Reckless Girls(54)
Ten more days with Eliza and Jake and their secrets.
“Works for me,” Brittany says, and I nod, too, even as I look around at the sand and the sea and the jungle behind us, wondering how a place that’s so open, so free, could feel like such a trap.
BEFORE
Eliza has never believed in fate. Some mystical force, pulling you where you’re supposed to be, so that everything clicks together with perfect symmetry? No way. Besides, that kind of thinking takes power out of your hands, in her opinion, so fuck that.
But still, when she looks across a crowded pub and sees Jake Kelly standing there, a pint in one hand, surrounded as always by a pack of acolytes, she has to wonder if the universe isn’t finally—for fucking once—doing her a favor.
Lord knows it owes her something.
After her mum, after Jake and all that, Eliza spent years drifting. A year of uni, then a new guy, one who had Jake’s blue eyes and easy charm, but not his cash, not that gold-plated sense of self that Jake had somehow possessed even at seventeen.
That guy—Tom—lasted nearly two years, and then she was moving on again, settling in London with some girls she met through an online ad, and working at a bank.
When that had gotten too dull to be borne, she’d found a job bartending on a cruise ship. She usually worked the Spanish route, Southampton to Mallorca and all that, sunburned tourists paying too much for tequila sunrises that she’d always made with her brightest and fakest smile.
It wasn’t a bad life. Eliza liked the travel, and the tips were good. It just wasn’t what she’d envisioned for herself when she was younger.
Sure, she was going to gorgeous places, but she was doing it as staff when what she wanted was to be the person being waited on, the girl who ordered the drinks, not the girl who made them.
But eventually, she made enough money from that job to travel on her own for a bit, getting off the boat in the Canary Islands and never getting back on.
She covered most of southern Europe, ended up in Istanbul for a period, all while drifting into different groups of people, different friends. And with people like that—people you meet on the road—there’s no real past and no real future. It can all just be a glorious present where Eliza can be anyone she wants. She doesn’t have to tell people that her mum is in prison, doesn’t have to confess to the wasted years on wasted men and wasted opportunities.
She can reinvent herself every time she ends up in a new place, and the freedom of that is heady.
But it’s not nearly as heady as this moment, as she makes her way across the pub to Jake Kelly.
He doesn’t recognize her at first. She can tell from the way that his eyes move over her that he’s interested, but it’s in a distracted sort of way, just a man seeing an attractive woman, doing whatever calculus it is men do as they decide if they’re going to pursue or not.
And then …
His eyes widen, and the expression on his face fills Eliza with a sudden rush of triumph.
“Holy shit,” he breathes as she comes close, and she smiles at him, placing a hand on his shoulder and going up on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek.
“Hiya, Jake.”
He sets his beer on the bar behind him so quickly that some of it sloshes over the side, and then his hands are on her waist, his grin genuine as he looks down at her. His teenage lankiness has turned into something more solid, his chest broader, his face sharper. Unfair, really, that he should still be this beautiful, and that she should still feel her face grow hot when he looks at her, that she should immediately feel like a sixteen-year-old again, craving his reflected glow.
“How on earth have I gone over ten years without this face in my life?” he asks, smiling, and just like that, it’s over, she’s done for. Lost again in that easy smile and those blue eyes, and he doesn’t even have to ask her to go home with him.
She just goes.
* * *
HOME IS A BOAT.
It makes her laugh at first when he takes her there. She can’t seem to escape ships these days, but that’s fine by her. She loves the water, and had even taken sailing lessons during her time on the cruise ship. Besides, the Azure Sky is not just any boat.
It’s gorgeous, sleek and luxurious, and she sees Jake’s pride in it as he shows her around.
“Where are you going to take her?” she asks, and he slides his arms around her waist from behind, kissing a spot behind her ear and raising goose bumps.
“Anywhere I fucking please,” he replies, then nods toward a map opened up on the table in the galley.
“Thinking about this one spot. Meroe Island. Supposed to be quite the experience. Ancestor of mine got stranded there back in the 1800s. Poor bugger got eaten, if memory serves.”
“By sharks?” Eliza asks, and Jake presses a gentle bite to the place where her neck meets her shoulder.
“By his mates,” he replies, and she turns in his arms, looping her arms around his neck.
“And you want to go there why?”
That grin again, those dimples. “For the fun of it, darling. And speaking of fun…”
Eliza lets him lead her to the cabin, lay her down on the wide bed, and strip off her dress. It had bothered her for years, the way she still thought about those afternoons in Jake’s bed as a teenager, how no man she’d slept with since had affected her quite the way he had.