Chapter 25

Saturday in Miami - Ellie

Luke's Miami condo was as nice as his mansion. It was in a new high-rise on the beach. The black town car that brought us from the airport pulled up in front, and I stepped out into the thick, humid air to feel an ocean breeze touch my face. I glanced around in the bright sun to see palm trees, hot-pink bougainvillea, hibiscus, and whole lot of other tropical flowers I couldn't even name.

Inside the building, the lobby was all slick white marble and chrome and glass from floor to ceiling. Even the elevators were gorgeous. They were four huge glass cylinders open to the lobby that slid silently up and down. Luke had to show me how they worked. I'd never seen elevators that only went to certain floors. Pretty smart invention, actually.

The condo itself was also a lot of floor-to-ceiling glass and chrome. It was a corner unit with three bedrooms and three and a half baths and somehow managed to have water views from nearly every room.

Luke had done great on the flight and the car ride here. He hadn't even broken a sweat as far as I could tell. I was proud of him. But I also didn't want to bring it up and force him to think about it. I wanted him to take the lead in whether he wanted to discuss how he felt being out in public again.

"Why did you buy this place if you never visit?" I asked as I gazed out across the turquoise water. Of course I'd asked Meg why she'd never mentioned it to me. And nope, there were no pictures of this place on the celebrity gossip sites.

"My business manager suggested I invest in real estate."

"So, is this condo and your place in Nashville everything?" Okay. Probably too nosey, but I mean, was he gonna bust out with some sort of ski chalet in Switzerland next?

"Nah. I also bought a house on a lake in Green Bay."

I turned to look at him. "Green Bay?"

"Yeah, huge Packers fan." He pointed his right thumb at himself.

"Oh, yeah, right. I seem to recall that," I replied with a laugh. An image of Luke lying on Meg's couch wearing a dark-green and yellow Packers T-shirt flashed through my mind. I'm sure he'd said something sarcastic to me at the time, but I couldn't remember what, of course. In fact, it was getting harder and harder to remember times when Luke had said sarcastic things to me. These days the phenomenal kissing seemed to take up more and more of my headspace where he was concerned.

Luke's phone lit up, and a smile covered his face. "Excuse me a minute," he said, walking away toward his bedroom and answering the call.

Of course I wanted to know what it was about and why he'd left the room to take the call, but I also knew it was none of my business. So I spent the few minutes he was gone staring down at the beach and trying not to think about how much I wanted to make out with him again later. If you'd have told me a year ago, hell, a month ago, that I'd be in Miami for what felt like a romantic weekend with Luke Knightley, I would have told you to shut your bleeping mouth, but here I was.

This whole thing with Luke was healthy, I told myself for the thousandth time since I'd agreed to come on this trip. No strings attached and no future involved. I needed to stop acting like any guy I dated could possibly be the future Mr. Ellie Hoffman. I mean, dating for dating's sake was fun too, wasn't it? Not that Luke and I were dating. We definitely were not. Kissing only. Not dating. But I realized that I'd put too much pressure on all of my actual dates since Vance. If a guy had shown the slightest hint of any behavior I equated with Vance, I immediately shut down the possibility of any future dates. I needed to be more casual. More breezy. More open to just fun. And what was this with Luke if not the textbook definition of breezy-casual-just fun?

The truth was I'd forgotten how to have fun. Luke had even had to tell me I had a stick up my ass. I mean, I knew it was there, but he'd confirmed it. Somewhere between being hyper-focused on school, taking care of Grandma, and being constantly stressed about how much I owed in student loans, I'd lost the fun part of me. This time with Luke was helping me loosen up. And now I was in Miami, ready to enjoy myself. The stick was officially coming out.

When Luke re-entered the living room, he'd already slipped his phone back in his pocket. He gave me a wide smile. "That was the ma?tre d' at the restaurant I booked for tonight."

"Ma?tre d'?" I echoed, raising my eyebrows. "Sounds fancy." Why did it give me a thrill that he'd booked a fancy restaurant for us? It shouldn't. It definitely shouldn't, right?

"It's very fancy," he agreed in a comical tone before strolling over to pull me against him with his right arm. "Damn. I can't wait to get this sling off," he whispered into my ear, giving me full body tremors. "I want to be able to wrap both arms around you."

His mouth quickly captured mine, and I eagerly returned the kiss, but the thought of us still kissing in a few weeks' time (post-sling) kept spinning through my head. How long was he planning on keeping this going? I thought we'd just do it 'til we got it out of our systems. Surely, that would be sooner than a few weeks, right? Right?

Nope. No. The new stickless Ellie wasn't going to worry about such things. She was just going to kiss this man until her lips were raw and worry about things like timelines and smart decisions later.

When Luke finally pulled his mouth from mine, I was in a lust haze and barely registered it when he said, "Want to go down to the pool?"

I shook my head and squeezed my thighs together before blowing out a sexually frustrated breath. Frick. The man could kiss. And he had to be as sexually frustrated as I was, right?

"Sure," I finally replied. "Sounds like the perfect Miami thing to do."

"Great. I'll go throw on my trunks, you put on your suit, and I'll meet you back out here in fifteen minutes."

"Sounds good." I turned to go to my bedroom. Like a perfect gentleman, he had given me my own room at the condo. Which, of course, was a good thing. I mean, we were still just kissing. A boundary I had every intention of keeping. Right?

As I wandered off to my room, I couldn't help but glance back at him. His ass in those jeans was just so?—

"Ellie!"

"Yep." My guilty gaze swung up to see him wink at me. Oh, great. He'd caught me checking out his ass. Cool. Cool. Cool.

"After we lie in the sun for a while, we'll come back up and get ready. Because we're going out and we're gonna paint the town red," Luke said with a wide grin, obviously being silly.

"Sounds good," I replied, laughing.

Okay, so he wasn't freaking out about being in public. That was promising. And we were—gulp—going on a date, weren't we?