“You can have the window.” Murph steps past our row to let me in first.
I duck under the overhead storage, drop my pack, and shimmy my way past the armrests. “You’ll have to sit in the middle,” I say needlessly. If he’ll let me, of course I’m going to take the window. Then I only have to press my body up against his instead of his and a stranger’s.
“It’s fine.” Murph eases into his seat with the grace of a ballerina, and I fumble around for a good several minutes, getting out my headphones, making sure I have lip stuff and my water nearby, getting my seatbelt buckled, and everything else I need for the next few hours.
Every cell in my body alights where it touches his, and I wonder if he’s as acutely aware of how glued together we are.
We finally take off, and I lean my head back against the rest. A sigh moves through my body, and my cells finally stop vibrating. So it’s taken five hours for the tension and attraction to seep out of me. It’s fine.
It’s Murph.
He lifts the armrest between us and murmurs, “Okay?”
“Mm, yeah,” I whisper. I have my earbuds in, and music playing, and he’s right. I’m going to take a much-needed nap on the flight to Belize.
I lean into his shoulder, and he lifts his arm around me. I’ve cuddled with him plenty of times—on our first trip together, when we were strangers, we shared a bed in a honeymoon suite.
He’s my best friend. He knows me; I know him.
“Mm,” I say again. “You smell great.”
He does. Like leather and spiced apple cider hooked up and had a bottle of deliciously-scented cologne. I take another big breath of it and settle further, a keen sense of finally being relaxed overcoming me. I drift in and out, and at one point, Murph asks me something I don’t answer.
I’m pretty sure he presses his lips to my temple and whispers something my ears hold onto and don’t let into my brain to make sense of. It doesn’t matter. It’s Murph, and he’ll tell me later.
Chapter Three
Logan
I have no clue what I’m doing. Holding Sloane Sanders in my arms is lethal—at least for me. I can’t be doing this. I have to get away from her.
Where? I glance over to the woman on my other side. She’s buttoned and polished to perfection, the way Sloane usually is when she sells houses. I took her professional headshot with my cellphone three years ago on the island of Oahu, and I’m surprised she hasn’t updated it yet.
Everything about Sloane surprises me. The fact that she’s so soft. So feminine. So funny. So put together.
I write women like her into my romance novels, and they always get their happily-ever-after. Even if their lives are messy on the inside, I craft the perfect man for them, and he provides the one thing they’ve been missing in their life.
I feel like Sloane is the one thing missing in my life, and I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and tell myself, You will tell her this year. You will tell her how you really feel about her.
I’ve had feelings—real feelings—for her for the last three trips. Two solid years. She hasn’t been out on a single date since she was left to walk down the aisle and announce to her family and her was-gonna-be groom’s family that he wasn’t there.
He’d never showed up at the venue. He called her ten minutes after she was supposed to walk down the aisle to let her know he “just couldn’t.”
I can. I can be the man Sloane needs and wants, if only I could open my mouth and tell her. “Ask her,” I murmur.
We live in two different states, but I talk to her every single day. Sometimes I don’t hear her voice, but we talk often enough that I can imagine it easily. She wasn’t fully awake when she told me I smell great. I know she wasn’t. Sloane sometimes says things she isn’t fully aware of when she’s falling asleep and first waking up.
I know this from our first trip together, where she blubbered at the counter next to me, something about her fiancé not showing up for the wedding.
Then she did something absolutely incredible. She squared her shoulders, tugged her backpack straps tighter, and showed the woman her second ticket. “Can I cash it out? Give it to someone?”
The woman gave her a kind, sympathetic smile. “Everyone here has a ticket to somewhere, sweetheart.”
I took a step closer. I didn’t. Well, I did, but my flight had been canceled. The ticketing agent I’d been working with had gone to get her manager.
Sloane’s agent looked at me, and I’d given her the best smile I could muster. “I don’t have a ticket,” I said.
Sloane looked at me then, her eyes sliding all the way to the floor and back to my face. She’d cocked her head and that gorgeous hip of hers. “You want to take a trip to Mexico with a stranger?”
I don’t remember a lot of details after that. I probably shrugged. And hummed. My sister says I hum instead of clearing my throat. “It’s halfway between,” Hattie tells me. “Sort of a throat-clear-scoff-hum.” She’d shaken her head next. “It’s annoying is what it is.”
I still do it. I don’t even know I’m doing it sometimes. It just happens. No matter what, after answering about twenty-seven questions, showing my driver’s license and giving her my phone number and address, Sloane had verified I didn’t have any warrants out for my arrest and I probably wouldn’t murder her on the Riveria Maya.
We’d taken her honeymoon trip together, and we’ve been taking a tropical retreat every January since. It’s the one shining part of my life I would rearrange anything and everything to do, especially now that I’ve been fantasizing about telling Sloane how I really feel.
“Not a fantasy,” I mutter to myself. “You’re going to tell her.”
She smells like sugar and mint and cola, and I want to taste all of that on my tongue so badly, my fingers curl into a fist. I glare at the screen playing some lame action movie I’ve put on to distract myself from the delicious female next to me. I want her in my life more than she is. I want her in my house, in my bed.
So you’ll tell her, I promise myself for probably the fiftieth time since I boarded a plane in Minneapolis. Tonight, even.
We’ll be arriving in Belize about eight o’clock, and I’m exhausted already. So tomorrow. I’ll tell her tomorrow.
I have a lot of things to tell her, including what I do for a living. When people ask me, I tell them I run my own business from home. Because I do. I write romance novels and publish them. Some myself, and some for one of the biggest publishers in the world.
I should know how to craft my own HEA, but I’m still working out the details. For now, I’m going to copy Sloane and take a nap. It might be the only thing that saves me from shaking her awake and telling her I’ve been in love with her for over two years.
Instead, I close my eyes, ignore the blasting of guns in my headphones from the stupid movie, and lean over to kiss her forehead. “I really like you, Sloany,” I whisper, and then I let myself relax completely.
Hours, a shuttle ride, and a trek to a golf cart, then a golf cart ride later, I stand at the check-in desk at Oriandon, the luxury resort where I’ve booked Sloane and I two rooms. “Logan Murphy,” I tell the woman across from me.