trickling over her feet.
One of those cuddling couples walked toward her, and she looked out toward a ship in the distance to let them have their privacy. Their bodies were completely in sync, curving naturally against each other with every step. It didn’t take much to read them. Babette could define it with one word—love.
“I think I’d like that too,” the woman said as they neared Babette. The man stopped walking, leaned toward her and kissed her, and Babette wondered what it was that the woman thought she’d like. Whatever it was, it certainly made him happy. The kiss was still going.
Babette slowed her pace and tried to hide the fact that she very much wanted to know what they were talking about. But they’d deepened the kiss even further, their bodies so close now that there wasn’t any light between them, and she simply couldn’t walk that slowly without drawing attention to the fact that she was eavesdropping. Apparently Rose’s spy fetish was contagious.
Sighing, she ventured a little closer to the waves, which slapped her feet almost nonstop as she walked. Her new path made it easy for her to spot seashells washing along the shore. One glistened in the moonlight, and she bent down and picked it up, then rubbed the excess sand away with her thumb before slipping it in her pocket. Several more shells were scattered around it, but those weren’t to her liking, so she kept walking.
After bypassing additional clusters of seashells, she saw another one that stood out, capturing the moon’s light and reflecting it, and she made her way toward that one and added it to the other one in her pocket. By the time she made it to the cove, well beyond the end of all the resorts, she had a pocket full of shells, and she’d walked way farther than she’d intended.
Besides the moonlight, there was no illumination on this section of the beach, but Babette liked that about the cove. No, she hadn’t intentionally walked here, but she wasn’t naïve enough to think that perhaps she hadn’t walked directly here subconsciously. She and Jeff had made love here several times, and each time had been incredible. She gazed at the water glistening in the darkened cove and could almost feel the warmth of his body entering hers.
Had he brought Kitty here too? She thought of Kitty’s shiny blond hair, and the way every single hair seemed to fall into place, her beyond-expensive clothes and her I-look-good-and-I-know-it attitude.
No, he hadn’t brought Kitty here. Kitty wasn’t the sex-on-the-sand type. She wouldn’t have liked the risk, wouldn’t have liked the sand, wouldn’t have liked the wildness of exploring each other thoroughly beneath the stars. And Kitty wouldn’t have even considered getting naked and hot and writhing with Jeff in this cove the way Babette did. She remembered the way the warm water felt moving against their naked bodies, and the way she’d totally lost herself when he kissed her in the moonlight.
Overcome with the intensity of that particular memory, she didn’t realize she was no longer alone. Not until the man who was merely a few feet away cleared his throat.
“It’s me. Don’t be afraid,” he commanded.
Like hell. Babette could run pretty fast, but she had no doubt the tall, muscled creature beside her could run faster. With no other beachcombers in sight, she had no choice but to try to slow him down if she wanted a halfway decent chance of making it back to the resort area of the beach first. With full survival instincts in motion, she brought her leg up and to the side, delivering a sharp, hard heel to the crotch. She was rewarded with a thick, guttural grunt, and the bastard stumbled backward. Then she sucked in a big breath, started to run and prepared to yell . . .
Except the sound of her name, and the familiar voice emitting the sound of her name, stopped her cold.
“Damn it, Babette!”
She whirled around to see Jeff, shaking his head and glaring at her.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he growled.
“What am I doing? What do you think you’re doing? Coming out here in the dark and sneaking up on me!” She backed away, lost her footing, and fell butt-first into the cove, then yelped when her seashells cut into her side.
The ass had the nerve to laugh, and she glared. Standing, she slapped at her wet, sandy behind, then fished out the shells that had broken and dropped