Bayside Passions (Bayside Summers Book 2) Read online

  “And I have many times,” he reminded her as she headed toward the door. “Don’t you need your keys? A purse? Your phone, just in case…?” Jesus. And here he thought she was prepared for anything.

  She bent at the waist and fiddled with her heel, opening some sort of secret compartment in the wedge. She curled her fingers around something and did the same to the back of her other heel.

  She popped upright holding her keys in one hand and her phone in the other. “Never underestimate a resourceful woman, big guy.”

  He wondered what else she was hiding. His fingers itched to go on a treasure hunt and explore every inch of her until he discovered all her most coveted secret spots.

  EMERY GAZED INTO the crowd as Dave rambled on about being a stockbroker, which she had decided more than two hours ago was the most boring job on earth. Or maybe she was just out with the most boring man on the planet. Since he’d asked her what she did for a living, only half listening to her answer, every conversation had revolved around him and his stellar ability to select solid investments. Investments she didn’t give a hoot about. Then there was the issue of his wandering eyes. Throughout dinner, and while they’d been dancing, he’d ogled nearly every woman in the place. Luckily, the Beachcomber was built on a bluff overlooking the ocean, and there was enough of a chilly breeze sweeping up the dune to douse the hot air coming from his blowhole, and the glorious view gave her something to disappear into.

  Her mind wandered back to Dean and their time together yesterday afternoon. They’d had such a good time, well, other than her pulling his flowers, but replanting them was fun. And last night when they’d danced together, his eyes had never once strayed. It had all been so easy. So friendly. She’d much rather hang out with him than with this guy. But didn’t that confirm what she’d known for a while now? She was much better at friendships than she was at dating. Either she chose the wrong guys, or she screwed up somewhere along the way by simply being herself. She’d heard it all—she was too flirtatious, too outgoing, too unfiltered. She might be overly friendly, and maybe some people saw that as flirtatious, but that was their problem, not hers. In a world where political affairs created anxiety so palpable they practically deserved their own state to live in, how could a person be too outgoing or friendly? And too unfiltered? That one really pissed her off. So what if she was overly confident and said what was on her mind?

  She turned her attention back to Dave, who didn’t seem to notice her zoning out and was now spouting off about his personal investments and setting himself up to retire in twenty years. What was he? Twenty-eight or -nine? She couldn’t imagine wanting to stop working that young. She wanted to do more with her life, not less.

  She took a moment to really study him. He was a handsome guy, with classic good looks and a nice body. She was sure some women would be all caught up in the idea of retiring young and doing whatever guys like him enjoyed doing, but he hadn’t paid a lick of attention to her, and she was this close to ending the date. Not that she needed a lot of attention, but was it too much to want two-sided conversation and a few laughs?

  Dave’s eyes finally landed on her, and she forced a smile. Maybe she was the boring one. Yoga wasn’t exciting to people who didn’t practice it, but there was more to her than what she did for a living. Maybe he was sitting there trying to think of a reason to leave, too.

  She nixed that ridiculous thought instantly, and in the same breath, decided she was done with this date.

  He leaned closer, his blue eyes darkening as he put his hand on her thigh and said, “What do you say we get out of here and head back to my place?”

  Laughter fell from her lips before she could stop it. “Are you serious?”

  He cocked a smile that told her just how serious he was.

  Unfuckingbelieveable.

  She pushed his hand from her leg, suddenly needing to know what had led him to believe he could get her to go back to his place—into his bed?—after the horrendous date they’d just shared. She opened her mouth to ask, and something Dean had said to her over the winter stopped her. She’d made a smart-ass remark to something he’d said when she’d complained about the guy she had gone out with, and he’d said, Doll, when the right guy comes around, you won’t need to spend your energy on all those snarky comebacks.

  She’d like to believe her dating history was riddled with the wrong guys and assume Dean was right. But she knew better. She was the problem, because she was the only person making the decisions about who she went out with. In any case, Dave wasn’t worth the energy. She politely declined his offer, ignored his put-off expression, and left with her head held high.

  The drive to Dean’s went quickly. Everything was so close here it reminded her of home—especially now that she was closer to her two best friends. As she parked next to Dean’s truck, relief swept through her, and the stress that had been her constant companion all evening fell away.

  Chapter Five

  DEAN’S COTTAGE WAS dark save for the light thrown from the television. Emery stepped inside quietly, and Dean looked up from where he was sprawled on the couch wearing a pair of gym shorts and a tight tank top, his feet propped up on the coffee table. Did the man own anything that wasn’t tight across all those muscles?

  “Hey, doll.” He pushed to his feet.

  “Hi.” She tossed her keys on the counter, and that tingling feeling she got when a good-looking guy approached shot through her. She bent down to take off her heels—and to regain control of her overactive hormones. Clearly her body was confused, getting turned on by Dean when she’d sworn off messing around with friends. Going months without a man’s touch will do that to a girl.

  “I figured you’d be back much later.” He put a hand on her hip to steady her as she wrestled with her second heel.

  He smelled woodsy and rugged, so much nicer than the acrid citrus cologne Dave had worn.

  “Me too,” she admitted. “Dave turned out to be a dud.” She took her phone from the hidden compartment in her heel and set it on the counter and then set her heels on the floor. Without them she was a good head and a half shorter than Dean, and stared directly at his chest. She tipped her face up and caught him grinning. “Why do you look so pleased?”

  “Just glad you’re home. Now I have someone to watch movies with.”

  Home. There was that word again. She had felt comfortable there from the moment she’d walked in yesterday afternoon. Maybe Desiree was right—home was more about the people they were with than the place they happened to be.

  She walked into her bedroom and rifled through her clothes until she found a pair of sweats, pulling them on beneath her dress as she called out to him, “Would you believe after doing nothing but talking about himself all night, he had the gall to ask me to go back to his place?” She grabbed a tank top from her bag and laid it out before her, then gathered her hair over her shoulder and said, “Can you please unzip me?”

  “What did you expect him to do?” Dean asked as he came over and unzipped her dress. “You picked him up in a bar.”

  With her back to Dean, she whipped her dress over her head. For a sliver of a second before she pulled her tank top over her head, she felt the heat of his stare.

  “Whoa, girl.”

  “What? My back was to you,” she said, as if she’d felt nothing, and then circled back to his question. “I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe that he would talk to me about anything other than himself. Take an interest in me? Not that I’m needy, but honestly, a girl needs a little something.” She twined her hair into a messy bun and rifled one-handed through her toiletries bag, searching for her hair clip.

  Dean reached around her, grabbed a clip and handed it to her.

  “Thanks. Would you ever treat a girl that way?” she asked as she secured her hair and headed out of the bedroom.

  “No, but I don’t pick up girls in bars, either.”

  “Really? Then where do you meet women?”

  He shrugged. “At
my friends’ Christmas parties.”

  “Good one.” She pulled open the fridge and spied a plate of ribs. “Oh, yum! I guess you had a good cookout?” She grabbed a rib from the plate and caught Dean looking at her chest. “Dean! You are a definite boob man.”

  “What do you expect when you flaunt those eye magnets?” He chuckled.

  She sighed. “At least you’re honest, and not an asshole.” She offered him a rib, and when he shook his head, she bit into the tender meat. Sweet deliciousness burst over her tongue. “Mm. This is amazing.”

  “Thanks.”

  She took another bite. “Sure you don’t want some?”

  The corners of his lips curved up in a wicked smile, and he stepped closer. The small kitchen suddenly seemed even tighter as heat climbed up her torso. Uh-oh. She might have to visit the girls’ sex shop tomorrow and take care of the disease she was suffering from—lackanookie—before she jumped her roommate.

  “That’s not really what I’m hungry for.” He reached up and wiped something from the edge of her mouth with his thumb.

  Shivers raced through her with the intimate touch, knocking her a little off-kilter. She was definitely visiting the girls’ shop—and she was never talking to Violet again, because she had obviously planted ideas in her head about Dean.

  Before she could misconstrue anything else, she said, “I know just what you need.”

  She pulled open the freezer, and exactly as she’d thought, it was stocked with nearly every flavor of Dean’s favorite ice cream, Halo Top. He ate it by the pint, and she teased him relentlessly about it because he gave her such a hard time for eating Ben and Jerry’s. But sometimes a girl had to indulge in Karamel Sutra. That core. Lord have mercy! She reached inside and grabbed a pint of Halo Top Chocolate Almond Crunch, and beneath it, she found a pint of Karamel Sutra.

  “What is this?” She plucked it from the freezer and held it up. “You’re secretly indulging in Ben and Jerry’s?”

  “Hardly. You were supposed to arrive next week, remember?”

  “Yeah. And?”

  “And that was for you. I figured you’d want to binge-watch something at some point, and I wanted to be prepared. I even bought the first season of that show you keep begging me to watch. Outsiders.”

  Her heart skipped a beat. She and Desiree used to do things like that for each other, but her guy friends would be more likely to toss her a beer when she showed up than prepare for her visit. Her older brother Alec had told her about the series, and she’d been dying to watch it. But Alec had a fledgling entertainment magazine he was trying to get off the ground, and he traveled often. He always seemed to have time to watch over Emery in a big-brotherly way, but rewatching a television series with her wasn’t how he wanted to spend the little free time he had.

  “I think you just inched up a notch closer to the number one BFF spot. But…” She opened the fridge again and scanned the contents—fresh veggies, Greek yogurt, farm-raised chicken thighs… “Let’s see if you make the cut…”

  He reached around her and pulled a can of whipped cream from the back of the top shelf. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  He set it on the counter and reached into a cabinet above her. His chest brushed against her back, and for a fleeing moment she allowed herself to enjoy the feel of his hard frame pressed against her. Friends, friends, friends, she reminded herself, struggling to ignore how good he felt. Could a person go through withdrawals from human touch? When the friends reminder didn’t take away the tingling in her lower belly, she pulled out the big guns—boss, boss, boss!

  He took a step back, and cooler air rushed over her skin. Her breath left her lungs with a long, relieved exhalation.

  There. That’s better.

  Worse. But safer.

  He set containers of chocolate and rainbow sprinkles beside the can of whipped cream, flashing a knowing grin. “What do you call nights like this again? Who-needs-men-when-I-have-Ben nights?”

  And just like that her head cleared and she needed no more reminders. This man had become one of her closest friends. He knew her—all of her—the good, the bad, and the annoying, and he still spent hours on the phone with her, had helped her figure things out so she could come to the Cape, and he had offered her a place to stay without hesitation. Only an idiot would take a chance at screwing that up.

  “I can’t believe you remembered that.” She opened the ice cream as he took two bowls down from a shelf.

  He scooped the ice cream into the bowls. “Kind of hard to forget when it seemed to be your mantra for a while there.”

  She opened the can of whipped cream and sprayed some in her mouth, thinking about what he’d said. “Not all of us are lucky in love. Open up.”

  She aimed the can and filled his open mouth with creamy goodness, earning a dark look that made her mouth water. She turned her attention to spraying whipped cream onto their ice cream to avoid getting swept up in the wrong direction again.

  He added chocolate and rainbow sprinkles to hers, leaving his without. After putting away the ice cream and condiments, he handed her a bowl and spoon and said, “Ready to binge-watch Outsiders?”

  “You mean am I ready to bury my bad date?”

  The muscles in the side of his jaw pulsed. “Thought we already did that.”

  She followed him to the living room and curled up on the couch as he set up the DVD. “Girls don’t just bounce back from bad dates. Do guys?”

  “How should I know?” he said as he sat down beside her.

  “You had a string of first dates that you said were boring or the women were too into themselves.”

  He filled his spoon with ice cream and grinned. “I guess we do, because you and I talked after each of those dates, and I don’t remember having anything to bounce back from.”

  She stuck her spoon in his bowl and tasted his ice cream. “That’s not bad. Here, try mine.” She filled her spoon with Karamel Sutra and fed it to him. “See? You didn’t keel over from Ben and Jerry’s. Anyway, getting over bad dates takes time. Think of life as the stem of a rose. You know how it has all those prickly things on it?”

  “Thorns,” he said.

  “Yes. They’re like bad dates, and in between them, you have this lovely, smooth stem, the good dates.” She ate a spoonful of ice cream.

  “And…?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed like a good analogy at the time. Thorns draw blood. Bad dates draw bad feelings. It takes time to get over the sting of it. I’ll meditate it out of my system in the morning.”

  He picked up the remote and said, “What you need is to skip the thorns and go straight to the calyx.”

  “The what?”

  “You know those green things at the bottom of the rose petals? Those are called sepals, and collectively, they’re called the calyx. It protects the flower in bud and supports the petals when it blooms.” He ate a bite of ice cream and turned on the first episode of Outsiders.

  “Dating should be so easy.”

  “You don’t need to date every guy in Wellfleet the first week you’re here,” he said under his breath.

  She reached over and pushed the pause button on the remote, glaring at him. “What does that mean?”

  “I heard you have a date with Brody tomorrow. What happened to not dating the guys you work with?” The bite in his tone didn’t go unnoticed.

  “We don’t have a date. He asked if I wanted to learn to surf.”

  “Trust me, doll, in his mind, it’s a date.”

  “It is not.” She pushed the play button, and they ate their ice cream in silence. She was annoyed with the possibility that Brody had misconstrued her acceptance of his offer to teach her to surf. Brody was hot, funny, and nice, but even during their short conversation she could see that he was the kind of guy who floated from one thing to the next—surf instructor this summer, traveling with a band last winter. She loved to have fun, but at her core she was a small-town girl who liked stability. Plus, she didn’t wan
t to go out with anyone she worked with.

  Her appetite gone, she set her bowl on the table and sat back to watch the show, mulling over what Dean had said. “Do you really think he believes it’s a date?”

  “Guys think differently than girls. In his mind it’s a date, regardless of what you want to call it.”

  She tucked her feet beside her on the cushion, stifling a yawn as the last twenty-four hours caught up with her. “Well, I’ll just have to make it clear tomorrow that it’s not a date.”

  Dean placed his empty bowl beside hers and put an arm around her shoulder, pulling her against his side. “Let me know if you have any trouble.”

  “Thanks. But I’ve got this. Telling guys what I think has never been my problem.”

  “I like that about you.”

  “Because you’re not dating me,” she said honestly.

  “That wouldn’t make a difference, doll. I like who you are, and that doesn’t change because two people become a couple.”

  She shifted so she could see his face, and it was as serious as ever. The longer she looked at him, the softer his expression became. And when she smiled, a slow smile lifted his lips, smoothing the remaining serious edges.

  “That’s a good thing, roomie,” she said, “because I like who you are, too.”

  They fell into comfortable silence as they watched the show. Dean’s fingers moved in an intoxicating pattern up and down her arm, lulling her worries away. It turned out all his ridiculously large muscles weren’t hard as stone. His chest was firm, but cushiony enough to use as a pillow, and his arm was heavy around her, practically crushing her against his side, but it felt good to be embraced by the man who had literally brought a smile to her face every day for months on end.

  By the middle of the second episode, Tango and Cash were curled up beside her, purring as they slept, and she was struggling to keep her eyes open, but too engrossed in the show to want to stop watching. After watching shows together from hundreds of miles apart while video chatting, she was enjoying finally spending time—and cuddling up—with Dean in person, like best friends should. For weeks she’d wondered if their friendship would change once she moved here and they were no longer restricted to long-distance phone calls. If after being reunited with Desiree, she and Dean would drift further apart. Even after only a day she knew their friendship had already changed. It was more real than ever.