Because it was undoubtedly desire. It coursed through her veins just from looking at him. His undivided attention felt like hands running over her bare skin.
“I can’t,” she finally said. Not I don’t want to.
And he seemed absolutely aware of the difference, judging from the way he looked at her, hungry and with the knowledge that the thing he wanted was within reach.
“I...uh... I have to go. Hope you win...whatever it is you’re going after.” She gestured to the kites still in the air, the stage and the people watching the action from the beach.
“And still no gift of your beautiful name?”
She shook her head again, this time not hiding her smile. “My name doesn’t matter.”
“I disagree.” He paused, his gaze amused and thoughtful. “I have to call you something in my dreams.”
Adah rolled her eyes. Cute and corny. “Call me whatever you like.”
“I think I’ll call you Doe Eyes.” Then he grinned at her, apparently pleased with himself.
She shook her head a third time. “It was nice to meet you.”
“It’ll be even nicer to see you again,” Kingsley said. Before she could tell him the island wasn’t small enough for them to run into each other without agreeing to a time and place, his smile flashed again. “This won’t be the last time,” he said. The sand pulled at her sandals, and she stumbled, blushing as she righted herself under his amused regard. “Be careful until I see you again,” he said with another quick scan up and down her body.
When he turned and walked away, she shamelessly watched him, the loose fit of the drying shirt over his muscled back and the shift of his butt in the long shorts. She bit her lip. There was joy in Kingsley. She thought about what sex would be like with him—undeniably hot, uninhibited—and knew there would be a spontaneous delight about the encounter, a pleasure at living and breathing and being able to gulp deeply from the cup of life. He was a man worth knowing. And touching.
“I know you’re looking,” he called over his shoulder without turning around. Laughter threaded through his voice. The sound of it should have made Adah blush and look away like a thief caught with her hands in the cookie jar, but she only grinned and kept looking until she could no longer make out the finer details of his physique.
She was still smiling when she walked across the sand and through the beachfront entrance of her hotel. The lavish hotel, though stretching the limits of her budget, was one she was glad to have found. Her room overlooked the water, the entire reason for her visit to an island in the Caribbean.
“Welcome back, Ms. Palmer-Mitchell.” The woman at the front desk spared a smile for Adah as she looked up from her computer screen.
“Thank you.”
“There’s a visitor here for you. She’s already in her own room, which she requested next to yours.”
Adah stopped. “A visitor?” A bad feeling made her footsteps stutter. The leftover warmth from the encounter with Kingsley leached from her. She shivered.
“Yes. She arrived about thirty minutes ago.”
Adah had been walking the island for nearly two hours, trying to clear her mind and find a solution to the unsettled feeling that had yanked her out of her sleep nearly every night for the past six months. She was desperate for a good night’s sleep.
Adah pressed her lips closed and sucked them between her teeth. “All right, thank you so much for letting me know.”
After wishing the woman a good morning, she crossed the tiled lobby, each step feeling heavier than the last as she imagined who was waiting for her upstairs. She knew only one person with the means and motive to come to Aruba and turn her peace upside down. When the elevator doors slid open on her floor, there was someone waiting to get on it. The woman, elegant in white linen with her iron-gray hair on top of her head in a simple French twist, smiled at her in equal parts relief and triumph. Adah released a quiet breath.
“Hello, Mother.”
“Surprise, darling!” Thandie Palmer-Mitchell rebounded beautifully from the surprise of seeing Adah in the elevator.
Adah wished she could say the same for herself. Her suspicion had turned into grim certainty when the elevator doors opened on her floor. She felt scattered to the four winds at the sight of her mother, gorgeously styled and smiling in the last place Adah wanted her to be.
“Are you heading down?”
“Not anymore, now that you’re here,” her mother said.
Of course not. What she hoped was a smile spasmed across Adah’s face. “Okay. My room or yours?”
“Yours, of course. You must want to shower and get cleaned up after being out there in the heat.” Her mother fanned her face with her slender clutch purse as she stepped back to let Adah off the elevator. “After ten minutes out there, it felt like my skin was covered with sand and sweat.”
She fell in step with Adah down the wide and well-lit hallway toward the small room Adah had booked. Adah cringed, suddenly remembering her mess. Although she’d been in Aruba for only a day, most of the contents of her suitcase were already spread all over the room, a tendency toward untidiness she carried over from how she treated her space at home. The common areas were orderly and almost obsessively neat, but her bedroom and bathroom were booby-trapped with piles of clothes, books and makeup in danger of falling over.
She wasn’t dirty, Adah often reassured herself, just disorganized. Her habit of just stuffing her rolled travel clothes into her suitcase in no discernible pattern meant she often had to dig to the bottom of her luggage to find the exact thing she needed. Then after all that searching, who wanted to repack everything? There was just no point.
Her mother was the complete opposite. She used packing cubes, elegant and expensive, that she carefully arranged before each trip. Underwear in one cube, dresses in another and so on. Then she just slipped the prepacked cubes into the drawers of whatever hotel she checked into. Adah envied her mother’s ability to easily and neatly transition from place to place. But Adah had never made any effort to take on those qualities for herself.
Biting the proverbial bullet, she slid the keycard in and opened her door. “Come on in.”
Inside was the same disorder she’d left. Clothes all over the bed and the chair near the window. Her suitcase gaped open on the dresser with her other bathing suit and underwear spilling out. She grabbed clothes from the chair and tossed them on top of the suitcase.
“Sit.” She scrubbed a hand self-consciously over her windblown hair. “I’m going to have a quick shower—just make yourself comfortable.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s okay, darling.”
But Adah hadn’t forgotten her mother’s earlier comment about her getting cleaned up. “It won’t take me long. Sit and play some music on your iPad or something.”
Then she seized
