“Señor is cheap, huh?” he asked with a sly grin at Damien.

Mandy laughed and waved as they walked on past.

“You didn’t even defend me,” Damien said in mock protest. “I am not cheap.”

“Well, I don’t think you are, but I’m really not entirely sure, having never seen you shopping. But you’re not going to distract me from my original question.” Her fingers pressed into his flesh. “Are you happy?”

Damien stopped walking and looked down at her, at the warm expression in her mocha brown eyes. She had a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose that he wanted to kiss. “Why does it matter to you, Mandy?”

“Because I like you,” she said simply, and it stirred to life embers he had thought were long burned out.

He started walking again, eager to move past the vendors, to where the sun and the ocean met with nothing but beach between them. He ached inside and out, with the physical need to bury himself inside Mandy, to seek pleasure and oblivion in that tender sensual give and take of sex with someone he respected, admired, was a bit in awe of.

“I’m content,” he told her, figuring that was close enough to the truth. “Or at least I was until I met you.”

“What did I do?” she whispered.

“You made me see that I’m lonely…” Damien stopped, took Mandy’s hand in his, turned her to him. They were only a few feet past the noise and laughter of the vendors, but he didn’t care. “I can’t—don’t want—a relationship. But Mandy, I find you very attractive, and I would really like to kiss you right now.”

Of course, he wanted to have sex with her under the nearest tiki hut, but he figured he should ease her into the idea.

Start with a kiss, then move to wild sex on the beach.

Mandy swallowed a bucketful of saliva. Whoa, boy. This was unexpected.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

They had spent the evening talking, laughing, relaxing, and in Damien she saw some of the same loneliness, the same fears that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in her.

She thought, perhaps, Damien Sharpton wasn’t so much a cruel, heartless man as he was a wounded man, scarred inside where no one could see it. Except her.

And she wanted to hold him, be held in return, in a mutual clasp of comfort.

But he was her boss, and she was keeping a big secret from him, and this was a sandy beach far away from home where reality was skewed and where mistakes could be made.

“Damien, I find you very attractive as well. Both physically and as a person. So I’m very much afraid that a kiss would lead to something else, and would that really be such a good…”