Burn: A South Beach Bodyguards Book (14 page)

His expression softened. He tucked my hair behind my ear. “Thanks for thinking I’m cute. You’re pretty damn cute yourself when you’re being indignant. Now let’s get in line and pay for all this crap.”

I wanted to say more, but I’d said enough. He would shut down if I pushed it. I knew enough about men to know that at least.

Ryan insisted on paying for everything, even though I protested. The cashier told me in Spanish that I should let him pay if he was offering. She teasingly called me crazy. She was probably right.

After a quick pitstop at Ryan’s to change, we walked the three blocks to the beach. North Beach was never as crowded as South Beach, and on a Wednesday in January the crowds were thin. The water was most likely too cold for native Floridians, but the sand was warm. We camped out and the first thing I did was eat my sandwich. I pretty much destroyed everything in the cooler, toes curled in the sand, butt on my towel.

Ryan ate slower than me and I didn’t even care. I was starving. Immediately I felt better. My headache dissipated within the first five minutes of putting food in my mouth, and the tension in my shoulders eased. I sighed as I popped a grape in my mouth. “I didn’t know the drugstore sold food. That’s random, but this works for me.”

“You’re the least high maintenance girl I’ve met,” he said. “If I had to guess, I’d say all you need is food, your dog, and that’s it. You don’t constantly check your phone, you don’t complain about the weather, you eat anything that is put in front of you. It’s nice.”

I was going to take it as a compliment, even though it made me sound very basic. “That does sound like me. But apparently I’m also clumsy and fall down stairs and give myself fake names.”

“Everybody trips once in awhile.”

“When was the last time you tripped?”

“I don’t know. But when I was a teenager I was falling all over the place. My legs and feet grew too fast for me to adjust to my new reality, you know what I mean?”

“That was me with my breasts.” I ate another grape and watched the waves rolling into the shore. “Do you know one time I went to California with my dad and the water isn’t blue there? It’s cold too. I was shocked and disappointed. I thought the ocean everywhere looked like it does here.”

“I’ve never seen snow. It’s a fantasy of mine to go snowboarding.” Ryan was sitting next to me, one knee up, his forearm resting on it. He barely fit on his towel and without his shoes on, I could see how huge his feet actually were. His mother may have not been a great parent post-birth, but whatever she had done while he was in utero it had created a giant.

“Snowboarding sounds like something I would suck at.” I waved away a few seagulls who were getting bold. They were well aware I had food and they were hoping I was a tourist who would feed them. Not a chance. I loved animals, but the seagulls were scavengers. Rats with wings. Once you fed them, they would never leave.

“Tell me what you’re good at.” Ryan had on sunglasses so I couldn’t see his eyes, but it just sounded like a conversational question. There didn’t seem to be any deep hidden meaning to it.

“School. Being on time. Taking care of animals. Cooking. Putting on lipstick without a mirror. Avoiding confrontation. You?”

“Winning fights. Bench pressing. Following my conscience. Interrogation. Laying on the beach.” He turned and gave me a smile. “Giving women orgasms.”

I should have known he would go there. Most guys did. “Interesting,” I said, purposefully not taking the bait. “Who do you interrogate?”

“Women who pretend they don’t want to have sex with me.”

I knew what he meant. It was supposed to be flirtatious. But I wasn’t biting, and honestly, he needed a little help with his delivery. Or maybe all women but me fell for that. But I still felt compelled to state a case for all women. “Then that makes you a creep. No means no.”

Ryan made a sound of impatience. “Okay, that is not what I meant. I am not some kind of sexual bully. In fact, I’m the fucking opposite of that.”

“You’re a sexual pacifist?”

“I’m a sexual savant. And you’re being a sexual brat.”

“Is that what you really think?” I dropped the grapes, admittedly a little hurt. “I’m not trying to be.”

“I know, I’m just giving you a hard time.” He reached over and snagged one of my grapes. “But you did throw sex out there more than once, then took it back. And refused to tell me why. But since I’m not pushy, I’m letting it go. Unless you don’t want me to let it go. But give me a clue here, Isabel, because I’ve never met anyone like you and I don’t know what to do.”

Was I such a great mystery? Maybe I was. But my thoughts seemed so clear and rational to me. “I changed my mind because I didn’t want you to have sex with me because you felt guilted in to doing it.”

Ryan took his sunglasses off so I could see his blue eyes. “I don’t do anything out of guilt. I want to. I want to even though I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do. I don’t understand why you don’t understand that.”

“Because you said so.” Men were the ones who just didn’t make sense. We were talking in circles. “Now can we just drop it?”

He put his sunglasses back over his eyes. “Consider it dropped.”

I lay down and closed my own eyes, dissatisfied. I didn’t want to spend the limited time I had with Ryan arguing about what I had said or hadn’t said and what he had meant or hadn’t meant. I was annoyed with myself for not just enjoying hanging out with him. Instead, I had pushed my own agenda, and now it was complicated. I put my T-shirt over my face, the sun blinding me. But then I jumped when something cold landed on my stomach.

My eyes flew open right as Ryan’s hand spread across my skin. “What are you doing?”

“You’re burning already. I’m putting sunscreen on you.”

There was absolutely nothing sexy about having my stomach touched, in theory. But when those jumbo hands slid across my skin, slick with lotion, his thumbs running under the waistband of my bikini bottoms, it was a whole lot of hot. Flustered, I started to shift away, though where the hell I was going I had no clue. He pressed down on me, pinning me on the towel.

“Stop wiggling, Isabel.”

I stopped. Instead, I stared at the top of his head and tried not to imagine what it would be like to have him going down on me, his tongue sliding over my…

My knees came together, tightly. I had spent plenty of time having those thoughts when he wasn’t around. Experiencing them with him present seemed oddly embarrassing. So I turned my head and studied the cruise ships on the horizon, heading out to the open sea. All of those people cruising to Mexico, the Bahamas, Key West. It must be almost four o’clock. That’s when they started rolling out.

Ryan’s fingers shifted the bottom of my top, so he could oil up the underside of my breasts. It seemed more than a little unnecessary and I liked it a little too much. “What are you doing?” I asked him a second time. “I’m not going to get burned where the sun can’t shine.”

“The edge of the bathing suit is where most people get burned. It’s a fact.”

His fingers shifted to the tops of my breasts and that had me sucking in a breath. “Fact: this is making me crazy so stop it.”

Ryan laughed. “Almost done.” He leaned over as he did my shoulders then nipped my earlobe. “It’s driving me crazy too, so we’re even.”

“Take me to bed or lose me forever,” I said, joking.

He furrowed his brow. “What does that mean?”

“It’s a movie quote. Top Gun.” I grabbed his wrist so he would stop slathering me in places he had no business slathering. “Don’t worry about it.” Something was off. We didn’t ever seem to be on the same page. It was like we were always a beat off of the other’s rhythm. I didn’t want to acknowledge it, but it was there. I closed my eyes again, resolutely. I needed to not worry about it.

Yet me not worrying was like the tide not coming in. It wasn’t going to happen.

“The only thing I’m worried about is making sure you enjoy every second with me.”

Even though I was holding his wrist, he was stronger than me, and he raised his hand to my face, running his thumb across my bottom lip. “One shot, I want to make it count,” he said.

For a minute, I was lost in his eyes. He had an intensity that just drew me in and held me there, in his grip. “One shot at what?” I asked, even though I knew what he meant.

“I’m going to make you mine tonight.”

There hadn’t been many moments in my life that were touchpoints, that a yes or a no would alter everything. That one decision would affect everything that followed. This was one of them though, and I knew it. A yes here meant that whatever happened later, I would always remember this.

And Ryan would always be the one. My first lover.

So with the sun shining across his face, his body looming large over mine, I just smiled. “Tell me about it. Stud.”

Ryan laughed, a low rumble that was so sexy, so inherently masculine, I knew that by this time tomorrow, I was going to be eternally grateful for falling down the stairs and knocking myself unconscious. Smartest dumbest thing I’d ever done.

F
or once I got her movie nod. “I’m not going to tell you, Sandy, I’m going to show you.” I had made a decision and I knew it was what she wanted. I wasn’t going to dissect the right and wrong, I was just going to roll with my conviction that I was looking out for her best interest.

“Your place or mine?” She pretended to look at a watch she wasn’t wearing.

Neither option particularly appealed to me. My apartment was, well, gross. Not dirty exactly but not really clean either. I couldn’t tell you when I had washed those sheets last and the mattress was one I found on the side of the road on garbage day. It didn’t bother me because free trumped anything else and I had put a mattress pad on it, but it was kind of sketchy if I thought about it too long. I didn’t want to go to her place because she still had my teenage crap lying around that bedroom. It was weird. It threw me back to a time in my life when I had no sexual prowess, unless setting the world record for jacking off could be called prowess.

She deserved something better than either options, but I wasn’t sure what that was. “Is that a movie line?” I asked, suddenly not sure.

Isabel laughed. “No. Just me trying to flirt with you.”

“Okay. Just checking.” I took a sip from my water bottle. I lapsed into silence because I wasn’t sure how to say my apartment might have a few health code violations without alarming her. There had to be a better solution.

“Do you know how many movies were filmed in Miami and Miami Beach?” Isabel mused. “A lot. Frank Sinatra loved it here. He practically lived at the Fountainbleau in the sixties. Can you imagine what it must have been like then? None of these condos were here.” She gestured behind us. “And South Beach hadn’t been painted in pastels yet. Everything was white.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.” I didn’t give a whole lot of thought to my surroundings or the history behind them. Isabel thought about things. That was very sexy. I could never keep up with her intellect, but it was sexy as hell.

“There were plans to demolish most of the art deco buildings in the late seventies and as part of a campaign to save old South Beach, a movement to spruce them up resulted in all the colors you see now.” She leaned over and smiled at me. “Nerd alert. I shouldn’t know that, should I?”

“I wish I knew more,” I said sincerely. “But if you want to know how to do surveillance, I’m your man.”

The smile fell off her face and she looked contemplative. There was longing in her eyes that unnerved me. “Married to the Mob was filmed here. Scarface. The Bodyguard.”

I had lived here in Miami my whole life, on the Beach for over five years, yet there was nothing glamorous about how I lived. Maybe it was time to take a page from the party book, the reason people visited Miami Beach and bought property here. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do. “Do you want to feel like you’re in a movie?”

“What do you mean?”

“Forget my place or yours. Let’s get a room at the Fountainbleau.” I’d never even been inside the hotel and I had no idea how expensive it was, but fuck it, I would bill it to Mickey for the job. Isabel deserved the night to be special, momentous. Any girl who had waited until twenty-two to have sex, then asked me, of all people, to rid her of her unwanted virginity, should at least be pleased she hadn’t waited any longer. Part of me felt like at this point, she could just wait until marriage, but then I wondered what kind of asshole expects to marry a virgin, when you know he wasn’t one. I didn’t want Isabel with a guy like that.