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unwelcome connection between him and Cilla. "Make lemonade."

 
    Chapter 3
     
    The morning air was beginning to warm as Cilla approached the pool, considering a swim. If she was at her place near the beach, she'd be preparing for a run on the sand, but the canyon roads were narrow and wound around each other in intricate coils. If she went out for her usual forty-five minutes of exercise she was afraid she'd either get lost or hit by a car. Bending over, she dipped her fingertips into the aquamarine water, yelping when her flesh met the much-too-cold wet.
    Nope, no swimming for her. Resigned, she turned toward the pool house, half of which was filled with top-of-the-line exercise equipment including a varied set of dumbbells, a weight machine, an elliptical, a stair-stepper and a pair of treadmills. It was a good thing she'd worn her running clothes just in case.
    When life gives you the Lemons, make lemonade.
    The echo of that line halted her footsteps as her mind replayed last night, the moments right before she and Ren exchanged their halves of the line.
    What impulse had led her to do it? She didn't know, but she'd hadn't thought twice about giving Ren the most casual of goodnight kisses. It had been just a little peck on the cheek, really.
    But then something had happened that made the walls of the hallway close in like a blood-pressure cuff. Ren had looked at her, merely looked at her, and the smolder in his eyes had sent her pulse pounding and her body temperature soaring. She'd felt turned on and terrified. Aroused and afraid.
    It was one thing when she was the host of a solo passion-party, but entirely another when an unexpected guest arrived, ready for party games.
    He'd looked that way, felt that way, his arm turning to steel beneath her hand.
    But if he actually wanted her, despite how attracted she was right back, Cilla knew there was no possible way she could do anything about it. She was terrible in bed. Awkward, cold, essentially embarrassed by the entire procedure that was intrusive, intimate, and, ultimately, messy.
    Just the thought of going through that with Ren—with the guaranteed result of experiencing his disappointment in her performance—made her want to dive into the freezing pool and never come up again.
    Her only hope was she'd imagined the moment.
    Somewhere in the night she'd started wondering about that. Besides "Fucking Lemons"—and there could be an untold number of reasons for him expressing that sentiment, as she well knew—he'd not given away what was going through his mind. Perhaps that smolder and that tension had all been on her side and she'd been, well, projecting.
    With her hand on that unfinished heart, the defiant symbol of his solitary nature, perhaps she'd romanticized the moment. Gone girly, fantasizing she was the one who could be his other half.
    Except it actually hadn't felt like romance , per se. Instead, it had felt the opposite of anything dreamy and idealized. To her, that moment had throbbed with raw power. Raw sex. Making clear to her that going to bed with Ren would mean she'd be stripped bare of more than just clothes.
    Oh, it had to be all in her head!
    The phone in the pocket of her hoodie buzzed. She stilled. Ren? But she'd left him—presumably—still sleeping back at Gwen's, and anyway, she hadn't told him how to reach her.
    How could she be thinking he wanted to swap bodily fluids when he didn't care about swapping cell numbers?
    The screen read "Jewel" and Cilla quickly took the call. She'd run into the other woman at the Canyon Country Store a few days before. Under the photos of The Doors and The Lemons, beside the shelves of expensive liquor and the section of English foodstuffs stocked for the famous expat Brits who lived in the canyon, the two women had re-connected.
    Or maybe connected for the first time ever. Jewel had been a couple of years ahead of Cilla in school and they'd never been more than nodding acquaintances even though they lived on