Page 67 of Hate Wrecked

He’s grown into a beautiful man. Gone is his baby face, the softness of his eyes. Instead, they are strikingly blue, and though the gaze he often aims at me is annoyed and piercing, I don’t mind. I heat under it—flush.

Rowan blinks. “What?”

“I just don’t understand how you don’t have someone waiting for you back home.”

He looks back into the water, eyes squinting. “What are you on now?”

I briefly glance at the water before returning to my preferred view: Rowan. “Look at you, with your fishing pole, your arms, and your shoulders—all of it.”

Rowan clears his throat. “You’re different, you know.”’

“Than?” I challenge.

“LA. You’re…you always said what you thought to me. But I don’t know. Maybe you have grown up.”

“You said I needed to grow up two seconds ago.” I arch a brow.

“Being an arsehole comes a little easier to me now. And it’s easy to be scared here. It was easy to be scared back in Hawaii when I saw you like that.”

“Scared of what?”

“Losing you. You can’t spend your life mad at your mom for her mistakes and then repeat them.” He looks away from the water, straight into my eyes. “You’re better than that. Smarter than that. We both know it. So, to see you again, after all those years, doing dumb shit. I hated it. And I let myself fall into it again.”

“Fall into what?”

“The drama. You. You were always a magnet to me, Riley. I couldn’t go there again.”

“Couldn’t or can’t?”

He looks away. “I can hardly escape you on this island, now can I?”

I don’t know if it’s an invitation to get closer to him or not. I never know with him. But I plan to test the theory, and my wants, as soon as we cook these damn fish.

I’m warm from the sun, from his voice changing, warm from everything.

Life comes at you hard and fast, and this island has woken me up. I feel alive in ways I haven’t felt in years.

“I don’t want you to be any way toward me here that you don’t want to be when some boat or plane takes us away from here.” I hate admitting it. But I have to. Dirty secrets are hard to walk away from and own up to. I treated him like one, and maybe I deserve to be his, but I can’t be that. I want what he begged for back in the city. Something real. Something we aren’t afraid of.

I’m not a young girl anymore. And the ghost of this man before me has made me keep every man who has found his way into my bed and heart at arm’s length.

“I can be your friend again,” he says, breaking my heart with his simple declaration and opening up.

We were never friends. Friends didn’t bare their souls the way we did. Friends didn’t touch each other the way we did.

“Friends?” I say the word like a curse.

“That’s all we’ve ever been,” he replies, his eyes trained on the ocean before us, the blue unable to compete with his eyes.

“Ah,” I agree, surrendering. He’s caught me. His words were always scarce, binding, and blinding in their honesty. It’s why I clung to him.

“He was your choice,” he whispers, finally bringing it to the surface.

The other man. The perfect vice, the drug. The antithesis of what any good parent would want for me. But on paper, he checked all the boxes. Another person inthe business. A name in lights. Someone who could elevate my status. Who the press should have damned for touching someone over ten years his junior.

You shouldn’t fall for your stepdad’s friends, but he leveraged his influence well, said all the right things, and made all the right promises.

A snake in the grass.

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