Life Is A Beach (Mills & Boon Silhouette): Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling (20 page)

“I’ve made coffee,” Paulette said. “Come and have a cup. And then if you’d like, you can take my car and drive to Haulover Beach. It won’t be as crowded as the beach here, and I won’t need the car today anyway since I’m going to be going over the Rent-a-Yenta books.”

Translation: Paulette wanted her out of the apartment. Getting out on her own sounded like a great idea, though.

“Mmm, okay, I’d like that,” Azure said, going into the
kitchen and helping herself from the Mr. Coffee. Out of politeness she added, “Why don’t you go with me?”

Paulette waved her hand around, indicating too much to do. “Busy,” she said. “Want me to fix you a scrambled egg or something?”

“Not necessary,” Azure said after she gulped her usual breakfast of two stress vitamins.

Paulette downed the last dregs from her cup and wandered off in the direction of the crowded bedroom where she’d wedged a desk into a corner for working at home. “Car keys on the table beside the door. The beach is south on—what’s the name of that road? Hmm, I don’t recall. Just follow the signs to Haulover Beach. You’ll find it.”

Azure needed no more urging. After a quick goodbye phone call to her mother and her sister during which Isis’s terminally cute youngest stepson recited a long and boring poem that he had written about a sand crab encounter on the beach, Azure folded up the couch bed and dug her swimsuit out of her suitcase. In less than half an hour, she was speeding south in Paulette’s yellow Volkswagen bug, which was no more her style than, say, sitar music.

Boy, she reflected on the way, would she be glad to leave this place tomorrow and get back to Boston and her tidy little apartment, her conservative gray Camry sedan, and all her classical CDs. Plus, no one called her Azure there. They called her A.J., a truncated version of her given name, which, due to the folly of her parents, was Azure Jonquille. She’d been rebelling against it—and them—most of her life.

At Haulover Beach she jockeyed the bug into a slot in the parking lot, followed the tunnel under the road, and emerged into sunlight. The sight of the glassy ocean, the scent of brine wafting on the breeze, the wheeling of gulls
overhead, were all so exhilarating that she didn’t mind the trudge down the beach to a deserted area where she could bask in peace. She staked her claim on a few square feet of sand, slathered on a handful of suntan lotion, plopped down on her stomach, and pulled the baseball hat loaned to her by Paulette over her face, after which she promptly fell into a doze.

Azure was awakened by the laughter of people who were involved in setting up a volleyball net. She didn’t look. She didn’t have to. She already knew that they were placing the net much too close, and if she ignored them, maybe they’d move it. But they didn’t. They went on talking and laughing, and when they started to play a game, the sand began to fly and she knew she’d have to vacate.

She eased over onto her back and pushed her hat back from her face. Aghast at what she saw, she blinked, sure that her eyes weren’t focusing correctly. The volleyball game was proceeding full speed ahead, but every participant, male and female, was completely nude. Embarrassingly nude. Upsettingly and floppingly and wigglingly nude, and she wanted out of there.

That Paulette! Azure never should have trusted her. Not only was her cousin annoying in the extreme, but she clearly had an ax to grind, maybe because she resented all those jokes the O’Connors had played on her when they were kids. All the same, Azure would give Paulette a piece of her mind. She would—

Her attention was drawn to a handsome male specimen who was now sauntering out of the ocean. Openmouthed, she couldn’t help but admire his physique, his deeply bronzed skin, his muscular structure. While she gawked, he stopped beside her blanket, showering droplets of water on her skin that, just from looking at him, had reached sizzling
temperature. “C’mon,” he said easily. “They need a couple more players.”

Oh, no! She knew this guy. She hadn’t recognized him at first because—well, the obvious answer was that he was stark naked. But his hair was slicked back and darker from swimming, and here on the beach he seemed even taller than he had yesterday. Also, she couldn’t help but notice a sexy gap between his top two front teeth, and that those teeth were the whitest of whites. This was the guy who had kept trying to fix an eye-lock on her at the wedding, the guy Paulette had introduced her to in the moments before she fled the reception. Lust Puppy.

Speechless though she was, Azure knew she couldn’t go on sitting with her eyes on a level with—well! From somewhere in the back of her mind emerged the thought that she did crave symmetry in all things in her life, and she did have to say this for the guy—he was symmetrical, all right. Two eyes, gray with silvery sparkles, already noted yesterday. Two ears, nicely formed, ditto. One thing she definitely had not had access to before was the tattoo slightly south of his navel. It looked like—it definitely was—a frog.

Warning herself not to get any further interested in this Mr. Lee’s anatomy, she scrambled to her feet. He seemed to interpret this as assent to his suggestion and immediately grabbed her hand, propelling her toward the game.

“But I—I—” She objected to his appropriating her without her permission, though even as she offered it, she knew her objection was not as strenuous as it probably should have been.

“Watch out!” someone shouted. The volleyball was flying through the air with a pretty good chance of bonking her on the head, so thinking concussion, Azure warded it
off in self-defense. It was what anyone would have done under the circumstances, but people clapped and cheered as if she’d joined the game.

Approval didn’t seem so bad after the last couple of days spent fielding her family’s tart questions about her love life, her work life, and her lack of hobbies—none of which she had answered to their satisfaction. But still. These people weren’t wearing clothes!

“Don’t you want to relax a bit more?” The guy who got her into this was staring down at her from his six-foot-plus height, laugh lines crinkling around those remarkable eyes that were both humorous and wry.

Translation: He thought she should shed her swimsuit, a staid and respectable flowery-print job. As if she would! Her mushy abs and jiggly butt were uppermost in her mind.

“Actually I’ve got to go,” she blurted, marching with determination back toward her blanket where she gathered up her things, telling herself she’d better keep an eye on this man yet not look at him.

“Go where?” he asked, planting himself and his froggy tattoo and all his other considerable attributes directly in front of her.

“Um—” she started to say, thinking fast. She had the absurd idea that he didn’t have to worry about jiggling, but when he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, she discerned that she’d been wrong about that. She felt a blush beginning below her jawline and moving upward.

“We could meet for a drink later,” he suggested, layering on the charm, which was a mistake. She distrusted charm after her experience with the faithless Paco.

She drew herself up to her full five-foot-seven height. “I don’t think so, Mr. Lee.”

“Lee’s my first name, not my last,” he said, his words
interrupted by a beach-grooming machine that made a lot of noise and flung sand in their faces. It was a perfect opportunity to flee, which she did, noting too late the sign that she hadn’t spotted as she arrived: Warning! Nude Sunbathing Ahead.

There are all kinds of fruitcakes around here,
she thought to herself as she jammed the baseball cap on her head and charged toward the parking lot. Oh, she’d known from the beginning that there’d be a whole slew of oddballs at Karma’s wedding. Thus this Lee character. Thus her present annoyance. Thus her murderous thoughts aimed directly at Paulette.

In fact, Azure was spitting fire by the time she cornered Paulette back at the apartment. Paulette, however, had a phone wedged against her shoulder and waved Azure away as she continued the conversation with an unknown client.

“She has one of those diseases that makes all her hair fall out. Her brother’s a tattoo artist and he’s tattooed all these little black scrolls all over her head.” A pause while Paulette rolled her eyes. “No, it doesn’t look like barbed wire. Scrolls, I said, and she’s very attractive.” Another pause. “Sure, Client Number 1799 loves to pull weeds. I’m sure she’ll be happy to help you in your garden. I’ll give you her phone number,” and Paulette reeled it off, finally hanging up. “Whew,” she said, heading toward the bathroom. “What some people will endure to get spousally enhanced.”

Azure followed hard on her heels. “How could you send me to a nude beach?” she sputtered. “People playing volleyball with no clothes on, and—”

Paulette picked up a bottle of Evian water and began spraying it
on her face. “It was a nude beach?”

“Oh, it was nude, all right. Nude boobs. Nude stomachs. Nude—”

Paulette stopped spraying and frowned. “Stop, I get the picture. Hmm, did you meet anyone?”

“Only that Lee fellow, and I wasn’t too thrilled to see him there, particularly since he was stark naked. And speaking of tattoos, he had one. Right below his navel.”

“I see. Or rather, I didn’t see, which is probably all to the good. So how should I know that was a nude beach? I’ve never had time to go there myself.” Paulette was maddeningly nonchalant. She set the Evian bottle down among the jumble of cosmetics on the vanity and, looking completely self-absorbed, pulled a few pixielike tendrils of hair to the front of her ears.

Slightly mollified, Azure sank down on a chair outside the bathroom door. “You didn’t send me there to get back at me? For all the things my sisters and I used to do to you as kids?”

Paulette eyed her warily. “No, that’s not why I sent you there. Anyway, I thought we’d forgotten about all that,” she said pointedly.

“Well,” Azure began, not sure what she was going to say.

“I hope you’re not seriously thinking of telling me to put my tongue on the metal flagpole again when the temperature is only a few degrees above zero. If you are, look outside. It doesn’t get down to zero here in South Florida. For which I thank my lucky stars.” Paulette sauntered to her desk and began ticking numbers off on a notepad, clearly finished with the subject.

“Um, your tongue on the flagpole—did it hurt much?” Azure had always wanted to know, and truth be told, she had always felt some regret for that caper, which had
earned her and her sisters a major restriction for a month when they were kids.

Paulette glanced up at her from beneath raised brows. “Hell, yes, it hurt, but not until I tried to pull it
off
the flagpole and left a significant amount of skin behind. Afterward I thought I shouldn’t have been so dumb.” Paulette was smiling, sort of.

“I’m sorry, Paulette. For that and the other things.” Like the catfood sandwich they’d traded to her for lunch. And the time before their school’s fall placement tests when they’d told the naive Paulette that smoking a cigarette would make her smarter, and Paulette had been caught puffing away in the basement by her horrified parents. Paulette hadn’t ratted on them, though. She’d taken the punishment, which as Azure recalled involved raking leaves for days and days, maybe even weeks.

“Well, all is forgiven,” Paulette said. “I might as well confess, though, that I’ve run a dating match on you. I’d like to set up a date for you with a certain client. Client Number 1851, to be exact.”

Azure stood up. “No dates, Paulette. Charming Paco saw to it that I won’t want to kiss any more frogs for a long time. Anyway, I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Oh, not so fast.” Paulette scrabbled among the papers on her desk and produced a phone message. “This is from someone named Harry. He wants you to call him right away.”

“Harry Wixler is my boss,” Azure said, wondering why he would be calling her here. Then she recalled that she’d switched off her cell phone at the beach so she wouldn’t be disturbed. Her time away from Wixler Consultants was supposed to be vacation time.

“Harry said he wants you to stay in Miami Beach for a
while. I’ll be away at a seminar on small business practices in Orlando for most of this week, but you’re welcome to keep bunking here if you like.”

Azure didn’t like, but she thought she’d better find out what was going on, so she retreated to a lounge chair on the balcony and dialed Harry’s office number on her phone. Out on the small triangle of rippling blue ocean that she could see from where she sat, she watched a large freighter ply its way north, trailing a creamy white wake. A scattering of pleasure boats caught her eye closer in, and she had the reluctant thought that there could be worse places to linger on the orders of her boss.

“Got a little problem, A.J.,” Harry Wixler told her when he answered. “A prospective client is vacationing in Miami Beach on his yacht, and I want you to wait there until he calls. He requires major sucking up to if we’re to acquire his account.”

Azure rolled her eyes. “I hate sucking up.”

“The man needs a business plan, and you’re the one to do it.”

“What kind of business plan?”

“He sold his dotcom company for millions before dotcoms went bust, he’s weary of traveling around on his yacht, and he’s eager to begin a new venture, franchising his new idea. It’s called Grassy Creek. He didn’t tell me everything, but it’s something to do with grass. In fact—”

“Grass? What kind of grass?” she asked sharply.

“Not that kind,” Harry said with a deep chuckle. “You young whippersnappers always jump to conclusions.”

“I am not,” Azure said tartly, “a young whippersnapper. I am a thirty-year-old woman—”

“That’s young. When you’re my age, anyway. And you’re one of the best consultants on board, especially with
franchise start-ups. This client plans to franchise a bunch of health food stores specializing in wheat grass, if you can believe it. I’ve given him your phone number, so stay put until he calls. And rent yourself a set of wheels so you can pick him up and take him to dinner. Got that?”

“Got it,” Azure said wearily.

“Good. Report back to me after you talk with him.”