She stumbled at the familiar voice and nickname, then without fully realizing it, began walking toward the water’s edge and the gorgeous creature emerging from the water, getting barer as the moonlight slid silver fingers over every hard inch of him.
“Ah,” Kingsley said, his breath coming quickly after his swim. “I figured I would see you again.”
Adah clenched her jaw to stop her tongue from hanging out of her mouth. Kingsley wasn’t naked, but he might as well have been. The moonlight outlined him from the top of his proud head to his feet striding out of the water and across the sand to meet her. Pale swim trunks clung to his hips, to the insistent shape between his legs, and the tops of his muscled thighs that were wide and hard enough to make the tips of her fingers ache to sink into them.
He just said something. It’s my turn to talk now. She swallowed again.
“I’m just going for a jog to escape my troubles,” Adah finally said with her wryest smile. She looked down the beach and saw the illuminated outline of her hotel much farther away than she’d realized.
Damn. How far had she come?
“Should we call it destiny then?” Kingsley wiped the seawater from his face, dragging his hand from his chin down to his strong throat and chiseled chest. Even in the soft light and pervasive dark, Adah could see his grin.
“Let’s just call it a coincidence and leave it at that,” she said, crossing her arms over nipples that had gone embarrassingly tight.
Kingsley stepped even closer, and she resisted the urge to close the last few feet of space between them and see if his body was as hard or smooth as it looked.
She cleared her throat. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll cart you off for public indecency?”
He looked down at himself and shrugged. “They’d be false charges if they do,” he said, grinning. “Do you think I’m being indecent just by swimming at night? I have a suit on.”
“What you call a bathing suit some might call underwear.” And the fact that it was a pair of tight white trunks only highlighted what a dark bathing suit would hide. Not that he had anything to be ashamed about. Heat scalded her cheeks, and she yanked her gaze up from his crotch.
“I’m more covered than most people on the beach today,” Kingsley said.
He was right. On her walk, she’d seen dozens of European tourists spread across the beach, all body types and speaking so many languages that she’d lost track of how many she heard. But the one thing most had in common was that nearly all the men wore brief swim shorts that clung to their butts and crotches, being just as aggressively sexy as the women in their bikinis. Adah was all for equal opportunity swimwear and enjoyed her walks mostly because of the view. Not all the men were beautiful, but the ones who were gave her quite the eyeful.
She’d been impressed and amused until she saw the more modestly covered Kingsley on the kite and just about lost her mind. Not that she was doing that great of a job of managing herself now. And if his smug grin was anything to go by, he saw through her clearly enough.
Adah could only laugh at herself. “Anyway, it was great to see you, all of you.” She couldn’t resist. “But I’ve got to get going.”
“Nope.” Kingsley shook his head. “You can’t leave yet.”
“Excuse me?”
“I want to see you again, and I don’t want fate to determine the time and place.”
She should say no. Adah shook her head and pressed her lips together, just on the edge of the confession. “You know I can’t...” But she didn’t know how to finish that sentence.
“This is nothing more than an invitation to go snorkeling,” Kingsley said with a look that was far from innocent. “Aruba has some of the most beautiful waters in the Caribbean. You should experience it with locals who know what they’re doing.”
“And you’re one of these locals?”
“Not at all, but my friends are and they will be there. I’m only local to Miami.” He said his home city with an echo of pride in his voice.
Miami was so very far from Atlanta. Good. That meant nothing could come of this...whatever it was. No matter how much Adah’s eyes drifted low on his body and her heart sped up at the thought of him touching her. But it wasn’t all because he was the most perfect male specimen she’d ever seen. He was just so open with his desire for her, so deliriously transparent in a way she’d never experienced before that it was intoxicating. And she also felt like the very air around him smelled of freedom. Escape. A higher plane of living, where pleasure was easy and everything else was inconsequential.
“What exactly do you have in mind?” she asked.
His beautiful teeth flashed in the moonlight again, and her breathing sped up. This was beyond ridiculous.
“We have a snorkeling trip planned for tomorrow night.”
She gestured to the high moon and the inky evening around them. “Snorkeling at night? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?”
“Not at all. The sea looks completely different at night, just beautiful. You won’t regret it.”
Adah started to argue with herself about the safety of going off someplace with a man she didn’t know. But all her life she’d been safe.
“Okay.” She took a deep breath once she’d committed herself. “Where should I meet you?”
“Do you know where the lighthouse is?”
“Yes.” It rose high and majestic, a historic piece of island history where tourists gathered from morning until night to take pictures, gawk at the scenery and buy food and drinks from the vendors who set up shop at its base.
“Meet me there just before sunset,” Kingsley said.
She raised an eyebrow at him. The snorkeling trip now sounded suspiciously like a date. It lay at the back of her tongue to change her mind and tell him there was something else she’d committed to after all. But she bit back the almost-confession.
“Okay,” Adah said. “I’ll meet you there. Near sunset.”
“Perfect.”
Adah didn’t know about that. She was quite possibly doing the most imperfect thing for her situation right now. She didn’t need another man in the mix to cloud her already-murky judgment where the potential wedding was concerned. But as she turned away to jog back down the beach toward her hotel and her mother, her mind’s eye wouldn’t let go of the memory of Kingsley, rising from the water like some Adonis thirst trap, making her heart beat fast and her tongue feel heavy in her mouth, thick with the desire to taste the path where every drop of water had run.
Yeah. Her decision making was cloudy. Absolutely the cloudiest it had been in a long time. But that didn’t stop her from smiling the whole way back to the hotel.
Seconds after walking into her room, she heard a knock on the other side of the door joining her room to her mother’s, then a muffled voice. Instead of answering what was undoubtedly the question
