Ahead in the Heat (3 page)

A
nnie had never been in a house quite like this one. It was . . . gorgeous. There were no two ways about it. Sleek and modern, every line was intentionally chosen for maximum impact. Glass glittered everywhere, but it didn’t make the space feel cold. Touches like the butcher-block-topped island stretching seven feet through the center of the kitchen warmed the rooms. An abstract mosaic with Moroccan flavor topped the archway leading into the dining room.

The contents of the kitchen had been a different kind of surprise. She’d expected plenty of junk food, metabolized by his obviously devoted surfing career and crammed in among dinners out. Most of the pros she knew from her days before school had been like that. They’d justified eating crap and drinking their brains out by the fact that they surfed or swam or skateboarded five hours a day. They didn’t take into account the long period spent chilling on their boards, floating on the water as they waited for the “perfect” set, or the long-term detriment to their cholesterol, kidneys, and liver. Especially their livers, considering the drinking.

She’d been there. She surfed with the best of them,
for a while. The levels of indulgence were infuriating.

She should know. When she was fifteen, she’d been seduced by the bright lights of going pro. There was a well-trod path to the goal of sponsorship. She’d kept on that track for three years.

Getting screwed over in an epic way tended to clean the stars out of a girl’s eyes.

It wasn’t as if a gorgeous house like this would have come if she’d gone pro, anyway. The women’s circuits had less than twenty percent of the prize money of the men’s World Championship Tour. She’d have been fighting for accolades and attention, and that wasn’t enough for her, considering the costs demanded in return. She needed more.

She needed to do more.

So she’d used surfing to nail a scholarship to UC San Diego. While she was there, she’d surfed her ass off in the National Scholastic Surfing Association for her team . . . but once she was done, she was done. She’d walked away from any hint of pro surfing and taken her shiny new degree off to med school. It had been the right thing.

Pro surfers had drive that took them to a higher level—and mowed over everyone around them on the way up.

But Jesus, if it got them houses like this, maybe she’d made the wrong choice. “Where do you keep the alcohol?”

He was so annoyingly smug sometimes. He slung a thumb in the pockets of his perfectly tailored slacks. “Why do you assume I have booze?”

She shot him a look that said she wasn’t born
yesterday. “Puh-leeze. You’re Sean Westin. You’re in the tabloids every other month, photographed at expensive clubs, with expensive women and expensive booze.”

“Don’t assume. Who’s to say those glasses aren’t filled with tea? Or tonic water with lime?”

Her stomach dropped. Had she misjudged him? She’d gotten enough of that shit herself, people who assumed her slightly tomboy look meant she was gay or butch or a shoplifter or antisocial. It sucked, but she’d learned the hard way that living for other people just wasn’t worth it.

But then he broke into a laugh. Lines spilled out from the corners of his eyes. “No, I totally drink. No sainthood here. There are two bars in the place. A wet bar in the study and a less formal one on the lanai.”

“Let’s start at the lanai,” she replied dryly. Keeping up with him had her on her toes, and that wasn’t only referring to matching his long-legged stride.

At least following behind him meant that she could check out his ass. While she was fully aware that ass checking was the last thing in the world she should be doing as his physical therapist, it was a little difficult to strip her gaze away from that tight curve. His slacks were a fine material that pulled taut over his bum when he twisted open the sliding glass door. Damn, he dressed nicely.

If professional surfers usually dressed like he did, maybe she’d been hanging out with skaters too long. Her friends all wore board shorts and cargoes. Sometimes jeans appeared if the weather dipped below forty-five degrees. None of them had button-downs
like the one stretched across Sean’s shoulders. He was insanely fit, which went to show poor choices could make even the most fit susceptible to injury.

Man, she was going to have a hard time keeping herself together when he was undergoing physical therapy. At least she didn’t have to be the one to administer it herself. She’d be a horrible therapist if this was how she looked at patients.

Not that any of them looked like Sean Westin.

Not that any of the men in the entire world looked like Sean Westin.

Annie’s whole living space could fit into Sean’s lanai. Considering that she lived on the upper floors of the same building that held her business, it wasn’t saying
that
much, but she suddenly realized why this room was called a lanai instead of a patio. It had a roof, for one thing, and walls along two sides, though they were open-framed and lined with Japanese-style screens that would be enough to keep a neighbor from peeking at anything going on inside.

The furniture was low to the ground and upholstered in pale white cottons to match the screens. They’d be the perfect chairs for Sean to throw himself into after a hard surfing session. The bar wasn’t hidden along a back wall, but instead installed as a central feature. It looked like something from a
Blade Runner
set, sleek black and knee-high with a recessed door in the center that was likely a fridge. The round arrangement would allow guests to grab what they wanted instead of having a designated bartender.

All of it paled compared to the space where the third wall would have been. Except anyone who’d
put up a wall there would have to be smoking something made out of sinus medicines in the back bedroom of a trailer.

The only frame the room needed was the perfect, impeccable, gorgeous view. The water. The ocean. But more than that. It wasn’t just
Oh, look at that blue strip
like so-called ocean-view houses in certain neighborhoods. Sean had a beach. He had white, pure sand that stretched for a mile north and two miles south.

Even the waves outside his lanai were perfect. He could grab a board, walk to the water, then paddle out into a right break that was currently six feet high on the front. “Jesus,” she breathed.

“Makes you wanna hit the water, right?”

She might have expected him to be smug, but it wasn’t there. His lips were slightly parted. His eyes were as wide as they went. Only in its absence did she realize the tension that had been held at his blade-high cheeks. He was softer here, looking at the ocean. Maybe he was one of those few people who actually seemed to understand the power the dark green water held. There was magic out there. Magic most people couldn’t touch.

Magic she hadn’t felt in a long time. “Wouldn’t know. I haven’t surfed in about five years.”

He gaped at her. There were no other words for it. His carved jaw dropped and his whole body shifted toward her. “Are you serious?”

She shrugged, though there was so much tension across the back of her neck, it felt as if she were grinding glass together. “Haven’t needed to since college.”

He shook his head a little, then passed his free hand over the top of his skull. He scraped blunt nails through his short hair. She wondered what that hair would feel like under her palms. Probably scratchy. Maybe she’d get a little tickle. Definitely a lot of tingles. They’d probably work up her arms and into her chest.

Fuck, she was such an idiot.

“Surfing isn’t about need,” he said in a voice implying she might as well have spoken in Farsi. “Surfing is about a drive.”

She pulled out the first three bottles lining the bar, and aimed her most beatific, bullshitting grin up at him. “Then I don’t have the drive. Besides, I have my teens to think about. It’s easier to keep an eye on five kids if they’re all skating in my backyard. Our hiking trips are difficult enough in terms of logistics. Taking them to the beach would require different transportation, and I’d have to be stricter about maintaining control over them. Plus it’s harder to store a surfboard than a skateboard.”

Something dark flitted across his features. He hadn’t shaved, so a shadowy growth covered his chin and jaw, but it did nothing to hide the twitching muscle. “I’ll give you that one.”

She sat back, spreading her elbows out on the armrests. It was probably the most comfortable patio furniture she’d ever planted her butt in and that was just not fair. She had kids who struggled to have enough to eat every day. Sometimes the snacks she provided would be the only calories they got. And Sean Westin probably dropped ten grand on decorating a
lanai.

“Really,” she said, dragging out the word to an obnoxious level. But her speech sped up, faster and faster as she went along. “What exactly does a world championship surfer know about hiding boards so an obnoxiously drunk stepfather won’t break it out of spite? That happened, you know. A boy named Mike stopped coming to my place after that, even though I got him a new board. He just gave up.”

The crystal clear blue of his eyes muddied into something more like a dark river than the ocean at Cancun. She hadn’t thought him capable of such changeable moods. The papers and talk about San Sebastian made him out to be way more of an affable, carefree playboy. He was the kind of guy who liked to have fun, and most everyone on the surf circuit loved him for it. “Maybe I didn’t have a drunk stepdad, but my mom had her own problems. I kept surfboards at other people’s houses most of the time. Usually they believed me when I said it was because they lived closer to the water.”

“What was the real reason?”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, he shut down. His eyes had been dark before, yeah, but that wasn’t the same thing as blank. His mouth lifted in the
shape
of a smile, but it wasn’t a real one. Even his posture changed as he rocked back on one heel. “Eh, there’s no reason to get into that.”

She didn’t believe him for a second. There was a deep dark kind of thing behind those words and their studiously casual tone. But sometimes it was easier to get hints and work around to the truth later. Her clients didn’t always realize that they’d come to
her for more than physical therapy. They needed whole-life overhauls.

She was just the woman to give him one. She smiled, pushing the bottles toward him. If he wanted to let it go, fine. For now. “There’ll be no alcohol for the next eight weeks. How we go about it is your choice.”

“What do you mean?” He almost seemed to hide a sigh of relief, but she had to be mistaken.

Sean might want to believe he was mystery and danger wrapped up together, but she was starting to think he was a whole lot easier to read than he wanted to be. “Either we pour the bottles out right now, together, or we load up my car and I store them for you.”

She liked giving clients this choice. Their answer usually gave a deeper insight into their relationship with alcohol. Sometimes it was the easiest way to find out if they were closet alcoholics. Their
choice
didn’t matter, but the way they delivered it absolutely did. Sean was frequently seen in clubs and had been in at least three bar fights that she’d heard of in the past two years alone. That wasn’t even counting his current injury’s being due to a bar incident that put his career in danger.

But he only gave a little shake of his head. “Really doesn’t matter to me. It’d be some cash outlay to buy again once I’m better, but it’s not like I have special scotch or fifty-year-old wine. I’m not really a wine type at all, for that matter.”

“Wonderful. If it’s all the same to you, then, I’d rather we pour them out. I could keep them safe at my house, but they would have to be locked up in
my bedroom. I’d rather not bring that sort of temptation to my kids’ doorstep.”

He gave another of those soft, slightly wondering smiles. Her stomach flipped, and she told it to shut the hell up. He was absolutely not looking at her the same way he’d looked at the ocean. That was ridiculous.

“You call them your kids,” he pointed out. “But they’re not, right? None of them are yours biologically? They’re teenagers who attend an afternoon drop-in center.”

“That still makes them mine.”

T
hree days later, Sean had managed to drag Annie out to the beach. When she admitted that she hadn’t surfed in five years, it had become his obsession to get her on the waves. He couldn’t even fathom that. The idea was simply absurd. Who in the name of God would pass up on surfing when they were good enough to have been on a university team? He also knew players who’d come out of UCSD. They had high standards. Pros had been known to surf for them after their careers had ended, while they got degrees to carry them forward in life.

Annie had been that good and walked away. There had to be a story behind that.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t his story to figure out.

She was his physical therapist. There was nothing in her job description that said anything about talking or having fun or dropping intimate secrets. It was better that way, since his secrets were of the incredibly distasteful variety.

The thing was, memories were crowding back. Partly because he knew she worked with underprivileged teenagers—and partly because he hadn’t been able to surf for almost a week now. Surfing always rinsed out his brain and made him better able to deal with new shit that came his way. There was too
much old bullshit that tried to hang on to him, and the water was the only way to push it away.

He had a beach house, for fuck’s sake, and no one was out there in the ocean. He just sat on the back stairs with his toes digging into the warm, abrasive sand.

At least his big donation meant he got house calls from Annie rather than having to go into her office. Money did count for something.

Except the downside of training at his house meant they were training by the beach. It was bullshit. He was still looking at the one place he’d kill to be. Surfing cleared his head to make him feel like something more than a dirty little kid.

He’d lost that. He’d injured himself and lost that connection to the water.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone more than three days without hitting the waves. Even in January, he’d wear a full-body wet suit. Some of the best waves came when the weather was shitty and storms were rolling in offshore.

“When do I get to surf?” It was still difficult for him to breathe, which was hard to understand. All he’d done were some arm lifts and extensions. Under normal circumstances, he could run five miles against the extra resistance of soft sand, then do forty-five minutes of weightlifting. But sweat had sprung up across his forehead. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and slugged back some Powerade.

“When you can do five overhead lifts without breaking a sweat.” She was folding up the table she’d brought along with her. He’d had to lie
facedown on it and swing his arm up and down as if he were a kid playing come-get-me with the monster under the bed. He’d felt stupid. Worse than that.

His shoulder throbbed in a different way than it had over the past week. It was less sharp pain and more like a steady ache. “That’s easy. I just won’t drink any water the day before and there’ll be no sweat.”

“Oh yay,” she said with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “Screw up your health in order to game the system. Good plan.”

He capped his drink and put it down on the edge of the stairs. “I wasn’t serious.”

She sighed. “I know. Sorry. You didn’t deserve that one. It’s just been a long day.”

“It’s only eight. What could be wrong?”

Her hair was pulled back in her short ponytail, complete with a thick fringe of bangs. But she’d left off the eye makeup, and purple shadows clung underneath her lashes. She shook her head. “You don’t really care.”

He stood, his stomach giving a weird little flip. Was that what she thought of him? It didn’t say much about him, did it. He gently stretched his arm, letting the pain burn through his muscles. It wasn’t all bad pain. There was the sweet sting of muscles being able to do what they wanted for the first time in a couple weeks. The sun rose above the house behind them, streaking warmly through the air. The water called his name, but even he knew it would be foolish to grab a board and try anything stupid. “Maybe I won’t care, but give me a shot. Maybe it’ll be more like a distraction.”

She sighed, but her hands stopped messing with the straps and struts of the table. She turned away from him. Her shoulders were narrow and her back even skinnier. She wore a T-shirt with shorts that showed off toned legs. Not surprising, considering how much she skateboarded. She had a skinned knee too, as if she were a kid. But the swell of her perky ass was all woman. “I’ve got this boy who comes by every now and then. Tim. He can grind for fucking miles. He’s got shockingly red hair and pale skin. Turns out, skin that pale—it shows bruises really well.”

“Shit,” Sean muttered.

“Yeah.” Her shoulders lifted and dropped as she sighed. “He came around at four this morning.”

“His parents?”

“Dad.” Her voice broke even on that tiny, simple word, but she stayed turned away from him. Her shoulders bowed in farther, almost as if she were trying to hide.

Sean turned toward the water. She obviously wanted a minute of privacy. A breeze on its way offshore tickled the back of his neck. At least his mom had never raised a hand to him. He’d been lucky in that respect. It had been part of why he’d never had a way out, which was the downside too. He’d always made the best of his circumstances, so the few times he’d been able to say something, no one had really believed him. He’d told a counselor in middle school. Mrs. Logan hadn’t been dismissive, but she hadn’t exactly moved heaven and earth to get anything changed. Sean had been put in foster care for a week while his mom had made the bare-minimum
improvements. Then he’d been back again. He’d been hopeful for all of two days, until he’d come home from school to find out that his mom had been shopping at the Goodwill while he was in sixth period social studies. Bags of clothes they’d never wear covered the table where he was supposed to do homework.

He’d left that behind. Literally and figuratively. His house was clean. He had the life he’d dreamed of.

He stuck out a hand. “Come on.”

She turned, but looked at his hand in the air between them as if he were offering her a handful of spaghetti. Not dangerous, but completely inexplicable. “But . . . where?”

“Down the beach.”

She shook her head. “No swimming. You’re not ready. You’ll do damage.”

“We’re not going swimming.” He flashed a shiny, cheeky grin. Distraction was a graceful weapon when wielded correctly. “You’re not dressed for it.”

“Like you’ve never talked a girl into skinny-dipping.” She was wavering. A single step brought her close enough that she could put her hand in his if she wanted to.

He kept himself locked down. Fingers open. Stance easy. This was no big deal . . . but for some reason it felt like it was. He
liked
Annie. She was sharp and funny, and this morning she was hurting. He hadn’t meant for them to have any sort of friendship, but he wasn’t opposed to it either. “Sure I have. But we’ve always done it after dark. It’s morning. You’re totally safe.”

She laughed. “No woman is safe around you.”

He didn’t mean to, but he took a step closer to her. They were shrinking the distance between them. He felt his spine tilt, his chin come down just a fraction. “Why, Baxter, does that mean you like me some?”

“A woman would have to be
dead
not to think you’re hot.” Except she said it with more of that disdain of hers. Like his attractiveness was a fact, but not one that mattered. “You know that. Of course you do, or you wouldn’t have been in ads for those expensive watches. There’s surfing sponsorship, and then there’s wider appeal. You’ve got it in spades.”

“I like money.” He’d never considered that a bad thing. He did what he needed to do in order to build his portfolio. The sport of surfing and his own corporate image could become something bigger. Better. Surfing was fucking awesome. If he could make money and help other people realize that, no one lost. There was the chance that his split focus was the thing holding him back from the top ten, but he’d calculated that as an acceptable risk. He still had to stay in the game, however. “I also like the water. Come on. Come sit with me.”

He could practically see the internal battle she waged. Her eyes were the same chocolate brown as the stripe down the surfboard he’d had his senior year of high school. That had been a good year, when he’d first entered Prime events.

“Fine,” she said with a decisive nod, almost as if giving herself permission. She tucked her hand in his.

He closed his fingers around hers immediately. Her hand was smaller than the hands he was used
to. Smaller than he liked, honestly. It took some thought to realize that all the vibrant personality he dug was packed into a tiny capsule. If she were as big as she lived, she’d have been six foot five.

They walked to the edge of the water in silence and sat below the tide line. The damp sand immediately soaked through Sean’s workout sweats. He stripped off his shoes, tossing them behind him to the white dry sand. She followed suit, ditching her tennis shoes. Her toes were elegant, with navy-painted nails.

He didn’t say anything. He knew from experience there was no point in pushing if someone didn’t want to tell a story. He hadn’t known Annie long, but she seemed like the ultimate in determination and control. The cold white froth of the very edge of the waves tickled their toes. When a particularly large surge swept beneath them to lick at the sand they sat on, Annie squealed. Sean laughed at her, but only a little bit. He had a feeling she didn’t mind.

There weren’t many surfers out, mostly because conditions were predicted to go off later in the day. They’d double the surf in the afternoon, so most people were probably getting other shit done so they could have free time when the surf was banging. Not Sean. He had all the free time in the world. Lately that had chafed him, but at this moment, it was something of a relief.

“He’s not a perfect kid, of course. It all started because he’d been drunk and out until two on a school night. Plus I bet he mouthed off when his dad tried to get onto him.” She spoke without looking at Sean, but that was fine. At least she was speaking.

Sean knew what it was like to hold on to something important and have nowhere to vent. “Still, that doesn’t make it okay.”

“God, no.” She sighed. “His father hauled off full force, and he’s got at least fifty pounds on Tim. He’s lucky he doesn’t have a fracture in his orbital socket. It was a really hard blow.”

“Plus he’s lucky he had you to come to.”

She shook her head. Her hands dangled between her upraised knees. “Sometimes I don’t know about that.”

“I’m sure of it.” Sean would have killed for someone who gave even half as much a shit about him. But there was no point in heading down that road again. It only caused pain.

“I should get going. I have an appointment in less than an hour, and I still have to get all the way across town.”

He liked the way sand felt under his feet. Comforting, even when it was cold and damp. Sand was home. Sand shifted; it could always be swept away by the ocean and cleaned before it was dumped back on the beach. “Go ahead.” He winked. “It’s not my fault you feel the need to check up on my clean living.”

“Clean living.” She gave a derisive snort. “Sure.”

“I swear it. Like a Boy Scout or something.” He crossed two fingers over his heart.

Suddenly, an idea hit him that was brand-new and ridiculous, but he’d never had a better one. “You know what? You should go with me to an event I have Friday. Just so I can prove how good I’m being.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she replied immediately. She shoved up from her seat and brushed off the clumps of damp sand from her ass and the backs of her legs. “Don’t be silly. It wouldn’t be professional.”

“I disagree. In fact . . . I think it would be entirely professional. These are the types of movers and shakers who are always looking for new charity projects to support. It’s a red-carpet event for the opening of a new magazine. It’ll probably shutter in less than a year, because who the hell buys magazines anymore, but that’s not your worry.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “What
is
my worry, then?”

“What to wear.”