It’s almost impossible to pinpoint when it was exactly I stopped hating Josephine. If I was to guess, it would have been about the time she had a sweet, shuddering orgasm while she was riding me with her head thrown back and her hips working in the perfect rhythm. 

We both lost it last night. Totally lost it. Was it fucking amazing? Yes. Would I like to whisk her back to that bed right now and have my way with her for the rest of the day—the rest of the week, even? Hell, yes.

But I can’t take advantage of her. I can’t completely dismiss the uneasiness I feel when I remember the whispered hatred we hissed at one another while we drowned in passion last night.

There’s also this: the more time I spend in her bed, the harder it will be to justify that it’s a vacation fling. The last thing on my agenda is to get involved with a woman like Josephine, a woman who clearly needs someone to manage her life for her. I have to do enough of that at Cash Industries.

Bottom line? Last night shouldn’t have happened.

I need to make sure this last chance is used in the appropriate way. I need to make sure we’re on the same page.

The only problem is that I don’t even know what page I’m on. I woke up this morning with my heart hammering out of my chest. Even a run over the resort’s trails didn’t clear my head—not that I truly expected it to. 

The echo of her words has been ringing in my ears all morning. Fuck this up again, and we’re done. 

Done with what? Done with the week? Done forever? That wouldn’t be much of a stretch. We’ve been “done” since high school. Come to think of it, how can we be “done”? We never even started.

If I take her back to bed, I’ll lose my perspective on what’s right.

So I take her out for coffee instead.

She looks cute as hell in a little tank top and shorts, her dark hair pulled up on top of her head in a messy bun. The way she moves across the sand, a little grin planted on her face, makes me want to take her back to the bungalow right the fuck now.

“It’s good,” she says, and for a split second, I think she was talking about last night.

“The coffee?” 

She grins and takes another sip. “What else?”

Two can play this game. “I know you like it when I rubbed your—” Why do I keep doing this, when what I need to say is that we can’t do that again?

“Stop, stop!” she cries, twisting toward the ocean. “You’re making me jealous.”

“Jealous of who?”

“Of myself, last night. Fine. Fine! I admit it. It was pretty good.” She purses her lips, and I can’t keep myself from laughing. 

I can’t go there, not any further, because any second now my cock is going to be too hard to think straight. “Yes. Pretty good.”

“Pretty good for two people who hate each other.” Josephine flicks her gaze over to me, raising her other hand to cradle her cup of coffee. The air shifts, darkens. I’m sure we had been flirting before, but now her mouth presses into a thin line. 

“I don’t know if that’s accurate.”

“Don’t you?” She says it lightly, and the color in her cheeks deepens. “Look, I think you’re…” Now she takes a moment to run her eyes up and down my shirtless body. There’s no way she doesn’t notice that my running shorts are now a tent. “You’re unbelievably hot, Charlie Cash. But we don’t have to pretend to like each other beyond…you know, the…physical.”

Something goes cold down in the pit of my gut, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. Last night, I didn’t have to think about it. The wave of energy carried us both where we wanted to go. 

The right thing to do would be to walk away now, before either of us gets any more involved. I know it like I know the sun rises in the east. But my conscience rips neatly in two.

I want more of Josephine, and in this moment, I’m willing to do whatever it takes to smooth this friction over.

“Physical,” I repeat, turning the word over in my mouth. “Physical…like this?” I dart across the sand and wrap one arm around her waist. She doesn’t pull away. In fact, her body bends toward mine an inch, fitting into my grip. “Or like this?” I kiss her on the corner of her mouth. All of it is like nothing I would ever have done if I was back in the city and not on this godforsaken island with Josephine Paxton, but it seems…right.

Until it doesn’t. A shadow crosses Josephine’s face. “No, I mean it.”

“Which part? The part where you were desperate to go back to the bedroom?”

I try to lighten the mood, but she’s serious. “The part where you have no obligation.” She stops, and I stop with her. We’re right in the center of two swells in the sand, a little alcove forming in the rocks between them. 

I look up at the clouds, pretending to search my memory. “I thought you said I had one more chance.”

She bites her lip. “I might have said that, but—”

“But what? Are you taking it back?”

“Are you taking back your true nature?” Her laugh sounds tinged with cold. “Charlie, you don’t have to act like this is anything other than a one-night stand. It was fun as hell, don’t get me wrong.” Josephine swallows hard. “But we both know you’re not the kind of person who’s going home twice with a one-night stand.”

Where the hell is this coming from? She curled up to me last night like we’d been together forever. She told me to call her by her nickname, for God’s sake. And now she’s trying to get me to admit that this is all some game. 

Well, maybe it’s true.

I pull away from her then, giving her a little space. “You’re right.” I take a deep breath before I can summon any more words. “Last night shouldn’t have happened.” The words sound hollow to my ears. They sound wrong.

But they cut deep. A split second of profound pain crosses her face, but then it’s gone, so fast I think I might have imagined it. Josephine pastes on a smile—a big one—and shrugs. “No, probably not. And I shouldn’t be taking it so seriously.” 

A breeze picks up off the ocean, carrying her scent right to me, and I want nothing more than to wrap my hand around the side of her neck and kiss those full lips, cover her mouth with mine and never come up for air.

I hate how much I want it.

And I want it so much that I can’t help taking one half-step toward her.

“You should take it seriously, because I—”

With the most grace I’ve ever seen in a human being, Josephine lowers her coffee cup to the sand, screwing it in so it won’t fall over, and then straightens up to her full height. “Because you got in over your head last night?” She’s wearing a cocky smile, and damn it, I like it. “Well, so did I. And what I meant—” Her expression slips back into a full-on display of confidence. “What I meant is that you have one more chance to have fun with me before we’re both off this island and we never have to see each other again.”

It strikes me as utterly wrong to treat her as a vacation fuck, but I can’t make my mouth form the word no.

Josephine raises one finger in the air. “On one condition.”

“What is it?”

“We don’t get too…attached. I stay in my room, you stay in yours, and we meet once a day for whatever fun we want to have.”

I arch an eyebrow. “Just once?”

“Yes.” Her voice is firm.

I glance out toward the ocean. “Last night…was it midnight?”

Josephine narrows her eyes. “What does midnight have to do with anything?”

“Well,” I say, treading as carefully as I can with my erection raging out of control. “If it was after midnight, then we already used up our fun for the day, and—”

She leaps at me, driving me backward into the alcove, her entire body a ball of sexy energy, and then her mouth is on mine, kissing me hard, like it might really be the last chance. We’ve already tumbled out of sight of the stretch of beach when she speaks. “Just this once, I’ll make an exception.”