He was on vacation and it didn’t hurt.
Wonders never cease.
"Walk with me." He stood up and tossed his napkin on the table. There were a hundred people around, dancing to the live band, eating their dinners at the dozens of candlelit tables set up on the sand. Crowds didn’t bother him – he usually liked to get lost in an anonymous crowd – but here, tonight, he wanted to be alone with Mandy.
He had changed his mind about his assistant. He no longer wanted to avoid her. He wanted to kiss her.
To taste those full pink lips and draw her into his arms, hand in her soft wavy hair. To absorb her feeling, her scent, take her all into him and remember what it was like to know passion, pure tactile pleasure.
Damien stuck his feet back in his sandals, but Mandy shook the sand off hers and put them in her bag. "Where are we going?"
"Nowhere. Just walking." He gazed at the horizon. "I’ve forgotten how to do that."
Every step he took had a purpose, every thought in his head task oriented. He didn’t walk for pleasure, he didn’t indulge in daydreaming.
But as the sun started to sink and the palm trees danced in the breeze, he wanted to walk and do nothing, be nothing, pretend that he was normal, a whole human being, who could have a beautiful woman at his side.
Mandy put her arm through his, leaning on him a little as they started to walk. He liked the feeling, like she trusted him. Like she wanted to touch him.
"Are you happy, Damien?"
The question caught him off guard, made him give a snort. He wasn’t even sure what happiness was, or that it existed. He believed in hard knocks; he believed in hard work, but happiness? It was nothing but a faint, fading memory.
They were walking past beach vendors who hawked their T-shirts and jewelry and artwork from their makeshift shacks. Damien was saved from answering by an aggressive salesman calling out, "Senorita! Hola… I give you good price, come see. Pretty bracelet for a pretty woman."
Mandy shook her head with a smile. "No, thank you."
"Sehor is cheap, huh?" he asked with a sly grin at Damien.
Mandy laughed and waved as they walked on past.
"You didn’t even defend me," Damien said in mock protest. "I am not cheap."
"Well, I don’t think you are, but I’m really not entirely sure, having never seen you shopping. But you’re not going to distract me from my original question." Her fingers pressed into his flesh. "Are you happy?"
Damien stopped walking and looked down at her, at the warm expression in her mocha brown eyes. She had a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose that he wanted to kiss. "Why does it matter to you, Mandy?"
"Because I like you," she said simply, and it stirred to life embers he had thought were long burned out.
He started walking again, eager to move past the vendors, to where the sun and the ocean met with nothing but beach between them. He ached inside and out, with the physical need to bury himself inside Mandy, to seek pleasure and oblivion in that tender sensual give and take of sex with someone he respected, admired, was a bit in awe of.
"I’m content," he told her, figuring that was close enough to the truth. "Or at least I was until I met you."
"What did I do?" she whispered.
"You made me see that I’m lonely…" Damien stopped, took Mandy’s hand in his, turned her to him. They were only a few feet past the noise and laughter of the vendors, but he didn’t care. "I can’t – don’t want – a relationship. But Mandy, I find you very attractive, and I would really like to kiss you right now."
Of course, he wanted to have sex with her under the nearest tiki hut, but he figured he should ease her into the idea.
Start with a kiss, then move to wild sex on the beach.
Mandy swallowed a bucketful of saliva. Whoa, boy. This was unexpected.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
They had spent the evening talking, laughing, relaxing, and in Damien she saw some of the same loneliness, the same fears that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in her.
She thought, perhaps, Damien Sharpton wasn’t so much a cruel, heartless man as he was a wounded man, scarred inside where no one could see it. Except her.
And she wanted to hold him, be held in return, in a mutual clasp of comfort.
But he was her boss, and she was keeping a big secret from him, and this was a sandy beach far away from home where reality was skewed and where mistakes could be made.
"Damien, I find you very attractive as well. Both physically and as a person. So I’m very much afraid that a kiss would lead to something else, and would that really be such a good…"
Mandy lost complete track of her thought as a fluttering sensation moved across her abdomen. "What on earth?" Heart racing, she placed her hands over her stomach and felt it again. The very first movements of her baby.
Oh, my God, it was incredible, absolutely amazing. She reached out and clutched Damien’s linen shirt with her free hand, suddenly light-headed.
"Are you going to throw up again?" Damien grabbed her elbows, looking left and right as if seeking help.
Mandy laughed. She was going to be a mother. There was a child growing inside her, and she/he was swimming laps back and forth from the feel of it. An almost overwhelming surge of love stole over her for this baby, and she wanted to share such a perfect moment with someone. Had to explain to another person that her whole world was shifting and morphing and she was settling into a wondrous kind of excitement over those changes.
"I’m not going to be sick." She grabbed Damien’s hand and laid it flat on her abdomen. "Can you feel it, Damien? The baby’s moving."
"The baby?" he squawked, eyes the size of dinner plates. "What baby?"
Now he looked like the one capable of tossing his tea and toast. "My baby. The one I’m having in approximately twenty-three weeks."
His mouth moved, but nothing came out. His gaze dropped to her stomach, where his hand was pressed over the coral sundress. Mandy put her hand over his, so he wouldn’t pull back. She wanted someone to feel the same miracle she was experiencing. Maybe it was too early for someone else to feel the movements, but if it wasn’t…
There was a quick push outward, as if the baby had jettisoned off a springboard, and Mandy broke into a smile as awareness dawned on Damien’s face.
"Holy shit," was his opinion, and he looked a little as though he’d walked into a wall after drinking a fifth of gin, but at the same time his thumb stole over her belly in a little soft stroke.