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man,” she called over her shoulder.
    He’d never been one to insist on being chivalrous, but Larken made him want to pull out chairs and hold doors open. Oh, the painful irony that she’d never appreciate that.
    “I was just trying to be nice,” he muttered.
    Apparently his voice carried further than he thought, because she stopped as soon as she got to the beach and held out her hand.
    “Just being nice,” she mocked, a twinkle in her eye like she was begging to be spanked.
    Jackson powered up the boat and pulled away from the island, sending a wave of water in their direction. Vince stared at her hand as the ocean lapped up his legs, soaking the bottom of his shorts a bit more. Didn’t matter. He planned to take them off soon enough, anyway.
    He took her hand to make a point, and together they walked onto the beach.
    “Come on,” she said, tugging him in the obvious direction, toward where the brush cut away to a path.
    “Wait.” He tugged her back. Now that he had her hand, he was going to use that to his advantage. “We’re alone.”
    “We were alone last night and at breakfast,” she pointed out.
    She wasn’t wrong. “And both times we kissed. So my dick thinks we’re going to do that again.”
    She glanced down his body. “Seriously?”
    “You didn’t like the gentleman routine. So I thought I’d go for crude honesty.”
    That got him a laugh, and a big grin spreading across her pretty face. Score. “Okay. For your dick.”
    He lifted their clasped hands and kissed her knuckles, then up her arm. The whole time she laughed at him. That was just fine by him.
    “I like you laughing,” he murmured as he reached her lips. “It’s a gorgeous sound.”
    She leaned in to kiss him, and the hot puff of her breath almost caught him. Almost.
    “Hang on,” he whispered, dropping his bag in the sand. He reached out and nudged her sunglasses off her nose and up onto her head. He winked at her narrowing eyes. “That’s better.”
    “You like stripping me bare, don’t you?”
    “Uhhh…”
    She grinned. “Two can play the crude game.”
    He had to take a deep breath to keep himself from yelling at her. There was fun teasing, and then there was…
    Damn it. He hauled her against him, kissing her instead of yelling, because the boundaries she had were so engrained, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself. And they weren’t that thick, actually. He just needed to storm through them and there she was, his Larken, with her soft mewling sounds and her wet, eager mouth.
    “I do like peeling away the layers and getting to the real you,” he said roughly, once her lips were swollen and she was breathing hard. “That’s what this little side trip is all about.”
    “I thought it was about learning to play nicely together?”
    He gripped her gently by the upper arms and nudged her nose with his. Her blue eyes glittered like the sea, and he swallowed back the instinct to get lost in them. To kiss her again and again until their twenty-four hours were up, Jackson came back to get them, and they could keep fighting and hopefully fucking and never deal with any of this.
    “Larken, I got off the boat yesterday and fell back in time a dozen years. I don’t know why we didn’t find each other again sooner. I wish to hell we had. I’m sorry—so fucking sorry—that I never reached out to you. But I’m standing here in front of you saying… Hey. It’s you. Holy shit. How’ve you been?” He shook his head. “And you’re throwing shade at me all over the place. So, no. We’re not going to learn to play nice together. We’re going to actually get to know each other again, or I’m going head off into the sunset and look for another job elsewhere.”
    It was probably a lie. He didn’t know what he’d do if she didn’t let him in, so he probably shouldn’t have said anything just yet—a point she wasted no time in throwing back at him.
    “Whoa,” she said, glowering at him. “So if it’s not