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Private Paradise(4)

By:Jami Alden


Carla slumped in defeat. In trying to avert professional disaster on her behalf, he had no idea he'd brought an even larger one down on her shoulders. And there was no way she could tell him, not without completely humiliating herself.

Even if she did fess up that a long time ago, in a Nevada desert far, far away she'd fallen for the one boy-man she'd known damn well to stay away from, what did it say about her that after more than a decade she was still so hung up on him she could barely stand to be in the same room?

Chris, though her cousin and one of her best friends, was also her boss. She was on thin ice professionally, and she couldn't let a personal incident from the past affect her professional present.

As she had reminded herself out on the deck, she was no longer an idealistic eighteen-year-old with stars in her eyes and hormones raging through her body. Time to pull up her big girl panties and face this situation like a grown up.





Chapter 2





There was no mistaking the tension in Carla's posture as she stalked across the patio, Chris hot at her heels.

Irritated or no, Sam couldn't keep his eyes off the way her ass swished back and forth and the way muscles of her calves shifted beneath smooth, tanned skin under the flowy fabric of her dress. He hadn't been bullshitting her when he said she looked even better than she had the last time he saw her. At eighteen, she'd been all wide, dark eyes and wild curls to match.

Short―she'd barely come up to the middle of his chest―but lushly curved enough to stop traffic, Carla DeLuca had been a sweet little armful, one he'd been itching to get his hands on practically from the first time he laid eyes on her. But Chris knew Sam all too well and had made it clear he'd kick Sam's ass all the way to Los Angeles if he so much as looked at his three-years-younger and infinitely less experienced cousin.

Though Chris had been a match for his size and played football and water polo, Sam didn't have much concern about Chris being able to kick his ass. But Chris was one of Sam's best friends, and Sam tried hard not to ever let his hookups interfere with his friendships. Plus, he knew Chris was right―Carla was a good girl, nothing like the girls Sam usually ran with.

So though he'd run into her every so often through high school and after, he'd tried his damndest to keep his hands to himself.

“Tried” being the operative word. Then, the summer after Carla's senior year, Carla had shown up for employee orientation at the resort outside Vegas where Sam had worked on and off for a couple of years.

It had taken less than a week of Carla and Sam working at the isolated desert oasis, well out of Chris's sight and influence, for Sam's restraint to break down and for him to do a full court press on Carla.

Not that she'd been easy. Though she'd trailed him by three years in high school, she'd been well aware of his reputation and had flat out told him she wasn't about to become another notch on his belt.

Which only made him want her more.

In the eleven years since he'd last seen her, it didn't look like Carla had gotten any easier. With her hair straightened into a dark, silky curtain and her body toned and tight, she looked sleek and tough and ready to take on the world.

She hadn't, however, been prepared for the bomb Chris had lobbed at her. Sam had tried to dissuade Chris from springing him on Carla unannounced. He knew damn well Carla wouldn't, as Chris claimed, “be totally psyched” to have Sam come work with her at Holley Cay.

And based on the last time he’d seen Carla, she had a damn good reason why.

Fresh guilt churned in his gut as he remembered the look on Carla's face that night he'd told her it was over. Her pain as he'd told her, in the cruelest way possible, that there was no future for them was seared in his brain like a brand.

He looked up at the sound of footsteps and saw Carla and Chris coming through the French doors that opened out from the restaurant to the patio. He could see the tension on Carla's face from here. Whatever she'd discussed with Chris, it hadn't made her any happier.

Had she told him about what had happened?

Sam's conscience pricked him, as it had the moment Chris had told him that if he accepted the position at Holley Cay, he'd be working not for Chris, but for Carla.

“You remember Carla, right?” Chris had asked.

Hell yeah, he remembered her. And not, as Sam knew Chris assumed, as the cute girl three classes behind whom he encountered at one of the many parties Chris had thrown in high school. Sam should have told Chris then, he knew. Should have come clean, been a man about it, and let him know all the reasons why Carla wouldn't want him within a hundred miles of their island paradise.

But he knew if he fessed up, he most likely wouldn't get to see her again. And though he hadn't let himself dwell on her in years―white hot dreams where he finally got to do all the things she wouldn't let him didn't count―at the mention of her name he felt the need to see her with an urgency unlike anything he'd felt in a long time.