The unwelcome notion hovered like a dark cloud over her thoughts. What if their encounter today wasn’t unexpected? She was at a place that promised to provide exactly that kind of experience, after all.

If so, they were doing an A-plus job so far.

But how would anyone have known ahead of time that she was going to get carsick on the drive and go for a walk by the lake the moment she arrived? Luke had definitely been on the beach before her. And the whole thing with the seagull—that couldn’t have been planned … could it?

“Can you train a seagull?”

Andie and Kat gaped at her.

“Never mind.” Julia picked up her glass and turned, resting her back against the bar as she sucked down half her espresso martini, irritated with herself for fixating on some guy who probably wasn’t even who he said he was. The depressing thought had barely wormed its way into her thoughts when she glanced up.

And up.

Straight into the pair of gray eyes she’d been fixating on.

CHAPTER 9

JULIA

The great thing about cocktail hour was that there were cocktails.

Delicious, distracting cocktails.

Slightly past tipsy but still a long way from drunk, Julia nursed what was left of her second espresso martini in one hand while she tried to smooth the curling edge of her name tag down with the other. All while dutifully ignoring the tall guy in the corner.

Thanks to his height, Luke had been impossible to miss since the second he’d entered the room. Their eyes had locked, and Julia had one of those moments she always laughed at when reading it in a book or watching it on a screen. The kind where a character is so caught up in her feelings that she forgets how to breathe.

She didn’t forget how to breathe, exactly. She knew how, she just forgot to do it. It was as if every bit of her brain was so focused on him, it didn’t have the energy or attention span left to maintain the most basic of bodily functions, even though they weren’t supposed to require thought in the first place.

Julia had been sure he’d walk over to her. She’d even begun to imagine it happening in slow motion, picturing his long legs devouring the space between them.

Instead, his long legs had carried him in the opposite direction as far and as fast as possible. Ouch.