“IT’S a beautiful day to ride some waves, bookworm.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that. I’ll probably swallow a bunch of saltwater today, though.”
I leaned against the railing behind the surf shop as she approached, pretty hair swinging in a ponytail and eyes bright. She looked different today. I narrowed my eyes at her.
“I’m wearing contacts,” she explained off my expression. “I’m sick of not being able to see anything out there.”
My eyebrows quirked. “Uh oh.”
“What?”
“You’re catching it.”
“Catching what?” She frowned.
“You’re starting to like surfing.” I wiggled my eyebrows at her.
“I haven’t even surfed yet.” She laughed and pulled her shirt over her head.
My cock reacted immediately.
It shouldn’t have. I didn’t know why today was different. I saw Hannah in her swimsuit all the time. She was changing into her wetsuit like we had done a few times already. It wasn’t a big deal.
Today, her swimsuit was a two-piece meant for swimming laps at the pool. Functional. No bells and whistles, no strings holding it together.
But today, something about the slight swell of cleavage over the neckline caught my attention. And the way she whipped her shirt off, I pictured her doing that in my bedroom.
She unzipped her denim shorts and tossed them over the railing.
Her ass. It was so cute. Two handfuls. Slappable. I stiffened further in my wetsuit.
Jesus Christ, Rhodes.
I turned around and stared into the forest behind the surf shop, eyes wide open and seeing nothing. It wasn’t like that with Hannah. I wasn’t her type. She wanted someone charming, polished, and stable. Hannah was a true love type of girl, not… whatever I could offer. She wanted forever, and I was all about temporary.
She wanted someone like Beck.
Irritation prickled on the back of my neck.
“Wyatt?”
I snapped to attention. She was right beside me. “Hmm?”
“Can you zip me up?” She offered me her back.
Even in the wetsuit, her ass was so cute. This must be what people were talking about when they referenced intrusive thoughts. I shoved them out of my head and zipped up her wetsuit before we grabbed our boards and headed to the water without another word.
She yelped when the cold water hit her feet.
“Oh, shit, I forgot the booties.” I set my board down on the sand. “I’ll go grab them.”
She shook her head and put a hand on my arm to stop me. “I’m going to try without them today. Is that okay?”
“Of course.” Her feet were going to get cold, though. “Tell me when you’re ready to go in.”
She nodded and smiled at me before wading into the water.
We paddled out into the white-water area, where Hannah had been learning.
I glanced over at her, paddling beside me. “You’re getting stronger.”
She shot me a pleased smile. The sun’s reflection off the water lit up her skin and danced across her face. She moved through the water with more ease and confidence than before. Something warm and proud hit me in the middle of the chest.
We paddled to a spot behind the break and positioned our boards to face the shore. Hannah watched a wave approach, and without needing encouragement from me, she began paddling to catch it.
I sprawled across my board, watching her arms dip in and out of the water. It rose and fell around me as the wave passed me but my gaze stayed on her. The wave approached her, and I had the urge to call over to her when to jump up on her board. I held back though, pressing my hand to my mouth, watching and grinning against my fist.
At the perfect second, she flattened her hands on the board and snapped up—
The board slipped from under her and she fell face first into the water.
Damn it.
I smiled big at her when she paddled back.
“Wipeout,” she called over to me, water dripping off her ponytail.
“You got up at the exact right time.” I winked at her and she nodded. Another small wave approached and I gestured at it. “Okay, bookworm, get back on the horse.”
She took a deep breath, nodded, and her tenacity made me smile. This was the third time we had been out on the water, and she still hadn’t gotten up on the board to ride a wave. Most people would have given up by now.
Not her, though.
I had been thinking more and more about our deal, how Hannah wanted to be a ‘hot girl’. How she had compared herself to her mom.
I’m never going to meet someone hiding in my bookstore, she had said the other night at the bar. And now here she was, bright and early in the morning, perched on her board, watching over her shoulder for approaching waves.
Huh. She must really want to find someone.
Something weird twisted in my stomach but I focused on Hannah paddling as the wave rolled past me and caught up with her.
“Come on,” I muttered to myself, leaning on my board, gaze glued to her.
She glanced over her shoulder, saw the wave, paddled harder, and as the water rose under her, she hopped up.
“You got it, bookworm, stay up.” I bit my fist as if I was watching a hockey game in shootout. My heart beat in my ears.
She wobbled once, twice, but caught her balance, hands out, knees bent, board skimming the surface as the wave carried her forward. My heart was in my throat.
She turned her head to shoot me a wide, elated grin and I beamed back at her.
“Yeah, Hannah!” I called over. “You’re doing it.”
She lost her balance, bailed off her board, and a laugh burst out of my chest. That big grin stretched over her face, even as she paddled back to me.
“You did it, bookworm.”
“I did it.” The clear sunlight made her eyes brighter.
Something warm and tight expanded in my chest, seeing her with her hair soaking wet, the sun on her face, and the biggest, proudest smile.
“You want to go again?”
She nodded eagerly.
Again and again, she paddled hard as the waves approached. She bailed a few more times but caught three more waves. She was getting the hang of it. I watched the whole time, hanging out on my board and enjoying the morning sun on my back.
Half an hour later, her arms moved slower in the water and her jumps up on the board didn’t have the same snap as before.
“Bookworm, I do believe you’ve earned your moment of solace in nature this morning.” I jerked my chin in the direction of the quiet cove. “Let’s go chill out for a bit.”
She nodded and we paddled out of the surf to where the water was calm.
“Hand me your leash, would you?” I held my hand out and she undid the velcro around her ankle before tossing it to me. I fastened it around my ankle. Now she wouldn’t float away from me. “How are your feet?”
She hoisted herself up on her board and wobbled into a seated position, cross-legged, before wiggling her toes. “Pretty cold but they’ll warm up out of the water.” She closed her eyes and tilted her face up to the sun. She sighed. My throat felt tight.
She opened her eyes, taking in the blue sky dotted with wisps of clouds, the forest beside us, the seagulls gliding through the air. “It’s nice here.”
We floated there for a few minutes, listening to the sound of the waves lapping the shore and the seagulls calling out to each other. The thought of leaving this place one day if I went pro broke my heart.
Going pro had been all I wanted since that summer I stayed with my aunts when I was sixteen. Aunt Rebecca had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, and her wife, my Aunt Bea, struggled to take care of her alone, so I moved in to help out with things. In the mornings, I surfed, and in the afternoons, I picked up groceries, cleaned the kitchen, took the garbage out, or mowed the lawn. I had surfed since I was a kid but that summer, it became everything to me.
I couldn’t stay in Queen’s Cove and go pro. I wanted to compete, and I wanted to win.
Last night, I watched footage of my competitors, surfers who had been competing since they were kids. They were used to the pressure. They were used to everyone knowing their name.
“What’s wrong?” Her hands rested flat behind her, holding her up.
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“You don’t have your usual stoned surfer look today.”
That made me smile. “I’m never stoned while surfing.”
“You know what I mean.”
I inhaled a long breath and let it out. “You know when we were at the bar and I said I wasn’t worrying about Pacific Rim?”
She nodded.
I didn’t answer. The words were stuck in my throat.
“You’ve been worrying?”
I gave her a quick nod. “Not so chill, huh?”
She tilted her head and gave me a soft smile. “You don’t have to be ‘so chill’ all the time. You’re human, Wyatt.” She regarded me, thinking. “What do you worry about?”
“That I’ll get out there and choke.” Again. “That I’ll do well, place in the competition, and have to leave Queen’s Cove.”
She gazed out across the water. “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”
I huffed a laugh. “Yeah. Something like that.”
Ripples radiated from her fingertips as she skimmed them through the water. She pulled her lip into her mouth between her teeth. “Can’t you come back to Queen’s Cove in between competitions?”
“Sure, but it won’t be the same.”
“No. It won’t.” Her gaze flicked up to me. “What do you think about out there when you’re surfing?”
“Nothing. My mind goes blank. My body knows what to do, my instincts tell me when to paddle and hop up and when to stay put.”
“Why do you think you’ll choke?”
Because it happened before. At last year’s competition, I panicked.
I cleared my throat. “I have a good life. I surf, I have the shop, and I love living here. I shouldn’t mess with a good thing.”
The summer with my aunts taught me everything was temporary—relationships, jobs, even love. The idea of going pro and surfing around the world was both electrifying and terrifying.
Once I had it, I could lose it.
My chest was tight with anxiety, so I cleared my throat again. “What about you, bookworm, would you ever leave Queen’s Cove?”
She chewed her lip before answering. “I can’t leave. I have the store.” She let out a long sigh and stared up at the sky. “I’d love to travel, though. I’ve never been anywhere except to university in Victoria. I read about all these places in books and it’s like I’m there but…” Her mouth twisted in a rueful smile. “It’s not real. I want to go there for real.”
“Could your dad run the store for a bit? Or Liya?”
She shifted her weight on the board, wobbling but maintaining balance. “Um. I guess. I don’t know, it’s a lot of responsibility and I don’t think Liya wants that. And my dad hasn’t worked at the store in a while so he doesn’t know where anything is.” She lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. “I’d have to close the store for a couple weeks and then the customers would be all grouchy because they couldn’t get their books.”
I pinned her with my gaze. “Have you talked to Liya about running the shop when you’re away?”
She shifted again. “No, but she’s busy and I don’t want to make her uncomfortable by asking too much of her.”
“So you’re trapped.”
She sat up and shook her head. “I love the store. I wish—” Her throat worked and she frowned. “My dad’s stuck.”
The guy had been handed a rough deal, losing his wife like that. But it wasn’t fair to Hannah to have to run the business like a monument to her mother. Hannah was in charge now. She had all these incredible ideas to change the store and they sat idle in her head.
“What was your mom like?”
A smile grew on her face. “She loved books.”
“Runs in the family.”
Her smile lifted all the way up to her eyes. “She had a degree in English lit, like me. She loved it when people found a book they couldn’t put down and came back to tell her about it. She was always recommending books to people.” Hannah stretched one leg out on the board and wiggled her toes. “People came to the bookstore for her, to chat with her or to say hi. Her enthusiasm was contagious.”
I listened, not wanting to interrupt or give her a reason to stop talking, like at the bar when she told me about how she’d change the store if she could.
“What’s your role in the store?”
“My dad still owns it and there’s kind of an unspoken understanding that I’ll inherit it one day. We don’t talk about that stuff.”
She was running the business single-handedly and it would probably be hers one day, but she had no say. That didn’t sit right with me, but I pressed my mouth tight and kept it to myself.
“That’s another thing I want to do before I turn thirty.” She rolled her lips. “I want to make the business profitable again.” She winced at me. “We haven’t been doing great lately.”
I frowned. Queen’s Cove housed about two thousand residents but saw over a million tourists each summer. The summer months were when locals made money. If the store wasn’t doing well in July, it didn’t stand a chance through the winter.
But I thought about Hannah on her surfboard, bailing over and over again but not giving up. A smile lifted on my mouth. “You can turn it around.”
She shot me a shy smile. “I hope so.” She relaxed down onto her board again and closed her eyes. “Where’s the first place you’d go if you got a sponsorship?”
I lay down on my own board and stared up at the sky. “Australia. There’s a big surf competition there in January.” I turned my head to face her. “You’d like it there. They have books and champagne.”
I didn’t know why I said that.
She smiled and opened her eyes, shooting me a skeptical expression. “They have sharks, too.”
“We have sharks.”
She snorted. “Shut up, please. I was doing a good job of not thinking about what’s under the surface today.”
A thought struck me. “Bookworm, when was the last vacation you took?”
She frowned, playing with the end of her ponytail, inspecting the ends of her hair. “I took a few days off at Christmas.”
“And before that?”
She made a thinking noise. “The Christmas before that.”
I blew a breath out. “Bookworm.”
Her head snapped up and she looked like she was about to say something but instead, she reached over, grabbed my ankle, and flipped me into the water. In her attempt, she slipped off her own board. A surprised laugh burst out of me the second before my head submerged.
When I resurfaced, she wore a small, mischievous smile, treading water a few feet away. “My feet are cold. Let’s get breakfast.”
Alright, so we were dropping the conversation about her taking a break from the shop. I suspected it wasn’t just her dad who didn’t want to change things in the store, but I’d leave it for today. I undid the leash, fastened it around her ankle, and ignored how smooth her skin was under mine. How delicate her ankle was. My fingers fit all the way around it.
“Thanks,” she murmured, and I nodded at her before we paddled in.
When we approached the shop, we set our boards down and I unzipped her wetsuit, turning before I could see her peel it off.
“Say goodbye to this board.” I listened to the sound of her pulling her wetsuit off and studied the siding on the shop.
“Why?”
“You’ve leveled up.”
I turned to see her proud smile and I matched it. My gaze dropped to her swimsuit. The swell of her tits. The smooth skin of her stomach, and the flare of her hips. I pictured running my tongue up her stomach. My cock twitched again, and I blinked, turning away.
The door opened. “I’m going to change inside, be right back.”
“Yep.” My voice was tight.
What was happening?
Oh. It was because I hadn’t hooked up with anyone recently. I usually surfed in the mornings but because I spent most mornings with Hannah, I surfed a bit later now, then spent the day at the shop, and then surfed until sunset to prepare for Pacific Rim. I didn’t have time to see people these days.
I hadn’t been thinking about it much, either. A few women had reached out, but I wasn’t into it anymore.
It wasn’t a big deal. It didn’t mean anything. I wasn’t her type and she was probably a virgin.
Shit. Was bookworm a virgin? The whole virginity thing was bullshit and it didn’t matter, but I was still curious. Hannah was cute. Our date yesterday was her first.
Her date. Not our date. That wasn’t a date.
Panic streaked through me.
If she didn’t have any sexual experience, then she didn’t have any standards.
The thought of someone messing up with Hannah made my skin too tight. A rock formed in my throat and I swallowed. Carter was off the table. There was no way Hannah would let him anywhere near her naked.
Holden wasn’t interested in Hannah, I was pretty sure. I frowned. I’d talk to him later about that, make sure he knew that it was a practice date. It could be a practice date for both of them.
But Beck. A noise came out of my throat, frustration and disapproval. Beck would be all over Hannah. What if he went too fast? What if he pushed her and she didn’t want to? What if he was selfish?
My fists clenched when I thought about him touching her, his hands on her waist or in her hair. I pictured them tangled together in bed and my jaw tensed.
Wrong. That was all wrong.
The back door of the surf shop opened and she walked out in her denim shorts and striped t-shirt. “I brought something for you.” She blanched at the look on my face. “Jeez, somebody’s getting hangry.”
I cleared my throat and pushed the thoughts from my head. “Yeah. What did you bring?”
“This is my way of saying thanks for helping me.” She pulled something out of her bag and handed it to me. It was a plastic inflatable book for babies, the kind they read in the bathtub, with words like CAT and DOG and BALL on it.
I raised a skeptical eyebrow at her and she shook with laughter.
“It’s so you can read out on the water in the mornings.” The giggles bubbled out of her and all the weird tension in me melted away.
“You’re such a brat.” I tugged on the end of her ponytail and grinned.
She returned my grin. “I know.”
We smiled at each other for a moment. I had the urge to tell her I was reading Pride and Prejudice. The boring, weird cousin, Mr. Collins, had just visited their home. I had read late into the night, laughing to myself as Lizzy maneuvered the awkward conversation with him. For some reason, I held back from telling this to Hannah. I wanted to see how the story ended first.
“Come on,” I said, tilting my head. “Let’s get food.”
On the walk to the food truck, I thought of something. “You’ve got more homework, bookworm.”
Her eyebrows rose and her eyes brightened. “What is it?”
“Round up twenty of your favorite books.”
She paused. “That’s it? I don’t need to run naked down Main Street or something?”
I laughed. “What? I would never make you do that.”
Her shoulder lifted in a shrug and she shot me another smile as we approached the truck. “You’re trying to push me past my comfort zone.”
The idea of other people, people like Beck, seeing Hannah naked was past my comfort zone.
I had something else in mind.
She narrowed her eyes but her mouth twitched upwards. “What are you up to?”
I tugged on the end of her ponytail again. “You’ll see.”
