“When we were at school, you and I were never exclusive.” He looked at her for confirmation. She nodded. “I don’t ever remember us having a conversation where we even talked about being in a boyfriend-girlfriend thing. We just…started.”
She nodded again. At that time in her life, new experiences were her priority, and she was as drawn to his bed as she was to his creativity and insight. “You’re right. We weren’t exclusive, and we never had that conversation, but you were my number one.”
“You were my number one sometimes too. And my other number one was a year ahead of me, and I fell in love with her, hard.”
Anna looked away. She remembered the woman he was talking about. Faint recollections, hazy snapshots rose around her, mimicking the ebb and flow of the great body of water in front of them. “I was a little jealous of her, Danny. That much I remember.”
“We kept seeing each other after I graduated, and she got pregnant. She was in grad school, she had her career trajectory all figured out, and having a baby with me wasn’t in any version of her plans.”
“What happened?”
He withdrew his fingers from the sand and smoothed the surface, picking out bits of shell.
Anna rested her hand atop his and pulled it closer with no resistance. “Danny?”
“I don’t think I can do this right, Anna,” he said, absorbed with marking a precise pattern of lines and dots into the sand. “I make my living walking into people’s homes and telling them what to keep and what to get rid of, and I can’t seem to do that in my own house. Not right now.”
She squeezed his sand-coated hand, gently. “Let’s swim.”
The salt water flowing around Anna’s ankles was balm to her soul. She closed her eyes, took in a deep breath, and let it out. The water swept away from her feet as she exhaled, leaving her toes buried in wet sand. A tiny crab scuttled across the tip of one bright pink big toe before disappearing in the next wave.
Daniel walked up next to her. Others around them were swimming. She kept going until the warm water reached her mid-thigh. She dove. Stroke after stroke, she pulled against the power of the water, needing to rinse away the sadness infusing Daniel’s words. There was more to the story, and he needed to finish it. She needed him to finish it. She raised her head and turned toward the shore when she could no longer hold her breath. Daniel’s dark head bobbed nearby.
“This is fantastic!” she gushed.
Swimming close, he reached for her waist and pulled her in, treading water and smiling as though their conversation of five minutes ago never happened. “You’ve always had a thing for water. I remember.”
Arms wide, bodies bobbing in the waves, salt pungent on her tongue, she grinned. “Do you recall a certain hot tub adventure?”
Ah, youth. When having sex in a variety of locales was on everybody’s bucket lists. And that was before she knew what a bucket list was. Daniel slid his hands under her butt and drew her legs around his waist.
“I do,” he said. “We had to be so quiet. And not move around too much.”
Anna floated, letting sensation buoy her as much as his embrace. The fabric of his trunks floated against her inner thighs, caressing her skin like long strands of kelp against slippery aquatic bodies. Sunshine and memories of the better times with him warmed her heart. She closed her eyes, mouth stretched into a languid smile.
“There’s a very nice pool on my terrace,” she said, hinting where they might go next.
Daniel’s hands cupped her lower back, drawing her closer to his chest. He’d managed to steer both of them closer to shore. When he planted his feet, the muscles in his legs and torso firmed in response. Anna held on as he brought an arm around her upper back and his mouth to hers.
Kissing out in the open while floating in salt water was lovely. Anna had been primed by Liam, and now the surrounding sensory input was making for a grand wake-up call all through her body.
A wave tried to knock them apart. Daniel bit into her top lip as his thumb pressed against her chin. Eyes half-closed, with a grin teasing the edges of his mouth and a hand clenching one half of her ass, his fingers played along the edge of her bathing suit.
“Let’s take this to your room,” he suggested.
“Race you.” Anna sent a challenge to his brown-eyed gaze, swiveled her torso, and flipped, seal-like, into the warm water. She beat him to the beach, grabbed her things, wrapped the towel around her chest, and attempted to outrun him to the hotel. He wasn’t trying to hide his body under a bulky piece of terrycloth and made it well before she did.
Hands on hips, he stood on the terrace at the edge of the beach, sunglasses on, the saltiness of the ocean water drying his hair into wild waves.
“I would have won if we were swimming to our rooms.” She giggled, taking the hand he extended and holding tight while he led them to the open-air stairwell and up to the third-floor landing.
Anna dropped her things by the door when they entered her room. “Shower?”
Daniel followed her into the bathroom and turned the faucets built into the side walls of the shower area. He stepped into the streams of water and stripped, waving at Anna to join him. “It’s easier to get out of your suit in here.”
She stared, her legs gone to marble. Daniel Strauss was standing in her bathroom, in Mexico, naked, lathering soap against gym-ripened pecs and six-pack abs and letting his mildly tumescent manliness just…just hang there, like it was the boss of her shower. And she
