have a ton of them.”
“At home.”
“No one’s here, Lace,” Jocelyn assured her. “Go. We’ll set up camp.”
Jogging up to the van they’d borrowed from her dad, Lacey squeezed into the back, stripping down and tsking over the price of the suit that barely covered her breasts and bottom. It was cute, but still.
She glanced down at her cleavage, and the rest of her. And all she could think of was the way Clay had drawn her. Did she really look that beautiful to him? That strong and capable? There were no words for how much she wanted to be the woman in that drawing.
The drawing! She had to go snag it before Ashley did. She’d tuck it away somewhere safe so she could pull out it out whenever she felt weak and insecure. Those times when she’d want to be reminded that a gorgeous, smart, funny, kiss-you-crazy man saw her exactly as the woman she wanted to be.
She rolled up her clothes and let her mind drift back to Ashley. Why this sudden preoccupation with David? Was it because she thought Lacey might be truly attracted to another man? Did she sense that Clay Walker was somehow different from the men she’d dated in the past.
Because he was.
She’d talk to Ashley tonight, before she spent another minute with Clay. They needed to be open and honest about this. And about Ashley’s father, who was never, ever coming to Mimosa Key.
Opening the back door slowly, she squinted into the bright sunshine as she climbed out.
“Wow. Pink is definitely your color.”
At the sound of a male voice, she gasped, spinning around to see a man silhouetted in the sunlight. She was vaguely aware that he held a paper. The sketch, her sketch, but that was not what short-circuited her brain. Oh, no. It was the complete impossibility of what she was seeing.
All she could do was croak his name. “David?”
Chapter Ten
It’s Fox.”
Lacey just stared, and tried to breathe despite the six-hundred-pound boulder that had just landed on her chest.
“I go by Fox now.” He took a step closer, the world behind and around him fading into black and white as David Fox, a man she had once loved with every fiber of her being and more, stood bathed in sunlight, a dark-haired, green-eyed devil.
“You look fantastic, Lacey.” He held out the drawing. “Self-portrait?”
She snatched away the paper, her heart wrenching as a corner tore in her hand. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see Ashley. And you, of course. And… wow.” He angled his head and openly admired her. “As good in three dimensions as”—he nodded to the drawing—“two.”
She covered her chest with the paper, painfully aware that she was in nothing but bright pink strips of silk that barely covered breasts that David had once suggested she have reduced.
“So how are you?” he asked with a wide smile that showed masculine dimples in hollowed cheeks with a hint of whiskers. A linen shirt hung over his lean body, and despite the trousers he wore, he didn’t show a bead of perspiration anywhere. In ninety-two degrees.
“I’m…” Dizzy. Stunned. Hoping to wake up any second. “You might have warned me you were coming.”
He gave her a look of disbelief. “Didn’t Ashley tell you?”
Ashley?
She thinks you’re going to get back together with David.
“Have you talked to her?”
“Not exactly,” he said, turning to look at Ashley in the water, offering his classic, handsome profile to her. “We’ve been communicating online. Today, in fact. She told me you’d be here.”
He was chatting online with her daughter?
“Is it safe for her to be out that far?” he asked.
Lacey took a few steps to see over the rise to the water. “She’s just past the sandbar. The water’s still shallow there, but it drops off after that.”
“I don’t know. It looks far.”
Irritation fired through her. “She’s with my friends. She’ll be fine, David.”
“Fox,” he said. “I really don’t answer to David anymore. Are your friends CPR trained?”
She choked a little. “Seriously? After thirteen years of doing a complete disappearing act, you’re going to show up here and question my parenting skills?”
“I’m not questioning them.” He squinted at Ashley. “She seems well adjusted enough.”
Seems? He’d determined that from “communicating online” with her and seeing her from three hundred feet?
“She is,” Lacey said. “But this is going to throw her for a loop.”
“Are those the same women from the dorm you RA’d in college?”
“Yes.” She wasn’t surprised he remembered them. The year David and Lacey had been together, she’d