“Get out of here. Go detox. Keep loving him. Be patient. You once needed time. Now he does.”
She shoved Cal, made him grab hold of the fence so not to topple off it. “And you’re the man who says he knows me.”
He laughed. “He’s so scare
d this isn’t what you want, if you push him too hard he’ll shut down.”
Jesus, these Sherwood men. Cal wanted her to play nice, and Zeke had been out there on his own waiting for her for too long. After all of this he’d never shut down on her.
And if he did, she’d know once and for all exactly how this mystery was going to play out and where they stood on forever.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Azure all the way to the horizon where the fishing boats were tiny specks. Zeke waded out of the sea, dropped into a sun lounger and put his sunglasses on.
All the scrapes and nicks on him were just about faded to nothing. He wasn’t scaring the resort staff who came to deliver room service to his bungalow with his smashed face anymore. They’d thought he was a gangster when he arrived, now he was just the guy who drank too much milky sweet coffee, had a thing for fresh pastries and elaborate desserts and balanced it all out with hours of gym, yoga, beach runs and swims.
And sleep.
He slept like a man who’d had way too little sleep and what there was of it was fucking uncomfortable. Prescient, he’d basically chosen this resort for its beauty, remoteness and brand of bed before he’d even known about all the hard ground he’d have to sleep on. Being reunited with a Grand Master made everything better.
Almost everything.
Despite the tropical heat, there was nothing he could do about the frost that encased his heart.
And apparently his sight was still glitching.
Because there was an unexpected item in the bagging area.
It was two weeks since the DMT was fully out of his system, two days before he was due to start a ten-day jungle trek, but he was still seeing things that weren’t real. Had to be some latent PTSD effect because there was absolutely no way Aurora Rae Archer wearing a floaty bit of nothing over some string that was meant to be swimwear was walking up the beach towards him.
He nearly fell out of his lounger trying to get a better look at this imposter who couldn’t be Rory, because Rory was detoxing at the Sedona spa in Malibu, according to Tres, so what he was looking at, extraordinary grace, glossy black hair, insanely beautiful body, was a mirage.
A mirage who smiled like Rory and make him gasp.
“Holy fuck.”
Who took off her big dark glasses and was unmistakably his Aurora Rae.
That would explain how his bones had been singing with pleasure so deep it was a vibration in his body from the moment he saw her. Made him feel weightless as he walked down to the shoreline to meet her, even as he knew this exchange was going to be fraught, and steeled himself.
“Cal,” he said in greeting. “Cal told you where I was. Dirty, low-down, rotten bastard.”
“Cal wouldn’t tell me. I had to pull out the big guns.”
He pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head. “Mom. She might as well have stuck me with a knitting needle.”
Rory shook her head at that. “You look much better.”
“You look incredible.” Her skin had a glow to it; the darkness under her eyes was gone. “But I like you when you’re all sweaty and disheveled, straw in your hair and grime under your broken fingernails.” He wanted to reach for her, dug his toes in the wet sand to curb the impulse. He’d crossed the world to stop himself from confusing things between them further; he wasn’t allowed to crash that intention now because he craved the feel of her body against his.
“What are you doing here, Aurora Rae?”
“You’ve had enough space.”
He waved a hand to indicate what she wasn’t wearing. “Are you hiding a shiv in that?” She might as well have already knifed him with that declaration, certainly pricked his tweak of arousal.
“Now why would I do that?”