Getaway Bay, page 8
He wondered if Esther could ever leave Your Ride and travel the world with him. He didn’t leave Hawaii all that often, but he had taken trips to Costa Rica, Brazil, the Philippines, and Thailand to visit other high-producing plantations. He’d spoken to their foremen, learned some things he didn’t know, toured their facilities and fields, and taken what he could and applied it to the Robison empire on the islands here.
Contrary to popular belief, Marshall did vacation sometimes, and he knew how to relax, as evidenced by the time he spent on his catamaran. He was sure Esther didn’t know and hadn’t observed that about him, and he wanted her to know. Wanted her to see.
He wasn’t sure what kind of men she’d dated previously, but she was the least shallow woman he knew. Maybe that wasn’t saying much, because all of his previous dates had been giggly, grinning females who just wanted to be in the forefront of any pictures that were taken.
He gathered his work together and put it in his briefcase, glancing out the window as Esther pulled into his driveway. A smile danced across his face, and he ducked his head as if she’d be able to see it.
Marshall wasn’t quite sure when he’d felt this happy, and he wanted to hold onto the feeling as long as possible. So when Esther got out of the car and took up her position near the back door, he decided that behavior had to stop.
He moved to the front door and opened it, calling, “You want to come in for a minute? I’m not quite ready.” A lie. A big, fat lie. His tie was precisely knotted. Jacket buttoned. Briefcase packed.
But he didn’t want his girlfriend to act like his chauffeur. Problem was, Esther was both his chauffeur and his girlfriend.
An internal struggle began, and Marshall had no idea how it would end. Esther moved toward him, her heels clicking delicately against the pavers as she mounted the steps.
He leaned into the doorway, his arms crossed, hoping she’d relax a little. “Morning.” He hadn’t seen her at all yesterday, and he’d been tortured with the memory of that last kiss, with her pressed against her door and drinking him in like she was dying of thirst.
He licked his lips and reached for her as soon as she was within arm’s length. A giggle of surprise burst from her, and he spun her around before kissing her against the other half of his front door.
She managed to separate her lips from his for a beat, long enough to breathe, “Marshall,” in a way that only encouraged him.
“Hmm?” He moved his mouth to her neck, because if she wanted to talk, she should be able to.
“I thought you just needed a ride.”
“I do.” She smelled like limes and fresh air, and he nosed her earlobe before nipping it with his teeth. She stiffened and he almost pulled back, but then she melted right into his arms, running those delicious fingernails along his neck and into his hair.
He kissed her again, knowing he wouldn’t be able to at the office. Everyone would be buzzing about her being there anyway, but he’d already decided he didn’t care. She’d said she could bring some work of her own to do, and while he didn’t taste any frosting on her lips, he was sure the cake would make an appearance at some point today.
He finally got control of himself and pulled away. After clearing his throat, he said, “All right. That was the best greeting I’ve had in a while.” He kept his hand in hers as he led her into the house. “You want the grand tour now, or later?”
“The cake will probably melt in the car.” She glanced around, though, like she wanted to see all the intimate places Marshall lived. Problem was, that wasn’t prevalent in this house. He spent most of his time in his office, or at Fisher’s hotel. He really only slept here, worked out here, and fed Popoki here.
“Later, then,” he said, glad he could avoid leading her all over his stark space. He collected his briefcase and went to the car with her. He made a grab for the door handle and opened it himself before she could do it.
Her lips pursed, and he said, “Remember how I’m doing this now?”
She stepped back and folded her arms. “I don’t think you should pay me then.”
He scoffed and lowered himself into the car. “Of course I’m going to pay you.”
She walked around the front of the vehicle, clearly unhappy. With both doors closed, and both of her hands on the wheel, she should’ve been able to go. But she didn’t. The smell of chocolate and caramel and coffee mixed into a tantalizing scent that made his mouth water.
“Half,” she finally said. “You can pay me half.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I’m your ride,” she said.
“I know what you are,” he said coolly. “If you insist on defining what it’s worth to open a car door for someone, you’ll have to let me do some research for the going rate of such things.”
She scoffed so loud, it sounded like she was choking. “Going rate? What are you going to do? Google it?”
“Exactly.”
“Exactly what?”
Marshall shouldn’t be enjoying this teensy tiff so much, but he really was. “Esther,” he said softly. “I simply don’t want you to open my door or make me ride in the back. If it bothers you that much, I’ll pay you ten percent less for the car service. But it doesn’t bother me, and I like getting picked up my girlfriend.”
Several beats of silence passed before she finally put the car in gear and started around his circular driveway. “Fifteen percent.”
“Five.”
“You just said ten!” She swatted him, and he yanked his arm away, chuckling.
“Six,” he said.
She pressed her lips together, but the smile still curved them a bit. “Fine, ten percent.”
“If you insist.”
“I do.” She expertly maneuvered the car down the mountain, the atmosphere between them charged but casual. As she pulled into the parking lot, and he instructed her to go around back to park, his nerves began a riot.
She’d want to bring that cake in, sing to him—maybe in front of everyone, he thought with horror—and then get to work.
He put his hand on her arm and looked at her.
She watched him back, searching his expression for something he probably wasn’t showing on his face.
“I have to tell you something.”
She put the car in park but left the engine idling, like she might just drop him off and go, depending on what he said.
“There’s a reason I don’t like celebrating my birthday.”
“Okay.” She held very still, and Marshall liked that she listened. Watched. Didn’t jump to conclusions or freak out.
“It was my birthday—my thirtieth, the big three-oh—when I found out about Lorna’s scheme.” His words started to turn hollow as his memories took him back to that place, but he pulled himself back to this moment. This moment with Esther.
“I’d gone to the Garden Grove plantation to surprise her. See, I was supposed to be in Costa Rica, but I’d come home early so we could be together.” He removed his hand from Esther and looked out the windshield. After another breath, he felt strong enough to go on.
“There was no chocolate cake. Just ledgers of her illegal activity. I left that office and moved up here, and a couple of days later, my mother got me the free trial to your car service.” He wondered now if there had been some sort of divine intervention. If so, waiting eight years for it to come to fruition seemed cruel.
“I’ve only been driving you for seven years,” she said.
Esther, ever the queen of details. Marshall loved that about her, and he didn’t resist the temptation to reach out and tuck her hair behind her ear. “Your hair isn’t in a ponytail.” He’d just noticed, though he’d definitely had his hands in her hair while he kissed her.
“It was when I got to your house,” she said, quirking one eyebrow at him.
Heat traveled through his core and into his face. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” she said in a near whisper. “I’m sorry about Lorna. But maybe we can replace your bad birthday memory with some good ones.”
He nodded, the whole story almost out. “I didn’t use your service for a few months. Maybe longer. I don’t really remember when I started, because I thought it was kind of absurd that me, a big, brawny billionaire, couldn’t drive himself to work.” He chuckled, the sound light so the moment wouldn’t become too heavy.
He looked right into Esther’s brilliant blue eyes, glad when he saw the flint of attraction burning there. “But I’m glad I did.”
“Me too.” She leaned forward and gave him a chaste kiss over the console. “I mean, big, brawny, billionaires need help sometimes too, right?”
He laughed, and the sound of her joining in with him made a new birthday memory he wanted to hold onto for a long time. “Right,” he said, before kissing her again, this time not quite so chaste.
Chapter Eleven
Esther gripped her bag with more force than necessary to keep it in her hand. While Marshall had never said the office would be empty, she’d sort of assumed it would be. But activity buzzed everywhere she looked, and at least a dozen people worked at desks and stood at a water cooler when she walked in.
Marshall nodded to them, said hello, introduced her to a few people whose names she catalogued for later in case she needed them. They finally made it to the fourth floor, where a sprawling office housed an enormous desk in front of an entire wall of windows.
Marshall barely looked outside as he rounded the desk and set his briefcase on it. But Esther felt drawn to them as if they were a powerful magnet. “Your plantation,” she said, her voice full of awe.
The rows and rows of pineapple plants were neat and orderly. Pathways had obviously been perfectly spaced to allow tractors to spray fertilizer, ethylene, and other products onto them. The plants closest to the building, just on the other side of a drainage ditch, each had a bright green pineapple growing from the center.
“One fruit per plant,” she said. “It’s incredible.”
He joined her, close enough to say they were together, but without touching her. “They are pretty, aren’t they?”
“I mean, I’ve toured your southern plantation, but not for years. It was one of the first things we did as a family when we moved here.” Esther wanted to reach out and touch the sweet fruit the way she had as a fourteen-year-old. She could smell the sticky-sweet juice on the plantation and the rich, fertile soil. “My brother would’ve loved it.”
His arm came around her then, and Esther leaned into him for comfort. “You miss him?” he asked.
“Every now and then,” she said. “He was only seventeen when he died, and I was the annoying little sister, you know?”
Marshall didn’t nod or laugh, so Esther didn’t either. “George and I are close now.”
“I’d like to meet your family.” Marshall’s hot breath touched her ear, floated down her neck, and Esther shivered. She couldn’t imagine bringing him to George’s wing house. Marshall was far too refined for corn nuts and karaoke. And bad karaoke at that.
But she smiled up at him and said, “Let’s do the cake,” with as much enthusiasm as she could.
He groaned, but it had a good-natured edge to it, and he sat down when she pointed to his chair. She got out the candles and made a big show of putting them on the cake she’d baked herself. All she could do while she tried to get the lighter going was hope that the cake wasn’t disgusting. She wasn’t exactly known for her prowess in the kitchen.
With slightly trembling fingers, she tried the lighter again. Marshall’s long, slender fingers closed over hers, steadying her and strengthening her. Her eyes drifted to his, and their gazes locked. She imagined herself growing old with him, watching as his dark hair turned gray, getting to come to these plantations and learn the pineapple business for herself.
She shook her head and looked down. Marshall pressed the ignitor, and the flame burst out of the end of the lighter. He directed her hands to light the candles, and then his touch fell away.
Esther hesitated for another moment, her thoughts still revolving around her car service. She wouldn’t be giving that up in favor of pineapples, even if she and Marshall did get married.
Focus, she told herself. It hadn’t even been a week yet, and her fantasies had already started taking on a white-dress, long-aisle theme.
“Happy birthday,” she sang. He laughed then, but she pressed on, completing the song and saying, “Blow ‘em out, you big, brawny billionaire.”
His face radiated pure joy as he leaned forward and blew out his birthday candles. Esther stood back and watched him, basking in his beauty, his kind spirit, his goodness, until he looked at her.
“So you actually eat cake, right?” She flew into the next phase of this party by collecting the plates, forks, and napkins she’d brought from her bag.
“I ran an extra two miles this morning.” He puffed out his flat stomach. “So cake me. A big piece.”
She couldn’t remember a time when she’d felt so happy, so content, as she did cutting a chocolate birthday cake in his office. They talked about nonessential things as they each ate their piece, and Esther hoped she’d be around for his thirty-ninth birthday celebration too.
Soon enough, though, his phone rang and he swiped open the call with, “Hey, Fish.”
Esther tried not to look like she was eavesdropping on the conversation, and since she actually had quite a bit of experience listening without looking like she was, she was able to hear his side of the conversation.
Several words caught in her ears. Words she’d heard before, and she’d always wondered at them. When Marshall hung up, she decided to be brave.
“So I’ve heard you mention something about Hawaii Nine-0 several times,” she said. “You just did again. What is that?”
He blinked at her, and Esther mentally kicked herself. “Oh, it’s a secret.”
“It’s not a secret.” He sounded a little rehearsed. A titch mechanical.
“You look like I’ve hit you with a frying pan.”
“It’s…elite.”
“Code word for secret.” She rolled her eyes. “I get it. You and Fish have your own little club and I’m not invited.” Well, she had a club too, thank you very much. And Marshall definitely wasn’t invited to sit on the beach with all the women who’d sworn off men. Or maybe that wasn’t what the Women’s Beach Club was at all. Esther had lost track over the course of the past week and a half, and she didn’t like the loss of control.
Marshall leaned back in his chair, his power suit and his steepled fingers making him very much the untouchable billionaire he was. Who he’d always been.
“All right,” he said, a smile playing across his mouth. “So I have a little club. It’s nothing special, and it’s exclusive, and maybe I don’t want to hurt your feelings.”
“What’s the requirement to join?” Not that she really wanted to join. She had to have some spheres of her life that were Marshall-free. Didn’t she?
“You have to have nine zeroes in your bank account. The Nine-Zero club. Not nine-oh.”
Esther rummaged around in her bag like the extra zero she needed would be inside. “Oh. Well.”
“And you have to live in Hawaii.”
“Which I obviously do.” She gave him a somewhat scathing look that fell short of burning him. “I’m not quite there yet.”
“You’ll get there.”
She appreciated his confidence. “How many members are in your little club?”
“Nine.”
“Ah, a good ol’ boys club.”
“Not at all. There are two women.”
Great. Just what she needed. Handsome, charming, smart Marshall hanging out with two women with just as much money as him. A rush of jealousy moved through her, and not only because of the numbers in the bank account.
“It’s no big deal,” he said, going back to his paperwork. “We get together and talk business. You don’t even like to talk business.”
“Sure I do,” she said. “I just don’t want someone who knows nothing about my business to give me unsolicited advice.” She nodded once at him and lifted her eyebrows as if to punctate the statement with So there.
He chuckled and held up the hand not holding a pen in surrender. “I get it, Esther. I was wrong to do that. Won’t happen again.”
“Unless I ask you.”
He gazed at her evenly, the spark that had sprung to life last Sunday present, and hot, and getting hotter. “Unless you ask me.”
She really did pull out the work she needed to accomplish that day, giving a little sniff like everything was settled.
He chuckled again. “When you get to be a billionaire yourself, we’ll pull your financial records, and if everything checks out, I’ll personally introduce you to the group.”
“Thank you,” she murmured, wondering if she could even handle another club, especially one where she had to prove actual worth to join.
She arrived on the beach several hours later, having left Marshall’s office just after they’d finished eating—kalua pork and sticky rice, from her favorite Hawaiian hut on Main Street, PolyFusion—without telling him about her own club meeting.
To be fair, Tawny had texted five minutes before lunch with WBC two-thirty. Met a man.
Esther had tried texting her for the details, but Tawny was keeping her thumbs off the keyboard. Probably because she wanted a bigger audience for news like this.
No matter what, Esther promised Marshall she’d be back by five-thirty, and she’d gone home to change, breathe in some soothing peppermint to quell the rolling in her stomach, and grab her beach bag.
When she approached the group of women already sitting on the outer edge of Sweet Breeze’s private beachfront, she told herself over and over to keep her news to herself. She hadn’t even told Stacey about the mind-blowing kiss with Marshall, and she didn’t want to overshadow Tawny.
“Hey, girls.” She sighed as she kicked off her flip flops and laid out her towel. A lot of the other women brought beach chairs so they could sit up, but Esther didn’t mind sitting directly on the sand. She felt more connected to the island that way, and she’d always come to the beach when she needed that grounding.
