All Over You, page 10
His hotel room was classy and luxurious, with a huge spa bath for two. Straight away his director’s brain took over and he began to think of honeymoon scenes — saucy moments in the spa, shots in the big bed. There was so much natural light in the place they’d barely have to light it. He made a mental note to talk to Frank and make sure he filmed one of the rooms before they left.
They’d agreed to meet by the pool for lunch before heading off to check out the first of the beach locations on their list. Mac changed into a pair of lightweight indigo linen pants and a white T-shirt, sliding his feet into a pair of leather thongs. After smoothing sunscreen onto his face, he made his way down to the café by the hotel’s main pool. A perfect circle, the pool sat between the arms created by the hotel’s graduated floors. The water looked cool and inviting — which was just as well, because he knew he was going to need some serious help as soon as he clapped eyes on Grace.
She’d changed into another one of her vintage outfits — a pair of figure-hugging black-and-white polka-dot Capri pants with a matching bandeau top that bared an expanse of trim, creamy torso. Her waist looked small, her breasts infinitely enticing. She wore a large-brimmed black straw hat on her head and her ever-present sunglasses. His gaze zeroed in on her hot-pink mouth and he actually licked his lips.
If he could convince her to go to bed with him one more time, he was sure he could bang this growing obsession out of his system. The thought popped into his head as though it had been hand-delivered by his gonads and he slapped it down again instantly.
For starters, even if every self-preserving instinct he had wasn’t screaming against his urge to put such a suggestion to Grace, he’d agreed to the no-monkey-business rule. Try as he might, he couldn’t redefine monkey business to exclude sex. Which left him back at square one — horny, frustrated, hot and feeling increasingly challenged by the responsibility he’d taken on when he agreed to direct the wedding special.
It had felt natural to wade into the trenches and work alongside the others back in Claudia’s office when the news of Heartlands’ sneakery had come to light, but it wasn’t until afterward that he’d recognized that had been his opportunity to stand aside and let someone more experienced take the helm.
He hadn’t, though. He’d dug in with the rest of the team, started outlining his vision to them. Whether it was the right vision or not, whether he could achieve it or not, only time would tell.
Belatedly he registered that Marla was talking, exclaiming over her room and the hotel’s amenities.
“Just don’t touch the minibar,” Grace warned. “They want your first-born child for a Snickers bar.”
“I knew I should have brought the kids with me,” Marla said.
Grace flashed a warm smile at the other woman and Mac could feel the mood in their little group lift, despite the rigors of their early morning flight. He’d never consciously acknowledged it before, but Grace was always quick with a compliment or a joke or advice. It had been the same with the meeting yesterday in Claudia’s office, he realized in retrospect — she’d been the one to calm Claudia down and start looking for solutions.
It was an attractive character trait. He’d also noticed how warm and friendly she’d been to the airline and hotel staff. For all her hard-as-nails tough-broad bull, she was actually a pussycat.
Except with him, of course. Then it was a battle to the death.
After a light lunch, they trooped out to the SUV Claudia had booked for the duration of their stay and Grace insisted on signing on as a driver as well as Mac.
“We can share the driving,” she said when he assured her he was happy to do all the wheel work.
“Tell me this isn’t about you not being able to stand being driven around by a man,” he challenged her.
She just slanted a smile his way. “You know me so well.”
He should have been annoyed instead of amused. When had he started being fond of her prickliness?
The first stop on their list was the Ko Olina Lagoons, one of which formed the beach the hotel sat on. It was only a few minutes by car to the neighboring lagoons and Frank started to get excited the moment he saw the stunning combination of water, white sand and green foliage.
“That outcropping, there,” Frank said, pointing toward a finger of land that thrust out into the sea.
Mac had spotted it the moment they crested the rise to the beach, also. It was picture-perfect — green with grass, the blue ocean behind it, palm trees swaying all around — a little bit of everything tropical, all in one location. Narrowing his eyes, Mac scanned the area and noted that even at mid-afternoon in the middle of summer, the beach wasn’t overly crowded. Cordoning it off for a shoot shouldn’t pose too much of a problem.
“This is good,” he said decisively. He turned to Grace, wordlessly waiting for her call.
“It’s perfect,” she said, one hand holding her hat down in the brisk ocean breeze.
“We can double it for another location if we shoot back along the beach,” Mac mused, getting caught up in the work.
“Horse riding,” Grace said suddenly. “I saw a brochure in the foyer.”
Mac could already picture it — ethereally beautiful Hannah wearing a trailing white skirt, galloping up the beach with Gabe chasing her on a snorting stallion.
“Great. Can we write that into the script?” he asked.
“There’s a perfect spot for it. In fact, it will make a great mood transition between their fight when Tania turns up in Hawaii and the romantic dinner Gabe arranges back at their hotel,” Grace said. She’d pulled a notebook from her handbag and was jotting down key points as she spoke.
His gaze was drawn to the barely contained energy in her hand as it moved across the page. He glanced at her face and saw a far-off look in her eyes, a sort of intense absence as she imagined her way into the story. She looked beautiful, inspiring, intriguing.
Frowning, he turned away. More and more lately, he was finding things to admire about her beyond her bodacious, sexy body and the chemistry they shared.
They spent half an hour pacing the beach while Frank filmed the location to show Claudia back in L.A. Then, although everyone agreed the site was perfect, they pushed on to inspect another four beaches on the basis that they might all be as ideal as the Lagoons. As dusk was falling, they held a quick conference in the car before heading back to the hotel.
“Opinions, people,” Mac invited, twisting around in the driver’s seat to address Grace and Frank in the back.
“I vote the Lagoons,” Frank said immediately. Since he’d been raving about them all afternoon, Mac wasn’t surprised.
“Don’t look at me — not much the art department has to do when Mother Nature’s got it all covered,” Marla said from the front passenger’s seat. “For what it’s worth, though, I vote the Lagoons, too.”
“Okay, I guess it’s unanimous then,” Mac said, turning back toward the windshield.
Marla shot him a surprised look. “What about Grace — doesn’t she get a say?”
“She likes the Lagoons,” Mac said. He didn’t need to ask. Whether through osmosis or sheer dint of time spent with one another, he was learning to read her.
He met her eyes in the rearview mirror. For once, she was without either pair of glasses and her tilted green eyes stared into his for a long moment before she glanced away. She didn’t say a word and neither did he.
He was frowning again as he started the vehicle and drove off.
OAHU WAS BEAUTIFUL. It was an understatement, but Grace quickly stopped trying to find the words to describe the breathtaking sights that the team routinely saw over the next few days. Finding locations for all their key moments turned out to be a snap — each day they found something that exceeded all their expectations. The way they were going, the week they’d allowed for the reconnaissance trip was insanely generous. Checking their location list on Wednesday morning, Grace saw that they had only one item left to cross off and three more days to find it. Brushing her hair out, she wondered if it would be premature to call Claudia and suggest they change their flights and cut the trip short.
She didn’t want to go home, though. She admitted as much to herself as she pulled her hair into a ponytail. As stupid and pointless as it was, she was enjoying this time with Mac.
Over the past few days, she’d seen more of the man behind the perfect face and body. Just yesterday, for example, they’d scouted a beach location and while Frank was filming, a little girl’s wooden tugboat had been pulled into the surf and out into deeper water. The girl had been inconsolable. Her mother had been almost as upset, explaining to anyone willing to lend a sympathetic ear that the toy had been made by her father, who had recently died. There were plenty of people milling on the beach — paunchy middle-aged executives on family breaks, young boys trying to be cool for teen girls with budding breasts and tiny bikinis, sporty girls with snorkels and flippers. But it was Mac who squinted out to sea to spot the bobbing toy.
“It’s not far out,” he’d said, then he’d tugged his shirt over his head and shucked his three-quarter linen pants so that he was wearing nothing but a pair of butt-and-package-hugging boxer-briefs. Grace knew absolutely that she wasn’t the only woman to nearly have a seizure as he turned toward the water, six-foot-three-inches of masculinity.
He should have looked stupid, wading into the shallows in his underwear.
But he hadn’t. Not by a long shot.
When he returned, body glistening with moisture, his blond hair slicked back from his beautiful face, the sound of camera phones clicking resounded along the beach. Who wouldn’t want to preserve the sight of a hot, wet god striding out of the water? He was utterly, utterly desirable.
But the bit that had really sent Grace’s stupid body into overdrive had been when he dropped to one knee to offer the precious toy to the little girl. The open delight on his face as the little girl laughed and thanked him was a revelation.
He was a nice person.
At some point — possibly day two — Grace had admitted to herself that her original lust-crush was fast becoming something much more substantial and scary. She liked him. She hadn’t liked a man that she was sexually attracted to for a long time. It scared her a great deal, but she kept telling herself that it didn’t really matter — it wasn’t as though she was ever going to be in a position to betray her feelings again. Sex was out of the question. Apart from the no-monkey-business rule, she figured she’d pretty much had her chance and lost it where Mac was concerned. It wasn’t as though he wasn’t spoiled for choice. The list of hotel staff alone who wanted to sleep with him would form a queue back to the mainland. She was pretty damn certain that Mac wasn’t lying awake at night the way she was, going over certain little moments from the day, trying not to think about their one night together.
She loved his laugh and his cowboy-to-the-rescue walk made her thighs weak. Just the sight of his strong, long fingers on the steering wheel or on cutlery or on pretty much anything was enough to invoke an image of those same fingers plucking at her nipples or delving between her legs.
To say that, after five days in his company, she was turned on was putting it mildly. She felt like one big overstimulated nerve ending. One whiff of his aftershave and she had to hide her hardened nipples by crossing her arms over her chest. God forbid she should brush up against him accidentally — she simply wouldn’t be answerable for her actions.
Grace ran a comb through her bangs, then rubbed on sun-block and slicked on a coat of very berry lip gloss. The hot weather dictated her wardrobe more than her mood, and she pulled on her black cherry-print hipster bikini, then topped it off with a fifties red-and-white gingham playsuit. Red plastic flip-flops, complete with a white silk daisy on each toe, completed her ensemble. She looked very Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island, but what the hey, she was in Hawaii.
She wandered downstairs to meet the others, but pulled up short when she found only Mac waiting for her in the foyer.
“Where are Marla and Frank?” she asked lightly.
“Food poisoning. Guess those fish cakes weren’t such a great idea yesterday,” Mac said.
Grace pulled a face, remembering the questionable hygiene of the beach vendor where Frank and Marla had insisted on lunching the previous day. She and Mac had turned up their noses at the offerings, electing to wait till they got back to the hotel to eat. In hindsight, a wise decision, it seemed.
“Are they both okay? Should we call a doctor or anything?” Grace asked.
“The desk staff are filled in and I took up extra water and sports drinks for them. I got the strong impression they’d both prefer to be left to their misery in private.” Mac shrugged.
“Right.”
There was an awkward pause as they both registered that this meant they would be alone for the day. Mac broke it by clearing his throat.
“I spoke to Claudia this morning, too. She’s keen on the scuba-diving idea over the nature trek, so I thought we could go check out the operators and find someone suitable.”
“Sure. That sounds…sensible,” Grace said lamely.
She’d been hoping against hope that the nature trek would win out over the scuba. She had a thing about any situation where there was finite oxygen. If Mac had just announced they were going down in a submarine or were about to launch off into space in a rocket ship, she’d feel the same way. It wasn’t exactly a phobia, as such. More a preference. A strong, persistent preference.
Forcing her worry down, Grace followed Mac out to the SUV. For the first time all week, she slid into the passenger seat next to him. Though they’d taken turns driving, there had been an unspoken agreement between them that either Marla or Frank took the front passenger seat to avoid exactly the kind of forced intimacy that enveloped them the moment the car doors thudded closed and Mac pulled away from the curb.
“Did the hotel have any suggestions?” Grace asked, hating the way her voice broke a little in the middle of her sentence.
“There’s a tour group who does beginners scuba courses in Hanauma Bay. I grabbed some brochures.”
Mac pulled a folded glossy pamphlet from his hip pocket and passed it over, his gaze remaining steady on the road.
“Wow. It looks great,” she said. Even to her own ears, her voice sounded stiff and fake.
Mac shot her a look and she pretended great interest in the brochure.
“Are you actually going to dive?” she asked oh-so-casually a few minutes later.
“Yep.”
Her buttocks clenched with fear. Damn him. If he dived, she had to go down, too. Why did she have so much stupid, stupid pride?
She stared at the brochure intently, trying to talk herself into it. The coral looked vibrant, almost psychedelic, and the fish looked cute and appealing. Even the water was a clear, perfect aqua.
By the time they’d found the dock where the tour group operated, she’d worked up a head of steam. She was going to do it. She refused to go down in Mac’s mental photo album as the girl who was afraid. Not that she imagined she was memorable enough to go down in his mental photo album at all, but just in case. And it wasn’t as though she was deathly scared of scuba. It was more a matter of inclination than anything else, and if her inclination happened to change, so be it. It was no big deal.
So when Mac stepped up to the counter and requested one dive and one accompanying ticket, she found herself leaning forward.
“Make that two dives,” she said firmly.
Mac raised his eyebrows.
“Thought you weren’t interested,” he said.
“What gave you that impression?” she asked airily.
Like many decisions in her life lately, she began to regret putting her hand up to dive almost as soon as the boat pulled away from the dock and started cruising out to sea. The wet suits, masks, flippers and tanks hanging on either side of the wide, open cabin looked utterly foreign and she gripped the edges of her wooden bench-seat as their guide, Sean, began instructing them on the basics.
“The important thing is never to panic,” Sean said as he handed out masks and snorkels for them to practice with.
Too late.
She noted with trepidation that Sean appeared to be around thirteen years old. Surely she shouldn’t be taking instruction from an adolescent? What could he know, after all?
She glanced around at the six other people who’d signed on for the beginner’s dive, but they all looked excited and not in the least bit worried about the fact that Doogie Howser’s younger brother was their instructor.
“I’ve been diving off Oahu for nearly twenty years and we’ve never had a serious incident. Scuba is very safe as long as you follow the golden rules — always listen to your dive leader, never leave your dive buddy and always, always go slowly to the surface. We won’t be going down deep enough for anyone to be at risk of the bends today, but it’s a good rule to learn early.”
Sean made eye contact with everyone to stress his words of warning and Grace saw with relief that there were crows feet radiating out from around his brown eyes. Not a teenager then. Given his comment about twenty years of experience, maybe he was even a sensible, experienced adult.
She nearly jumped out of her skin when Mac leaned across and spoke in her ear.
“Relax. It’s supposed to be fun.”
She nodded, her determination to tough this out doubling. Squelching all her irrational fears into a corner, she concentrated intently on Sean’s instructions, learning how to equalize the pressure in her ears as she descended, how to signal that she was okay, how to signal that she was distressed and how to clear her mask should it fill with water. Sean passed out the tanks next and Grace soon found herself breathing in bottled oxygen and battling to keep her heart rate down.
When the boat’s chugging motors switched to an idle, she glanced up from inspecting the gauge on her tank and knew they had arrived. Smiling broadly, Sean distributed shorty wet suits.
