Lorelie Brown - Riding the Wave

Instead, it was toward the man who’d spoken. He had high cheekbones and dark eyes with a slant that whispered of far-off waves. His mouth, too, was delicate in a way that most men couldn’t pull off. Not him, though. He was all subtle intention and dark focus. On her.

She swallowed. She smiled.

“Okay, well . . .” Her voice trailed off. Tanner’s arm had the consistency of concrete. His muscles were locked about as rigidly as possible. “Jack, everyone, thanks for the invite, but we’ll be . . . See ya.”

Hauling Tanner into a corner booth took all the subtle force she could muster. And she still could only move him because he eventually decided to be moved.

She ought to have been annoyed. Manly power shows had never been her style.

Instead something wicked and dark lit within her. It felt like cresting the top of a huge slab, waiting for the heavy weight of the wave to snatch her up.

She intentionally wedged him in so that his back was to the tables filled with surfers, then squeezed in next to him. If she’d sat across, she wouldn’t have been able to resist looking. Wondering what the hell had set him off.

His dad had been a blusterer. Lots of complaining, a little bit of stomping around. But Tanner seemed to be the exact opposite. All quiet burn. Her fingers literally itched to have her camera. The sharp line of his jaw would photograph so freaking perfectly, even in the dim light. Her thumb rubbed across the latch of her messenger-style camera bag. But it’d probably be a bad idea.

“Do I get to know what your problem is?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s easy enough.”

Rolling her eyes, she waved down the waitress. They turned over as easily as prom dates, so Avalon didn’t know this one’s name. But she had quite the rack, wrapped up in a pink twist of fabric.

Avalon checked automatically to see if Tanner had noticed. Not that it made any sense—and hell, with what the waitress was sporting, she had looked too.

Tanner still stared straight ahead, as if willing himself to keep his gaze away from the table of surfers.

The bleached blond waitress smiled and it turned her otherwise vacant features pleasant. “What can I get you?”

“Just a Corona. Tanner?”

“Iced tea. Thanks.”

The waitress bounced away with a nod.

Avalon fiddled with a cocktail napkin. “Tea?”

“I’m on my training regimen. Strictly limited alcohol.”

The party behind them broke up, and Jack and James called a farewell to both of them. Avalon twisted in the booth to say good-bye, but Tanner only raised a hand over his head in an abrupt farewell. When the rest of the noisy group tumbled out the door, he deflated a few inches into the leather bench.

He blew out a noisy breath. “Sorry.”

“I’m assuming you’ve got some problem with that dude?”

His mouth tweaked in something that approached a smile. The scar over his mouth leached white. “You could say that.”

“But that’s all you’ll say, I’m guessing.” She ought to have moved around the horseshoe-shaped bench to the other side of the table. There was no reason for her to be within touching distance of him. But she stayed.

He smelled like salt and man. Something that made her want to nuzzle.

When the waitress arrived with drinks, he smiled at her. Avalon spotted tension at his temples. The tiny fluting around his eyes that wasn’t quite called wrinkles. When the blonde walked away, he kept looking in her direction, but Avalon didn’t get the idea he was ogling her. More like avoiding looking directly at Avalon.

She wrapped her hands around the damp bottle. “You don’t have to say anything, of course. You owe me no explanations. But I’m here to listen.”

That got him to look at her. It went all the way down inside her, as if he were looking for a specific answer. “Tell me one thing, Avalon.”

She swallowed past a mouth that felt as dry as if she’d swallowed a handful of sand. “Sure.”

“Are you oh so eager and ready to listen because you want to . . . or because that’s what you’ve always done with my family? Your role, let’s say.”

She flinched the tiniest bit, the tendons inside her elbows jumping. No matter how closely she searched his face, she couldn’t see any meanness in it. A certain level of curiosity, she supposed. Maybe a bright flash of hope in the anticipating part of his lips.

There had only been a couple times in her life when she’d felt like she stood at such an easily delineated crossroad. One had been when she’d held two college acceptance letters and decided intentionally to stay near the Wrights so they didn’t forget about her. The other had been when she’d looked at her college boyfriend and intentionally accepted the fact that he would always be too nervous to try surfing, even for her. At that moment, she’d accepted that he wasn’t Tanner and never would be.

Her heart thrummed into overdrive. “Because I want to.”

His lips lifted into a genuine smile. “Yeah? That’s all right.”

She ducked his gaze, looking at her beer, and she wasn’t the gaze-ducking type. Easier to keep her fluttering girly bits in line if she wasn’t looking at him. But crap, it wasn’t even as easy as all that. “You should know something.”

“That doesn’t sound promising.”

She couldn’t help a little laugh at that. “Totally depends on your definition.”

“My definition includes not being able to take you out for dinner tonight.”

“You’re kind of slick, aren’t you?” She didn’t want to admit what that line had done to her. Made her slippery and needy. “You know, I remember when you were nineteen and home after your first summer on the circuit. Didn’t you have a crush on Amanda Hanterny? She shot you down.”

“Ouch.” He pinched his features into mock chagrin. “She said she wanted a boyfriend who’d be able to take her to prom. Thanks for bringing that one up.”

“Yeah, your ego doesn’t seem like it needs any stroking. Anyway. Issue. Us.”

“There’s an us already?” He took a lock of her hair between his thumb and forefinger. Though he wasn’t touching any other part of her, a shiver slid over her collarbone. “I think I should be careful around you.”

“Hush already.” She was really going to have to spit this out before Mr. Slick got going too hard. “I’ve been hired by WavePro to do a spread on you. I thought you should hear it from me first.”

He tugged lightly on the chunk of her hair. A tingle spread over her scalp and she had to swallow hard. Her legs pressed together against the sudden ache between her thighs, until her knees ground bone on bone.

“A photo shoot shouldn’t be that big a deal. We’ll take some pictures, and then you’ll let me take you to dinner. As payment, I’ll get to pick the restaurant.”

Oh, this was not going to go over well. Tanner had never really been known to revel in the spotlight. “No, you don’t understand. They want full access. I’m to be with you pretty much twenty-four-seven until the Pro.”

“No way,” he said automatically. He dropped the lock of her hair as quickly as if it had turned into a jellyfish stinger, and slipped so far away from her that he was practically on the other side of the booth.

“I wanted to be the one to tell you. I didn’t want you to think I’d gone behind your back or anything. They came to me.”

“You know what everyone’s going to say about why, right?”

Bile burned through her chest. Everyone was going to say that—the boys’ club of the surf world in action. But it didn’t matter. She’d make sure it didn’t, not when they saw the photos that resulted.

“I don’t care.” She pulled her Canon out of her bag like a medieval warrior pulling out a sword. Rather than beheading dragons, she laid it carefully on the highly polished table. Tanner was no Arthur anyhow. “If I wasn’t friends with the family, everyone would say I got the gig because I was sleeping with you.”