Page 2 of Meet Me in Tahiti

“What a gorgeous ride!” a woman said. “Wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but so scary.” The single woman laughed along, but somehow, she still looked… lost.

Something tugged inside him. What could make a woman come on a trip like this alone, especially among all of these seemingly happy couples?

Russ adjusted his grip on the rail before he was caught staring. Too bad she was drop dead gorgeous.

Maybe this week wouldn’t be as predictable as he’d thought.

Tessa Reed steppedoff the narrow water taxi onto the wooden dock and felt her knees wobble—not from the motion of the boat, but from the view in front of her.

Oh. My.

Turquoise waters in every direction surrounded by dark blue ocean further out, as if someone had come in with a set of paintbrushes and painted each section a different blue.

Swaying, windswept palms on shore, angled in just the perfect direction, as if Mother Nature herself had taken out a carving knife and whittled them into the perfect pose.

She gazed up. Clear blue skies overhead. She breathed it all in.

Okay, so she was now ninety-eight-point-five percent glad she’d come. Even—alone. Well, with three other couples, but no date of her own.

But the catamaran anchored next to the water taxi looked like something out of a travel magazine. Gleaming white hull, smooth teak deck. Gorgeous sails tied up, awaiting the wind. The boat shimmered under the Tahitian sunshine like a dream.

And yet… here she was.

Eight days. On that boat. With her closest girlfriends and their significant others. And without the man who was supposed to be holding her hand.

Tessa squared her shoulders and hoisted the strap of her oversized tote bag higher on her shoulder. She refused to let this trip be tainted by him. She hadn’t set aside a sizeable portion of every paycheck for the last three months nor traveled 5,500 miles to sulk in a corner cabin over some guy who couldn’t keep his hands to himself.

Nope. She was turning thirty this week, freshlysingle, and by golly, she was far too sunburn-prone, especially this close to the equator, to be loyal to a cheat of a man. She dug through her bag for her sunscreen as she walked, nearly tripping over the lip of the dock in the process.

A warm hand reached out just in time to steady her elbow. “Careful there,” a low voice said with a trace of amusement behind it.

Tessa looked up and into the face of the man who’d caught her.

Tall. Tan. He had short, tousled, light brown hair under the cap on his head—a black brim and a white crown, which only served to make the official man-in-charge look even more appealing. He was probably in his early thirties? Aviator sunglasses concealed his eyes.

“Oh,” she said unsteadily.

Brilliant. Eloquence in action.

Her hand almost flew to her temple to salute him—he looked so official—but she stopped herself, blushing.

“Welcome aboard theLatitude.” He gestured to the gangplank with a friendly smile. “I’m Russell Callen, your captain for the week.”

Wow.Did all the boat captains in the South Pacific dazzlelike this, like they embodied the very definition ofsmoking hot?

She sucked in a breath and pulled her gaze away from his broad shoulders, hidden beneath a perfectly starched white polo with the little nautical sign of the charter company over the pocket.

“Oh, hey, everyone,” he called casually, “no shoes on board, please.”

Tessa grimaced. No shoes? She’d spent hours matching her outfits for each day with a pair of shoes. Okay, so most of them were just the same pair of flip-flops or sandals, but still. What sort of absurd rule was this?

No one else seemed surprised by the rule, however, so she frowned, then stepped out of her sandals and reached down to retrieve them from the dock.

She glanced ahead. Her friends looked like they’d done this sort of thing a hundred times, their shoes already in hand, pulling their suitcases behind them.

Tessa, meanwhile, was trying not to sweat through her linen sundress as she dragged her luggage along, which was, as it turned out, probably twice the appropriate size for a boat like this. Would it even fit in her cabin?

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