Lexie Keller sat at the vanity, applying her makeup in quick swooshes of the brush to properly contour her face. Some women were blessed with high cheekbones and a porcelain complexion, but Lexie took classes and spent enormous amounts of money to achieve those things on the daily.
Or at least the appearance of them.
As her fortieth birthday approached, she couldn’t help feeling a little melancholy. She pushed the feelings away and swiped on a generous amount of the sparkly, razzle-dazzle lip gloss Sasha had given her for Christmas a few months ago.
Sasha Redding had come into Lexie’s life quite unexpectedly, and through Jasper Rosequist of all people.
Still, her part-time job at The Straw now provided Lexie with the one bright ray of hope in her life—and how pathetic was that? And she thought she’d been boring as a penny pusher, a number lover, and a mutual fund heiress.
But the moment she stepped into The Straw, she felt lighter than she ever had. “Hey, girl,” she said to Sasha, who was bent over a notebook at the back counter.
“Lex, how are you?”
“Doing great.” Lexie had become an expert fibber over the years. Why did you come to the island? Work. Are you seeing anyone, dear? Yeah, Mom, I see men all the time.
No one had to know that yes, Lexie worked here on the island, but she could work from anywhere. And her mom didn’t need to know that the men she saw were fellow Nine-0 Club members who had zero romantic interest in her. And she wasn’t interested in any of them.
“Brewing up something new?” she asked Sasha. The owner of the drink stand, Sasha had an incredible palette and an adventurous imagination when it came to fruits and flavorings.
“Maybe,” she said, pressing the eraser end of her pencil against her temple. “I can’t quite make it come together. But I think something for spring would be nice. Get our customers back in here after this dreary winter.”
The rainy season had been bad this year, and Lexie immediately thought about the people who’d been stranded up in the mountains after the landslides just after the new year. Thankfully, everyone had made it home safely, and Lexie had just read about one couple who’d met on the excursion, fell in love while they were stuck in a remote shack, and were now engaged.
So it proved that people could meet under the most extraordinary of circumstances, and Lexie hadn’t felt so foolish for thinking her one and only was going to come through the line at The Straw one day.
She tied an apron around her waist and faced the front of the building where the order window was. No one waited for a drink, and she asked, “How long has it been dead?”
“Only about ten minutes.” Sasha seemed really distracted. “You’ll be okay if I run out for a few minutes? I need to go pick up the Sunrise Special cards and take them over to Sweet Breeze.”
Lexie opened her mouth to offer to take them later that evening, when she’d be in the owner’s penthouse for her Nine-0 meeting. But the group was exclusive, and secret, and Lexie snapped her lips closed again.
“I’ll be fine,” she said instead and scraped her thick, dark hair into a ponytail on the very tippy top of her head. Sasha left without saying anything, her focus still on the notebook as she made her way up to the sidewalk to her car.
A couple appeared then, and Lexie put on her business face, one that wore a smile and did mental math and enjoyed being around other human beings.
For a while there, when she’d first come to the island, Lexie was sure she could be happy living in her spacious rambler, anonymously, on the south side of the island. But she hadn’t been.
“Lemon Whip,” she repeated. “And Berry Blast. That’s eleven ninety-two.” The couple paid, and she blended, and a line formed. Lexie kept her focus on what was immediately in front of her, but that didn’t mean the dark-haired man loitering along the beachwalk, by the biggest palm, didn’t catch her attention.
Of course he did, as it wasn’t the first time Lexie had seen him in that exact position, leaning against the tree with one shoulder, both hands in the pockets of his shorts, one foot crossed over the other at the ankle.
Jason Burnes.
If he thought for one moment she didn’t see him when he spied on her, he was wrong. Her mouth filled with a sour taste that had nothing to do with the limes she’d just zested.
Jason had come to the island over a year ago, when Tyler Rigby—a fellow billionaire in Hawaii—had made up a fake engagement. Tyler and everyone else on the island knew Jason as a reporter for a poker magazine.
But Lexie knew him as a bartender in New York City, where she’d lived before making her big move across the ocean and leaving her high-rise life behind—and the dangerous, abusive ex-fiancé that had ruined her so completely she hadn’t been able to stay in a city of millions with him still there.
When Lexie finished with the customers, she stood very still in the window, shooting her best laser gaze toward where Jason leaned against the tree. Almost a challenge. Like, Well? What are you doing here again?
He ducked behind the trunk, and a measure of satisfaction pulled through her. She’d never confronted him so fully before, and though thirty yards separated them, she felt a bit breathless and weak.
Why was he watching her? And why couldn’t she just let it go, like she had all the other times?
Sasha returned, asking, “How’d it go?” and Lexie snatched up the washcloth and started wiping the counter. She knew one of Sasha’s pet peeves was a sticky, drippy service station.
“Great.” She wiped in circles, her eyes drifting back to that palm tree as worry gnawed at her insides.
* * *
That evening, Lexie straightened her blouse and patted her hair as Sterling, the valet at Sweet Breeze, got behind the wheel of her car. She loved coming to the Nine-0 meetings, and she’d held them at her house a time or two. They’d gotten a couple of new additions over the past six months, and Lexie had enjoyed making friends with the new women on the island.
But she wasn’t as business minded as most in the club, though none of them knew it. Sure, she knew what went on at Keller Investments, the huge financial resources company where she owned fifty-one-percent of the shares. But her oldest brother, Luke, was the one who really ran things from their thirty-five-story building in New York, and her youngest brother, Bruce, was the CFO.
So her CEO was really in title only. Still, she had the right number of zeroes in her bank account, and no one really seemed to care what she did if she had that.
The lobby at Sweet Breeze seemed unusually quiet, though she supposed for a Wednesday at almost nine p.m., there wouldn’t be much going on at the luxury resort.
She stepped past the public elevators and down a hall that led to Fisher’s private one and pushed the button. The light flashed red, and she keyed in the code.
“Four-seven-six-two,” a man said, and Lexie practically leapt away from him. She hadn’t heard him coming, and her heartbeat rippled like a flag in a stiff breeze as she took in his tall frame, wide shoulders, dark hair, and the soapy, spicy scent of his cologne.
Jason Burnes.
“Are you following me?” she demanded, wishing the car wasn’t already up on the blasted twenty-eighth floor. She really had to get away from this man.
“Not at all.”
She cocked her hip, wishing his voice didn’t reach right down into her stomach and make it vibrate in a good way. “Right. I saw you at the beach today.” And every other day I work, she thought but kept to herself.
“It’s a public beach.” His dark eyes that had once consumed her so completely while she sipped seltzer water flashed, and she recognized the danger in them. She didn’t trust journalists, especially ones who came to the trade after five other attempts at a career in wildly different fields. So her money could buy her some information, something she didn’t go around flaunting but which she also didn’t ignore.
“What do you want?”
Surprise lifted his eyebrows, and a softness she hadn’t expected entered his eyes. “How’s Luke?”
“Better now that you’re gone.” The elevator chimed and the doors started to slide open. She stepped inside, intending to leave without another word. The likes of Jason Burnes didn’t deserve a good-bye or a nice to see you. Because she wasn’t glad to see him.
And he’d gotten bolder, approaching her in this tiny hallway. Or maybe it only felt tiny because he was so big, so broad, and still so beautiful.
She shook her head as she punched at the only button in the elevator, the one that would take her to Fisher’s penthouse.
“I didn’t leak that story,” he said. “I quit instead of talking to the reporters.”
Their eyes locked, and Lexie wanted to believe him so, so badly. Her heart thundered like water roaring over cliffs.
“Lex.” The agony in his voice wasn’t hard to hear, but Lexie only lifted her chin, determined not to show him that she still had feelings for him.
The car doors slid shut, removing the handsome face of the only man Lexie Keller had ever truly loved from her sight. The elevator moved, and Lexie slumped against the back wall.
It was ridiculous how easily he could remove her every defense. How her hopes skyrocketed just from the nearness of him. That her feelings, though seven years old, were still there, just dormant.
The elevator beeped again, opening to reveal Fisher’s penthouse. Lexie smoothed her hair again and faced her future: making drinks to stay social during the day and attending secret meetings with her rich friends at night.
There was absolutely no room for Jason. Not again.
* * *
“You wanna come?” Gabi, one of the newer members of the Nine-0 Club, pulled her shirtsleeves down and looked at Lexie. “You can just have coffee.”
Lexie smiled and nodded as she shouldered her purse. Gabriella Rossi was an old friend whose family had made their fortune in cruise ships. So she knew Lexie didn’t drink much more than champagne, and even then she usually just held the glass so people wouldn’t pester her about drinking more.
Her father had been an alcoholic, and a mean one. So while Lexie loved her parents, she didn’t love what alcohol had done to her childhood.
“Are you okay?” Gabi put her hand on Lexie’s elbow. “You’ve been distracted all night.”
“It’s….” Lexie met Gabi’s lighter brown eyes, hers more the color of caramel while Lexie’s were like black coffee. When Gabi had first come to Hawaii, Lexie had panicked. She didn’t want anyone on the island who’d known her in her previous life. But everything had been fine, and Lexie had worried needlessly.
Maybe Jason would be like that.
No. She shook her head. “Another old friend has come to the island.”
Gabi linked her hand through Lexie’s arm. “Intriguing. Male or female?”
“Male.”
Gabi nodded to Ira, who set his glass on the credenza and joined them as they walked out. She and Ira had started seeing each other about six weeks ago, and the atmosphere felt a bit awkward as the three of them loaded onto the elevator.
“Do I know him?” Gabi asked, always the lover of games, especially riddles and puzzles.
“I don’t believe you do.” Lexie had kept her relationship with Jason under wraps as much as possible. As her younger brother’s best friend and a man way below her father’s standards, Jason had agreed to keep their dates, hand-holding, and kissing behind closed doors.
She went to his place, or the bar, or they met somewhere at odd hours. He never came to her place, or picked her up, or pressed her against her front door and kissed her goodnight.
“You don’t sound happy about him being here.” Gabi stepped out of the elevator with Lexie, leaving Ira to follow along like a puppy.
“I’m not.”
“Was he more than a friend?”
Yes. “No.”
“Well, that doesn’t give me much to go on. I assume you haven’t mentioned him to me.”
“No.” They reached the front doors and Lexie paused, the scent of Jason’s cologne hanging in the air. It took all of her self-control not to start swiveling her head back and forth to find him. “I’m not feeling up to coffee. I think I’m coming down with something. You two go on.”
Plus, she didn’t need to be the third wheel with Gabi and Ira when their relationship was so new. Perhaps she could call Sasha and see if they could grab a late night snack together.
But she and Jasper were together now, and Lexie stood in the brightly lit foyer, wishing she had someone to go home to as well. Drawing in a deep breath, she stepped out to the valet, expecting to see Sterling but coming face-to-face with Jason instead.
“What are you doing here?” she blurted even as she scanned him from head to toe and found him wearing the service clothes of someone who worked at Sweet Breeze.
“I work here,” he said needlessly, his eyes devouring her too. She wished she didn’t like it so much, crave his attention so strongly, or know exactly where to find him next time she wanted to see him.
He grinned at her as if he could hear all of her thoughts inside her mind. “Do you need your car?”
