Mid Life Love (Mid Life Love #1)(103)

“No...” He smoothed my hair. “Do they know about your sister?”

“They know she died in a plane crash...They don’t know it was my fault.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know it was going to crash.”

“Says the man who saved his sister from a burning trailer...It was definitely my fault and I—”

“It wasn’t your fault, Claire.” He pulled me close to his chest. “You can’t blame yourself for everything that goes wrong in life...What was your sister’s name?”

“Caroline...Caroline Ashley Gracen.”

“That’s a really pretty name...” He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and kissed my cheek.

I wanted to say more, to tell him how Caroline actually hated her name, but I shut my eyes and gave in to the much needed sleep.

Chapter 23

Claire

“Your dancing is getting better.” Jonathan smiled as he twirled me around the yacht’s dance floor.

“Yours is still questionable.”

“It’s because I have a terrible teacher.” He laughed and pulled me into his arms. “Are you still on the fence about being my date to the IPO ball?”

I nodded. I knew he wanted me to go with him; he’d been making that fact very clear all week. Yet, it was still a while away and I was nervous about making our relationship public.

It seemed like we were the only people at corporate who’d been taking advantage of the invisible fraternization policy, and I knew my coworkers would have something negative to say about it.

“I’ll give you until the end of the week to say yes.” He dipped me low to the ground. “I’m not going with anyone else.”

“You could always go alone...”

He rolled his eyes and pulled me back up. “Let me know when you want Greg to take you shopping for a dress.” He brushed a stray hair away from my face. “I always take an employee as a date to the company’s social functions. No one will suspect anything.”

“So, you won’t touch or kiss me while we’re at the party?”

“I can’t promise that.” He tilted my chin up and brushed his lips against mine. “You know I don’t care who’s watching.” He traced my lips with his tongue and parted my mouth open, but then he stopped.

“Where is the pool?” “He said he had a pool.” “Maybe he lied about it to get us to come.” “How are we supposed to brag to the rest of the squad about being on a luxury yacht that doesn’t have a pool?”

He laughed and stepped back as Ashley and Caroline rounded the corner, staring at us.

Ashley breathed one of her most dramatic sighs. “You told us that there was a pool, Jonathan. We brought our bikinis and our cameras, but there’s no pool.”

“I’ll show you where it is.” He grabbed my hand and motioned for them to follow us. He led us up two stairwells and inside a massive room with walls that were covered in frosted glass. He hit the lights and then he pulled on a small lever—making the hundreds of dark gray panels on the floor slide open to reveal a clear blue pool.

“Ugh! How did he expect us to find this?” Caroline shook her head.

She and Ashley immediately tossed off their towels and slid into the pool, laughing about the many ways they planned on making their friends jealous.

“Would you like to finish your dance lesson now?” he whispered.

“I can’t use the pool?”

“There’s another one downstairs...” He slipped his arm around my waist. “You can use it after we’re finished.”

“Dancing?”

“You can call it whatever you want...”

I couldn’t get into Girls’ Night...Not tonight.

All I could think about was Jonathan—him kissing me, him holding me, and him making love to me.

Ever since he’d said “I’ll do better,” he’d taken things to another level: He came over on the weeknights and hung out with me and my daughters—crushing me at Monopoly, helping them with their model planes, and even cooking for us sometimes. On the weekends, he treated us to full days at sea, bringing along a chef team that prepared whatever we wanted. He insisted on picking me up for work in the mornings, and he’d even managed to get me to eat lunch with him every afternoon.

The flowers he had delivered on a daily basis now included small chocolates and sweet little notes that made me blush. And the sex between us—though it’d always been amazingly mind-blowing, was becoming way more passionate and intense.

Tonight, he was away at some conference in L.A. and I was missing him—truly missing him, and I was too scared to acknowledge the exact reasoning behind that.

“Some men really need to take a class on the proper way to please a woman.” Helen set down her glass. “It’s so sad when they don’t know how. These last few men have forced me to invest in a brand new vibrator. I’m thinking about starting my own website and giving free pointers.”

I sighed. “Do you keep track of how many men you’ve been with, or is that completely pointless now?”

“I stopped counting at thirty.”

“Thirty?”

“Or was it forty?” She shrugged. “Men do it all the time. I don’t ever want to be married, so why not?”