shaking so hard, he thought she might be sick.
“Shh, stop,” he soothed. “Stop, Andrea.”
“My name isn’t Andrea,” she managed to get out through her wild squirming.
He put his mouth to her ear. “So what is your name?”
But she didn’t answer. Finally, she just sagged against him, as if the went left her sails or something.