She dropped the towel on the sand and stomped on it. “I will.” Then she slunk away, leaving him with a hard-on and a sinking feeling.

“God, Eli. You’re so uncool,” Therese exclaimed, her face flaming with embarrassment. The ground he’d made up with her was slipping away.

“You look really nice,” he said weakly.

Therese turned up her nose and stalked toward the water, following Aria. One of the teenage boys sniggered. Eli glared at him. It didn’t seem to have any effect.

“Bro, you are so dead,” the kid told him.

Eli closed his eyes and groaned. “I know.”

CHAPTER 13

Microscopic! She scoffed. As if. Her bikini was perfectly appropriate. Who cared what he thought, anyway? If not for him, she and Teri could have looked good and flirted with the beach-goers. If he hadn’t come along, they could be having a great time. What the hell had he meant by throwing a towel over her? How rude. And how awful. Tears pricked her eyes. She blinked them back. She’d worked too hard at being comfortable with herself to let one stupid man ruin it.

That he looked absolutely magnificent wasn’t fair. She hadn’t noticed him when they’d started making their way to the water, but when she did, Oh boy. Never before had a naked chest affected her so much. He must have recently exited the water, because droplets were glistening on his strong shoulders and corded biceps. Rivulets ran down his broad chest and trickled into the deep groove in the middle of his abdomen. The damp hair on his torso was springy, and she wanted to run her fingers through it.

He was physically perfect. And it irked her.

Aria had never been perfect. A chubby teenager, she’d only slimmed down once she discovered the gym at university and began giving her cakes away rather than eating them all herself. She’d never be thin, though. Her shoulders were square and her hips were wide, the skin laced with fine silver stretch marks which had persisted through every quack remedy she’d tried to fade them away. Apparently, she had a genetic predisposition for them. Just her luck. Still, they weren’t visible from a distance, so she’d decided not to worry.

After seeing the physical perfection of Eli Lockwood, however, she wished, just a little bit, that her blemishes would disappear.

“Eli is so lame,” Teri said, catching up to her. “He thinks it’s all right for him to be shirtless but gets angry at us for wearing bikinis? What a jerk.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Aria replied. “He’s just old-fashioned.”

That thought brought on a vision of Eli emerging from a lake, Mr. Darcy style. Bad, Ri.

Teri scowled. “I think we look hot.”