Thankfully, the first person who runs up when I step into the resort’s lobby is the one I’ve most been looking forward to seeing.

“Oh, you poor thing,” Brooke says, playing mother hen. My bestie wraps me in a tight hug even though I’m going to get her rather smashing sailboat-print sundress damp. Then she looks me up and down, tucking her light brown hair behind her ears in a characteristic anxious gesture.

“It wasn’t that big a deal,” I say quickly. “I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”

She waves me off. “I just finished picking flower arrangements. Did you know it’s possible to get sick of looking at gorgeousness? It’s a good thing Trevor and I found one we really liked early on, because by the end I was ready to hand over my eyeballs and tell the florist to decide with a dice roll.” She laughs. “I’m so glad you’re here, Ruby.”

“And in one piece, after all,” Maggie says, ambling over. She’s wearing a casual Grecian dress that, combined with her curves and the bouncy waves of her chestnut hair, gives her a goddess-like air. Her grin, on the other hand, is all imp. She holds up a key card. “You’re checked in. Come on. Let’s get you to your room and on to the pampering portion of the holiday.”

My room—“Just down the hall from mine!” Brooke says—leaves me breathless. Gauzy curtains float where the open sliding glass door leads out onto a balcony with lounger, private jacuzzi, and a view over the sparkling turquoise water. The bed is covered with a duvet so airy I immediately want to bury myself in it and a thread count probably in the millions. A faint floral scent drifts by, so subtle I’m not sure whether it’s natural or hidden essential oils, but I’m okay with it either way.

The bathroom features both a glass-walled shower stall with rainfall option—hmmm, might need to put that off until the thunderstorm is less fresh in my memory—and a jetted tub. “The toiletries are all natural ingredients,” Maggie comments as we convene there. She gives the same pitch for the cupcakes she makes for a living, and I can vouch that they’re pretty spectacular. Of course, that’s partly because her natural ingredients are frequently of the boozy variety.

“And the water is solar heated,” Brooke says brightly. “Plus they have this special water recycling system so it’s all as eco-friendly as possible.”

“Yes,” Maggie says dryly. “Trevor is in heaven.” Brooke’s husband-to-be is known first for his mad bass skills and second for being the crunchiest eco-geek this side of San Francisco.

I grab one of the hand towels and barely restrain an indecent sigh at the softness. Still, a glance in the mirror tells me it’s going to take at least a shower to fix the catastrophe that is currently my hair.

“Was it awful, getting stuck on the road?” Brooke says. “I mean, with the storm and all . . .” She grimaces.

I don’t want her to worry any more than she clearly already has. “Ah, it was hardly any time before Will showed up.”

Brooke spins toward Maggie. “You sent Will to get her?”

Maggie raises her hands. “I was asking around, and he overheard and volunteered. I figured Trevor’s friends were safe. If he’s a serial killer or something, you really should have told me.”

“It’s nothing like that,” I say, wishing Brooke hadn’t brought it up. “We just had an . . . awkward situation in college.”

“It was more than that,” Brooke says.

“Okay,” Maggie says, waggling a finger at me. “I think you’d better spill, and there are a lot of comfy chairs around here I can torture you with if necessary.”

I can’t help smiling at the Monty Python reference. “I misjudged him,” I say. “I trusted him when I shouldn’t have.”

“They started out at each other’s throats,” Brooke informs Maggie. “Every day Ruby would call me to vent about how he’d been showing off for the prof or correcting her in class—so, of course, I knew it was love.”

I roll my eyes. “He did get on my nerves. He even finagled his way into getting a spot with everyone’s dream advisor at the same time I did, when the guy normally only took on one undergrad a year. But we ended up managing a project for him, and it turned out we actually got along when we were working together. We started hanging out more as friends, and then my mom had a cancer scare back home—he cut me a ton of slack, held my hand when I was freaking out . . .”

“That’s so sweet,” Maggie says, without her usual sarcasm.

“Well, yeah. I thought so. He was still seeing other girls here and there, but nothing serious, and I guess I got rosy-eyed imagining he’d get serious with me.” I bite my lip.

“But he turned you down?”

“Worse,” Brooke says dramatically. “She wrote him a letter confessing all her feelings.”

I cringe, just remembering. “I got drunk, and worked up the courage to go over to his frat house when he was out and stuck it under his door.”

“So far, so good,” Maggie says.

“Yeah, well, the next day I came by the house for the study session-slash-hangout we’d already planned. And . . .” I stop.

Damn it. The memory still hurts, with an echo of the nervous pinching in my stomach when I walked over, my head spinning with the possibilities. I hadn’t heard anything from him, so maybe he was going to pretend it had never happened, but maybe he wanted to wait to talk in person. To let me down easy, or to tell me he felt the same way? Hope fluttered in my chest.

That’s when I saw all the guys clustered around the bulletin board in the common room, jostling each other and snickering. I can still hear Will’s voice, reading with wry amusement the words I’d written so sincerely the night before.

“ ‘Sometimes a person comes along who makes you think all the clichés and fairy tales could be real.’ ” He chuckled and nudged whoever was standing next to him in the throng. “Can you believe that?”

My heart had started thudding hard enough to shake me, and my cheeks flared searing hot. For a second I couldn’t convince my legs to move. I knew I should march on over there and give him a piece of my mind, take him to task for treating my emotional so cruelly. So I did what every courageous, independent woman would do.

I turned on my heels and ran.

Reliving that moment, I swallow hard. Brooke touches my arm. “Ruby?”

I make myself shrug. “He pinned it to the bulletin board in the common room for everyone to gawk at. All the guys in the frat were laughing at it. Will was standing there laughing about it with them.”

Maggie sucks in her breath. “Yeah,” says Brooke. “Exactly.”

“I gave him my heart and he took a dump on it, basically,” I say. “He couldn’t have cared about me even a bit. I was an idiot to think he did.”

“You weren’t an idiot,” Brooke says firmly. “He put on a good show. I’m so sorry you’re going to have to put up with him here. I really didn’t know Trevor’s Will was your Will.”

“How exactly did that happen?” I ask, grateful to change the subject from my past humiliations. “He wasn’t at Trevor’s birthday party last year, or your engagement party, or, like, a gazillion other things everyone else showed up for. I never ran into him once before now.”

“The story I heard is that they were on the rowing team together at USC,” Brooke says. “You know how guys are. They’ll barely talk in five years and still see each other as BFFs.”

That explains it. I straighten my spine. “Well, I’m not going to let him get to me. I learned my lesson. I’ll steer clear of him, and we’ll both be happy.”

* * *

After a shower—not the rainfall kind—and a wardrobe change into my favorite teal halter dress—it sets off my eyes and makes my figure look nearly hourglass; magic!—I venture out of my room to explore.

Beyond the lobby desks, the main floor opens up to an outer deck where teak recliners circle a sparkling infinity pool. Palapas spot the golden sand of the beach beyond. The layout of the resort allows the jungle to sprout up here and there around the deck, and a natural breeze flows through the whole place. An environmentally friendly substitute for air conditioning, I guess. I can’t say it isn’t pleasant.

Really, there’s nothing unpleasant I can say about Will’s resort, as much as I might enjoy getting a mental dig in. It’s one of the most un-unpleasant places I’ve ever had the satisfaction of inhabiting, down to the modern-yet-classic styling of the columns and doorframes.

But then, Will has always been good at appearances, hasn’t he?

Speak of the devil. The man himself ambles into view on the deck, side-by-side with a woman I haven’t seen before. Her ebony hair is pulled back in a chignon, and a sleek indigo sheath dress cloths her tall, svelte frame. She doesn’t look more than a year or two older than me, but she’s exactly the sort of woman who always makes me feel like even at 28 I’m just a frivolous girl.

I watch their stroll, safely hidden from view by a massive fern. It doesn’t help that she’s absolutely gorgeous. No wonder Will can’t seem to take his eyes off of her. And why wouldn’t she be into him? Successful, handsome, charm to spare—he’s even more the playboy than he was in college.

The thought pinches at my chest. Is that jealousy? Oh, no. He can flirt with whomever he wants—it’s no business of mine.

And yet I’m still standing there when Will gives the woman a brief wave and turns to head straight toward me.

Ack! The last thing I need is him thinking I’m lurking around to spy on his canoodling. I scoot backward and spin around to hustle off—and find myself face-to-face with a speeding luggage cart.

I yelp. The porter gasps and yanks the cart to the side. Several of the smaller bags tumble off the stack of suitcases onto the floor.

Nice one, Walters. “I’m so sorry!” I babble as I grab a few of the runaway bags. I’m just setting the last of them back on the cart when someone taps my shoulder. My heart sinks.

“You know, if your things were ruined in the rain, there are alternatives to hijacking other people’s luggage, Ruby,” Will says with a teasing arch of his eyebrows.

I glower at him. “I’m just giving your employee a hand.”

The porter, clearly a generous spirit, hurries off without mentioning I caused the problem in the first place.

“So what do you think of the place?” Will asks, reminding me of how much I don’t want to tell him the answer to that question. But I’m not going to lie.

“It’s nice enough, I suppose,” I say nonchalantly, “if you’re into comfort and splendor and that sort of thing.”

Will’s smile twitches as if he’s trying not to laugh. I’m not sure if that’s a victory for me or a fail. “As hard to impress as always, I see,” he says. “Let me guess: You’d be happier spending your vacation adventuring off on some uncharted planet?”

I don’t go around broadcasting my sci-fi geekery to everyone I meet, but I’ve never been ashamed of it either. If you ask me, the world will be a much better place if the Star Trek vision of the future ever comes to be. All races and nations living in harmony, on a grand quest to bring the same kind of peace and compassion all across the galaxy? What’s not to like?

And that’s not even getting into how fantastic it’d be to have the technology to conjure any food you wanted out of thin air or zip across the planet in an instant.

But right now Will’s comment makes my cheeks burn. Star Trek was always our thing, the shared geek bonding that brought us together. I had written him off as another shallow frat douche when I noticed the logo sticker on the back of one of his notebooks. We wound up talking for hours in the campus pub that night, going over our favorite episodes, and which characters we were most like. (He was obviously a Riker, the full-of-himself ladies man gunning for the captain’s chair, and Will insisted I was a Janeway, breaking new ground and breaking balls as the first female captain in the franchise.)

The last thing I want to remember right now is how well I thought we’d clicked. As if it was a sign or something sappy like that. Sometimes, a TV show is just a TV show. I mean, Charles Manson might have been a fan, too! If there ever was a person who could have used a time machine . . . One quick hop into the future and younger me would have been so much wiser.

No chance of that at the moment, so I keep my cool with a careless wave of my hand. “Interplanetary adventuring could have some appeal. I’ve never been much of a beach bunny.”

“No,” Will agrees. For a second the look he gives me is almost speculative, unguarded enough that I’ve started to relax when he adds, “When you do take off on your interplanetary journeying, make sure you have the right company. You wouldn’t want to end up with a flat and no one to rescue you on the other side of the galaxy.”

He gives me a wink, and my hands clench even as the rest of my body flushes hotter. I suspect some very unwise words might have come out of my mouth, but just then the elevator dings, and half of Brooke’s extended family floods into the lobby.

“Ruby!” Maggie calls with a wave. “Time to kick off wedding week with a fancy dinner.”

“Count me in,” I say, turning my back on Will. I’d feel happier heading over to join the crowd if I didn’t know he was coming right behind me.