fascination as he throws it over his shoulder and tucks it close to his throat.
That was just on me—in fact, the crotch of the suit that’s closest to his mouth is still warm from my flesh.
Danger! Danger!
I shake my head to clear it again. What is wrong with me this morning? Who even thinks of something like that? Like, how horny am I?
I point in the direction of my car over my shoulder. “I can drive myself. Probably a good idea.”
He smiles, but he stops himself from laughing at me by biting into the flesh of his bottom lip. “No need. We can walk to breakfast.”
“Walk?” I ask, almost sounding horrified. “How far is it?”
He laughs now. “Just under a block. Don’t worry, you’ll make it without collapsing.” I glare, but he keeps going. “And if you don’t, I’ll pick you up and carry you.”
All attitude and sass, I step around him to start walking, but I’m not paying enough attention to my footing and accidentally step off the sidewalk and into the sand.
It took a full three minutes to get these sandals all done up again—don’t ask me to explain why I chose them—and now one foot is full of sand.
I try to ignore it, even try to discreetly shake the sand out, but it’s beyond annoying. The grains are in all the bad spots, rubbing the skin off my foot with quick precision. I’m going to have to stop and fix it, but that’s going to make it really hard to continue to save face.
Desperate, I transform my gait into a limp. Maybe if I don’t put full pressure on that foot, it’ll survive the walk to the restaurant without needing to be amputated.
“Holley,” Jake remarks behind me, watching me do my best impression of a peg-legged pirate. “Did you step on a scorpion or something? What are you doing?”
“I have sand in my shoe,” I say with a roll of my eyes, finally stopping and bending down to try to get it out.
Jake doesn’t say much from behind me, so I do my best to ignore him while I work at the intricate strap and buckle that circle my ankle.
It’s always difficult to get the strap out of the buckle because the leather is too stiff to really bend. They’re adorable shoes, but they’re really a pain in the ass. I do my best not to think about the fact that I actually put these on in some lame attempt to impress Jake with my good fashion sense.
The reality is, he probably didn’t even notice.
I shove and pull and torture the strap, trying to force it to bend to my will and release the prong from its hole. My cheeks flush immediately at my own mental commentary.
All I can think about are the barbed penises I read about in J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood books. Now that was a prong that was hard to get out of a hole.
Still messing with the buckle and thinking about sex with a penis that actually, like, latches on, I’m caught off guard when Jake scoops me up into his arms and tosses me over his shoulder in a full-on fireman’s carry. The bathing suit is gone, but I’ve been messing with my shoe for way longer than would have been necessary for him to actually put it away in his bag somewhere.
I shriek, of that I’m sure, but finding actual words to shout at him is proving much, much harder.
“I… Well… I’ve never… Hey!” I ramble, trying to sound convincingly aggressive.
He snickers, of course, obviously shaken by my articulate and well-versed threats.
“Put me down,” I finally manage, but the shake of his head against my hip makes me seal my lips altogether.
“Nope,” he declines, hoisting me even farther up onto his shoulder to find a comfortable position while he walks. “You’re taking too long, and I’m hungry. I saw you try to work those sandals this morning before you came down onto the beach, and it took you a year and a half.”
“You saw that?” I whisper, unable to hide my horror that I wasn’t in my own world as I’d so naïvely thought then.
“Yes. I watched until it was too painful to watch anymore, so I’m not watching again. I’m all topped up on my quota for watching you mess with sandals for the day.”
“Well, then,” I huff.
He chuckles. “Don’t get all offended. Once we’re at the diner, you can take your sweet time fixing it. Hell, I’ll even