WORTH THE RISK

She told the charity she needed a bit of personal time, and laid out all the reasons why she thought her second-in-command was more than capable of stepping into the role. She wrote her second-in-command, apologizing for the short notice, but making sure the woman she’d handpicked knew that it was her very competence that had made Lexi so sure she could slip away. It was true, she’d realized as she wrote it all out, even though she might not have thought it through before she’d gotten on that plane.

She emailed her father—or rather, his personal secretary—and felt badly about the relief she felt because she didn’t have to have an actual conversation with him. Because she already knew what he’d say. Or rather, how he would sound while he said it. And he was far too good at triggering her guilt. That it was unintentional on his part, and always motivated by concern, somehow always made her feel more guilty. The truth was, Lexi didn’t feel guilty at the moment. She didn’t want to feel guilty.

I’ve decided to take a little break, she had texted Lily.

I support this move completely, her best friend had fired back. I hope a beach is involved. Hot boys and cocktails.

More or less, Lexi had replied. And it had still been that first night, so that strange fear had washed over her, gripping her tight. I’m in Olkfield. And she’d stared down at her phone, watching as the three dots that indicated Lily was typing appeared. Then disappeared. Appeared again. Then disappeared once more.

She’d been sitting in the guest room then, her feet crossed beneath her as she sat in the armchair in the corner of the room. She’d stared at her phone, nervously worrying her knuckle between her teeth.

Tell Tyler I say hello, came the reply, at last.

And that was all.

But it didn’t matter. Lily knew. And if Lexi let herself think about it, it was likely that Lily knew a whole lot more than the two of them had ever discussed directly. Like those moments with Tyler, taut and strange, that Lexi had been pretending not to notice for years now. And yet none of them as intense as what had happened here.

It took her two days to remember that she ought to let Victor know where she was, too.

I have gone off to Olkfield, she texted him, feeling as stiff as the words sounded when she stared at them on her screen. I don’t expect to be gone too long.

Victor's reply had come swiftly. Please update my assistant with return date.

Just in case Lexi had been tempted to romanticize something that had nothing to do with romance. She told herself that what she’d felt, then, staring at his message, was peace. Relief. She told herself that was what she felt now, too.

“What are you scowling at?” came Tyler's low voice from behind her.

Lexi jumped, then turned that scowl on him. And immediately wished she hadn’t.

Because Tyler worked on that marvelous body of his. There was a gym in the house, where he put in at least an hour a day, but he also liked to run. He’d introduced her to the coastal walk that stretched from the Beach, and Lexi had taken to walking it on fine mornings, breathing in deep. Letting the Sea breeze and the lovely sunshine dance over her face like happiness. Stopping here and there to gaze at the water or take pictures from the rocky cliffs.

Tyler ran it. She could tell that he’d been out on the run already this morning, because he wore nothing but a pair of athletic shorts, and he was…gleaming.

Sweating, she corrected herself crossly.

She should have been revolted. But he didn’t smell bad. He smelled clean. Male. And the sweat of his exertion only made him look better, somehow. It made his green eyes gleam brightly, and Lexi felt reduced to a stuttering, bumbling mess.

It happened more and more the longer she stayed here. One more reason she should leave.

“I’m not scowling,” she told him, ignoring all that gleaming. “I was thinking about business-related things. I’m so far away I keep pretending Nemford doesn’t exist. But it does.”

“Last I heard, yes.” He sounded amused as he went to the refrigerator, and pulled out the makings of the shake he put together every morning.

Several different powders she assumed were proteins and superfoods and whatever else it was health nuts liked to put in themselves to keep up with all the gleaming. Green things and antioxidants and worthy supplements packed with vitamins. The very opposite of the full breakfast she remembered him tucking into with gusto on hungover mornings.

There was no reason for her to be here, but she leaned against the counter, her mug of strong tea in her hands and watched. Tyler fixed himself his drink then chugged it down, tipping back his head so she could hardly help but stare at the strong column of his throat. And all the lines, planes and ridges of that body he worked so hard on almost entirely exposed to her view.

She studied the tattoo on his back, the line of Gaelic down his spine and the Celtic knot he wore over his heart. Why did she want to put her hands on him so badly? To trace those tattoos she recognized like old friends, to remind herself how well they suited him and how easily he wore them.

Because you need to go home, she told herself sternly.

“I’m headed into the office,” Tyler said. And when he looked at her, his green gaze swept over her the way it always did, after that first conversation. Friendly. Happy. Not complicated in the least.

There was no reason it should make her teeth ache, so hard that she clenched them. “The housekeeping service will be in,” he continued mildly, though something about the way he looked at her made her unclench her teeth. “I told them to expect a guest on the premises, so don’t be put off if you wake from a nap to find someone hoovering up the place.”

“I won’t be here,” she said grandly. And without thinking it through. “I’m going to do a bit of the tourist thing.”

“And here I thought you planned to waft up and down the coastal path again.” He studied her. “You should roam about Quay and the Rocks. Take the ferries all over Olkfield Harbour. Get a sense of the place.”

Lexi had spent most of her life charging around doing this or that, but not since she’d arrived in Olkfield. All she wanted to do was stay tucked up in Tyler's house, or lost in her own head as she wandered up and down what had to be the most beautiful walk in the world. It hugged the coastline, meandering through the beach towns and around a haunting cemetery set into the side of a cliff, over the ocean pools, up the rocks and down again. When the sun was out it could be warm enough to feel like summer while other days it was moody. She loved it either way.

But she’d announced she was off to play tourist, so that was what she was going to do.

“I’ll drive you in then,” Tyler said, with a grin.

And that was how, scarcely forty-five minutes later, she found herself sitting in an outrageously flash sports car, prowling through the morning traffic toward the Olkfield Central Business District.

“I have to make a confession,” she said as they waited at a light. She glanced over at him, dressed in his usual uniform of jeans and a T-shirt— which should have looked ratty and casual and student-y, but didn’t. Not the way he wore them. “I had no idea you worked this hard. You underplayed it.”

Tyler laughed. “Maybe I wanted you to think it was effortless.”

“You work all the time,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t know when you sleep. No matter what time I wake up, jetlagged and victimized by the time change, you’re always awake. You take phone calls night and day. And yet you still have time to go on runs and toss weights around in your gym. I thought I was busy, but you’re a superhero.”

“I do run a company, Lexi,” he said, in a tone of mock reproach. But she was caught up in the way he propped his arm up on the steering wheel, and it was difficult to tell which was more powerful, the car or the man. “It can’t run on its own.”

“It’s just so…”

“Surprising?” Tyler supplied.

And he laughed when he said it, but she didn’t think he was kidding.“Impressive,” she corrected him. “I was going to say it was impressive.”

The look he threw her way was unreadable, but then traffic surged forward, and he put his attention back onto the road. And then, before she could ask him something, or say those things she kept biting back, his phone rang the way it always did. And he answered it the way he always did, because he was far busier than she’d ever imagined, and he launched himself back into another business conversation.

Lexi told herself she’d imagined her reaction to him when he pulled up to a curb on a city street some time later, told her to walk straight ahead and indicated that she should get out. But when she reached over to open the door, his hand grabbed her arm, stopping her.

It made her feel jagged inside. Scraped up. His hand was big and hard over her forearm and his eyes were so green. And something about Tyler looking at her so intently made her think she might shake. She wanted to, anyway.

“I’ll meet you later,” he told her, gruffly. “At the Opera Bar at the Opera House. Eight o’clock.”

“It’s a date,” she said, brightly. And immediately regretted her choice of words. But she didn’t have time to stammer about it, or take it back. Or even qualify what she’d said.

Because Tyler smiled, and it was an edgy thing, wired directly into that jaggedness within her. “I’ll see you then.”

And Lexi found herself out on the street, then walking, oblivious to her surroundings. Because all she could see was that look on his face. Which is why it took her a moment, after she’d walked down the block and under a rail overpass the way he’d told her to, to realize where she was.

He’d dropped her a block away from a walkway that led around to the iconic opera house itself. And the Olkfield Harbour Bridge. And the gleaming, beautiful water of the harbor itself, cut through by the green-and-yellow ferries. And sailboats catching the wind. It was like standing in a postcard.

And later, Lexi couldn’t have said which one of those things made the tears begin to stream down her face. Only that she cried, and she couldn’t believe that a place she’d seen on television a thousand times was far more beautiful than she ever could have imagined. And that somehow, even though she was standing there on a bright winter morning, crying her eyes out in the middle of the streams of Olkfield siders and tourists, so very far away from Nemford and the world she knew, she had never felt quite so at home in her life.

_________

Tyler had resigned himself years ago to the fact that he clearly loved a hair shirt. He liked to suffer, obviously. What other explanation was there for a hopeless, unrequited love that stretched on past hope, past reason, and insinuated itself into every interaction he had with other women?

Aren’t you just a fecking martyr, his older brother Andrew had once sneered at him. Andrew had talked a metric ton of shite that day, but that particular dig stayed with him. And if he’d ever had any doubt, that was gone now. Because there was carrying a torch, which Tyler had done for years now whether he liked to admit it or not. And then there was Lexi in his house. Living under the same roof.

Lexi looking soft and sleepy, shuffling around his kitchen. Lexi lost in thought, gazing out over the rail on his deck. When they’d been at university together, he’d known things about her. Intimate things that could only come from daily interaction. That she worried a lock of her hair around and around one finger while she studied.

Or when she was nervous, she worked a knuckle between her teeth. The way she hummed beneath her breath, always off tune, when she was happy. The awkward, yet endearing, way she danced to the endlessly cheesy music she liked.

Since graduation, those things had faded. When he saw her now, there was always so much less time. A dinner here. Drinks there. He texted her more than anyone else he knew, combined, but it wasn’t the same as those stolen intimacies. It couldn’t be. And he would have said he’d accepted all that, long since.