endearing things about you.”
“Here I thought it was my good looks and my banging body.”
“Banging body?” I laughed as I rolled my head back on his arm to look into his eyes. “You just gave away your age, buddy.”
He opened his mouth to reply, but we’d reached the party. The smell of the fire and the roasting meat was even stronger there, and I also caught a whiff of the sweet-smelling, tropical flowers decorating the tables.
The event looked very much like what I imagined a luau did, with tables laden with food, local music being played by a live band, and fires everywhere. People danced to the sultry sounds of the guitars, and a singer was swaying with her eyes closed on the makeshift stage.
Jaxon grinned when he saw Big Mac ambling up with his arms open and a flowery necklace in each meaty hand. “Welcome, my friends. I’m so happy to see a real couple decided to join us. I can’t stand all these touristy, fake, ‘I love you’ couples.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, suddenly super aware of the real status of my relationship with Jaxon. Even though it was starting to feel real, it wasn’t. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
Big Mac shrugged a dark shoulder, the skin revealed since the shirt he was wearing had no sleeves. It was like a vest that had started out as a T-shirt, and the print of the front was faded. He draped the flowers around each of our necks while he replied.
“You know what I’m talking about. Those couples who think they need to prove to everyone just how in love they are by constantly kissing and being on each other’s laps.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but Jaxon beat me to it. “Thank you for recognizing the depth of our relationship.”
He glanced down at me with another simperingly sweet look on his face, and I rolled my eyes at him. “Sure. Yeah. That’s what it’s all about.”
One corner of his mouth twitched up at my response, and he buried his face in my hair to hide his laughter.
“Come and meet everyone,” Big Mac said when my fake husband had regained his composure. “I’ve been telling them all about the only couple on the island I can stand being around.”
“Why do you work at a resort catering mostly to honeymooners if you can’t stand the couples?” I asked curiously as we fell into step beside him.
He grinned and shared a look with Jaxon over the top of my head. “The pay, the perks, and the bikinis. In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of barely clothed people around here.”
Jaxon laughed, tucking me closer to his side. Warmth bloomed inside me at the possessive gesture. There was no way he could be threatened by Big Mac, whether the man had checked me out in my bikini or not, but it was like these things came instinctively to him. Like he just couldn’t help himself because he didn’t even always realize he was doing it.
Back home and in my career, I was no shrinking violet. I was the head of my department and dealt with a bunch of egotistical jerks all the time. Being a ball-buster was only one of the ways in which I’d progressed as fast and as far as I had.
Will had known me that way, and he’d been perfectly happy to let me wear the proverbial pants. If there was a problem at a restaurant, I was the one to have to sort it out. When he caught another man making eyes at me, he’d trusted me to deal with it.
While I was more than capable of handling everything myself, I couldn’t deny that I enjoyed the whole dominant, possessive thing Jaxon had going on. Alpha-male bad boys had never really been my thing, but now I was starting to wonder why.
Not that he was a bad boy—at least not to me—but he definitely gave off that vibe with other people. And the way he had sex? Well, he definitely wasn’t a good boy. That’s for sure.
On the other hand, he wasn’t a boy at all. There was nothing even remotely boyish about him. He was a man, and a pretty darn sexy one to boot. It wasn’t just his body or his looks that made him sexy. He just was.
While I didn’t need the white knight galloping in on his horse to save me, it was nice to know someone really had