It's in His Kiss by Jill Shalvis Page B

too, and again he told himself to keep going and not look back.
    And again, he didn’t budge. She looked like a quiet, calm, sexy-as-hell oasis, and she was drawing him in without even trying. “Thought Lucky Harbor was just a pit stop,” he said over the sound of the surf hitting the sand. “But you’re still here.”
    Becca tilted her head back and leveled him with those melting dark eyes. “Appears that way.”
    “In your PJs,” he noted.
    She looked down at herself. “It’s my Man-Repellent. Guaranteed to deflect a guy’s interest with a single glance.”
    The PJs were baggy, but there was a breeze plastering the material to her body, which was a complete show-stopper. He laughed softly, and she narrowed her eyes. “What?” she asked.
    “Let’s just say they’re not as bad as you think.”
    She blinked, then lowered her gaze, taking the time to carefully brush some sand from her feet.
    It occurred to him that he was making her nervous by looming over her, so he shifted back a foot or so and crouched low to make himself nonthreatening. He added a smile.
    She visibly relaxed. “You probably shouldn’t flash that smile at me too often,” she said.
    “Why?”
    “It’s . . . attractive,” she admitted. “You’re attractive. Which you damn well know.”
    “But I’m wearing my woman-repellent gear,” he said, and she laughed. It was a really great laugh.
    He’d felt the pull of their chemistry from the very beginning, and had wondered if she did as well. No need to wonder now; it was all over her, however reluctantly she felt it. He needed to walk away now, before this got any more out of hand.
    Instead, he spoke. “Is there a reason you want me to be repelled?” he asked.
    “You mean am I crazy, or in a relationship?”
    “Yeah,” he said. “Either of those.”
    “Not in a relationship.” She smiled a little thinly. “Jury’s still out on the crazy thing, though. You?”
    He gave a slow shake of his head. “Negative on both.”
    She dropped the eye contact first, instead taking in his body in a way that revved his engines. “Do you always run that hard?” she asked, her voice barely carrying over the sound of the surf hitting the sand.
    He shrugged.
    “I see you sometimes in the mornings,” she said. “And you do. You always run that hard.”
    He smiled. “Peeper to the bone.”
    “Can’t seem to help myself,” she admitted.
    He dropped to the sand beside her and didn’t miss the fact that she stiffened up at his quick motion. To give her a minute, he stretched out his tired legs. “I worked at sea for seven years. I missed running. I promised myself when I got off the rig, I’d get back to it.”
    She took her gaze off his body to look into his eyes. “What was the job?”
    “I worked for a consulting firm monitoring the deep drilling rigs. We’d go out for months at a time, no land in sight.”
    “We?”
    “I had a crew,” he said.
    “You were out at sea with a bunch of guys for months at a time?”
    “There were a few women too,” he said. Three, to be exact, one of whom had neatly sliced Cole’s heart in two.
    “What was your job out there?” Becca asked.
    “OIM. Offshore installation manager.” He shrugged again. “Basically just a fancy title for babysitting the operation.”
    “All of it?”
    “I handled the business side of things,” he said, “the shifts, the tasks, everything.”
    “
Sam knows everything
,” she said softly. “That’s what people keep telling me.”
    He didn’t know everything. He didn’t know, for example, why he was so drawn to her. Or what made her so wary.
    “Must have been a tough job,” she said.
    “The job was hard as hell,” he agreed. He had few good memories of those years, working his way up from grunt worker to manager. After they’d lost Gil, he and Tanner had come back to Lucky Harbor with Cole, who’d wanted to be here to take care of his mom and three sisters. Tanner had needed recovery time. And it’d