Moonlighter (The Company, #1)(16)

“Sunning myself at the pool, mostly. I’ll look over my speech and return some emails. The conference doesn’t get going until tomorrow.”

“Okay.” I guess I’m sitting by the pool, then. “After you’ve had enough sun, I need to get a workout in. So you’ll need to come back to the room, or else head to the gym with me.”

“I could stand to get some exercise. It’s good for jet lag. How long do you spend in the gym?”

“Two to three, depending on how good the equipment is.”

She blinks. “Two to three…hours?”

“Give or take. Depends how far I run after lifting.”

“That’s impossible. I can’t spend three hours holed up in the room waiting for you. I was going to get a massage and a pedicure.”

“Two then,” I concede. “That’s my bare minimum. You have to do your job, right? I also have to do mine.”

“And your job is working out like a mad man?”

“Working out like a beast,” I correct her. “I’m thirty-four years old, Alex. In four weeks I’ll be at training camp, fighting to dominate guys who are wet behind the ears at twenty-two. They want to take my place on the team. I can’t let ‘em. I don’t work out, I get soft.”

“I see. Okay.” She folds her hands. “I think I know a way to compromise.”





I don’t like compromise.

Alex’s solution is that she gets her early afternoon spa treatments while I finish my workout. That ought to make sense, except for a couple of crucial details.

She has the hotel staff bring a treadmill up to the private patio, so that I can run ten miles while looking out at the ocean. The treadmill is cranking at a brisk pace, and I’m sweating out of every pore as the waves lap the beach.

But I’m not looking at the ocean as often as I should be, because Alex is also getting a massage on a portable table a couple of meters away from me. Face down, she’s oiled up and naked on that table, her skin glinting in the Hawaiian sun.

Sure, there’s a towel covering her ass. So all I can see is her back and her oil-slicked limbs. And a kissable stretch of her neck. But my imagination is top notch. Worse, another guy—and he’s a young, twenty-something Hawaiian stud—has his hands sliding up and down all of Alex’s bare skin.

I can’t stop glancing over there. I’m probably going to stumble and kill myself. It will be all Alex’s fault, too. She even moans once in a while, especially when he works on her feet.

It’s the moans that really kill me.

Note to self: it’s not easy to run with a semi. This is not relaxing. My body temperature is climbing to an unreasonable level, and I don’t know whether to blame all the weight training I did earlier, the Hawaiian sun, or the luscious woman on the massage table.

At the nine mile mark I slap the stop button on the treadmill and let it slow to a stop. I can’t take it any more.

“Quitting early?” Alex asks from the massage table.

I don’t even answer that insulting question. “Avert your eyes.”

“Why?”

I march over to the edge of that pool, my back to Alex and the masseuse, my front to the Hawaiian surf. I strip off my sweaty running shorts and jump into the narrow pool.

Ahhhhh. Cool water is just what I need.

“Where is your bathing suit?” Alex yelps. “It’s not that private a terrace.”

“Where is yours?” I fire back.

The massage therapist laughs. “We’re done out here, anyway. I can’t do a pedicure in the sun; it makes the polish sticky. Here’s your robe.”

“It’s just as well,” Alex says. “There are snacks inside.”

“I thought we were having a late lunch?” I need a real meal after that workout.

“Oh, we are,” Alex assures me. “The snacks are just a warmup.”

She sits up, clutching a sheet to her luscious bosom while I suffer. It’s going to be a long week in Hawaii.

Max isn’t getting a Christmas present this year. Or ever again.





6





Alex





At first I thought I was imagining it. But no—I called this. Eric Bayer is taunting me with his hot body. He wants me to feel bad about turning him down that time in April.

He wants revenge. And even worse? It’s working.

No man has ever had such an unruly effect on my hormones. Maybe it’s the pregnancy. Or the jet lag. Or the sunshine. But I can’t stop looking at the hunk of male glory that is Eric Bayer. Two-hundred-odd pounds of muscle and smirking.

I shouldn’t even be attracted to him. But I am. And it’s bad. Really bad. For example, I never thought much about a man’s gluteus maximus before now. But I’ve been treated to over an hour of those sculpted buns on the treadmill. They’re going to be jogging through my dreams forever. I can just tell.

Also, I never knew that a man’s back muscles could be so sexy. Or his calves…

This is going to be the longest week in paradise ever.

After my spa treatments, I take a cool shower and wash my hair. When I come out, Eric is seated on the sofa in nothing but a fresh pair of shorts and two days worth of scruff on his rugged jaw.