Chapter 293: Chapter 31
Rayne’s phone began ringing on the bar just as Liam picked up a can of shaving cream in the bathroom.
Absently shaking the can, he watched from the corner of his eye as she walked in from the balcony and picked up the phone to look at the caller’s number. She hesitated, biting her lip; then she raised the phone to her ear and answered the call.
With the hot water running in the sink, he couldn’t hear what she was saying, but her shoulders were stiff, her head was bent, and she was rubbing the back of her neck with her free hand.
Her body language spoke of tension and apprehension. From that, Liam deduced that her boyfriend was either telling her he was planning to leave for the island or else giving her hell for not picking his other calls.
A few monts after the call began, it ended, and she put the phone down. The call hadn’t lasted long enough for any sort of temperantal outburst from the boyfriend, which ant he wasn’t mad at her for not picking any of his calls.
And now the only remaining logical conclusion was that Rayne’s boyfriend had simply told her he was coming to Maranta and, also based on the brevity of the call, Rayne hadn’t attempted to discourage him from coming. That was not the behavior Liam had expected from her after all the ti they’d spent together and after he’d told her that he was ready for whatever lies ahead of them.
She obviously didn’t take him seriously, or she would have told her boyfriend about her decision to break up with him.
When Rayne walked into the bathroom, Liam was standing at the sink with a towel around his hips, shaving.
Surprised by the sweet intimacy of the mont, she leaned against the vanity and watched in the mirror as he finished shaving his throat. His face was covered in lather, with nothing visible except black eyebrows, long-lashed deep dark eyes, and a finely sculpted, sensual mouth.
He rinsed the razor under running water and glanced at her in the mirror, his mouth quirking in a half smile at her fascinated interest in his act of shaving; then he resud his task.
Stroke by deft stroke of the razor, his tanned face, with its chiseled jawline and strongly molded cheekbones, began to erge from beneath the lather.
Rayne watched, but thoughts of the phone call she’d just received from Max’s secretary soon furrowed her forehead into a worried frown.
According to his secretary, she and Max had worked late into the weekend nights, and Max had finally hamred out a satisfactory results with the other company.
He had tried to call Rayne from his office to tell her he was catching a 3:30 AM flight, arriving at 12:35 PM, Maranta ti, but all he’d gotten was a voicemail ssage at the villa and on her phone.
Refusing to leave a voicemail ssage to her again, he’d flung his phone down on the sofa and instructed the nervous secretary to start calling Rayne and to keep trying until the secretary actually heard Rayne’s voice.
"If I were you, Miss Wallace," the secretary had nervously warned, "I’d et him at the door with a soothing smile and a sexy outfit. He’s pissed off over a call he received from soone yesterday and not being able to get through to you for two days."
Max was going to be feeling a lot worse, Rayne knew, when she t him at the door with her luggage packed and her final decision about their relationship.
Liam noted her expression in the mirror. "You look like a troubled woman," he observed conversationally.
"He’s on his way to Maranta." She announced.
"That’s definitely a big issue."
"I need to et him at the villa to explain everything to him there. But i’m not sure what to do or say—"
"That’s an even bigger problem."
Surprised and a little hurt by his flippant responses and seemingly cavalier attitude toward a situation that was going to be very difficult for her, Rayne said quietly to hide her hurt, "You seem to know it all. Do you have any advice for this kind of situation?"
"Since he’s already on his way, we can’t change the situation," he replied, rinsing off the razor again. "But we can make it work by following a simple rule."
Rayne watched him shave his upper lip, and then she said, "What exactly is the rule?"
"The rule we all have to follow here is simple. Assuming you decide to choose him over , I am obliged to willingly step aside so he can spend the rest of his vacation with you and try to win you back."
"What’s his role?"she asked.
Passing the razor from jaw to cheekbone on the left side of his face, he said, "Once he realizes you want to be with soone else, he should accept it gracefully, wish you well and then get the hell out of your life."
"And what’s mine?"
"You need to make him understand you’re serious as quickly as possible—within hours, not days—and to avoid letting him get you near that nice big bed while you’re doing your explanining and convincing."
The reason for his curt tone and his reference to the bed hit her, and Rayne stared at him. "Are you jealous?"
"Not yet, but I’m getting there." He said, making short, quick razor strokes beneath his left ear.
"But why?" Rayne said, trying to hide how shafully pleased she was by his admission. "I can’t just break up with him over the phone or at the airport. I need to be at the villa to explain and let him down gently."
Instead of responding to that, Liam rinsed off his face and asked a question of his own, "How long is the flight from Zen?"
"About nine hours, because there are no direct flights."
Liam wasn’t getting any of that. He gave her a side eye and said, "It seems to
that encouraging him to fly nine hours to get here, expecting he’s going to be with you for the rest of his vacation, is a questioning way to let him down gently."
It finally dawned on Rayne that he was under a mistaken impression that she’d spoken to Max and encouraged him to co back, and she quickly clarified the situation for him.
"That call was from his secretary, not him. She told
his flight left at 3:30 AM and arrives at 12:35. I didn’t think he’d co with only four days left of our vacation. If I’d talked to him before he left, I wouldn’t have let him co thinking things were the sa between us." She explained.
"I’m sorry. I should have realized that."
Rayne smiled to ease his worry, but she was intrigued by realizing her influence over him and curious about the rules he ntioned so confidently.
Wanting to play a harmless ga to tease him and see how much he truly cared about her, she crossed her arms, tilted her head, and pretended to look at her nails. "So, what would you do if I change my mind about breaking up with my boyfriend?"
The studied nonchalance in her voice instantly alerted Liam to what she was up to, and he suppressed a smile as he reached for a towel.
He was no stranger to the subtle power dynamics between n and won. "In that case," he said calmly, "the rules are very clear and simple: You would need to call
to say you have changed your mind, and then I would switch roles with him."
"You would just gracefully accept defeat, wish
well, and step aside?" Rayne asked, disappointed.
Liam’s smile turned into a grin behind the towel. "Are you sure you want to play this ga with , sweetheart?"
"I don’t think so," she said cautiously, and he laughed.
He lifted his brows, waiting for a verbal coback, and when she had none, he gave her a boyish grin of satisfied superiority and turned back to the sink to comb his hair.
Rayne glanced at her watch. "I don’t want him to have to watch
packing, so I need to be finished before he arrives. So I should leave in fifteen minutes."
She glanced down at the shirt she was wearing, which belonged to Liam, and the black shorts she’d randomly grabbed after her shower, and decided to quickly change into sothing else, preferably pants for what lay ahead of her.
"I need to change my clothes," she said aloud as she walked over to the closet.
She took out a pair of dark pants and noticed that the black dress and shoes she’d worn the night before were missing. "Do you know where my black dress from last night is?"
Liam paused, comb in hand, and frowned in disbelief at the fact that she planned to wear such a dress to go break up with her boyfriend. "If you plan to wear that while explaining and letting him down gently, I think you’ve missed the point of our rules."
Rayne was taken aback by his stern tone, then she realized he’d misunderstood her yet again and smiled. She had no intention of wearing the dress; she’d simply asked because it wasn’t in the closet. But then the realization that he was jealous made her pleased.
She slid serenely onto the chair at the dressing table opposite the sink and began to brush her hair.
"There’s that tone again," she mused as if thinking to herself. "Was that the sound of a jealous man who says he’d let
go without protest if I changed my mind today at the villa?"
Briefly closing his eyes in surprise that he’d fallen into her trap of revealing his jealousy, Liam silently sighed and decided not to argue with her. Yes, he was jealous; it was a normal reaction for any male who sensed his woman was about to slip past his fingers.
And now that he had decided to commit to a relationship for the first ti, he would never allow another man to step into his territory or dare to lay a finger on his woman.
As he watched her brush her glossy red hair, he couldn’t rember ever feeling as utterly lighthearted and content as he felt at that mont.
"Mr. Ramirez took our clothes from last night away while you were in the shower. He’ll return everything nicely cleaned in a little while."
A few minutes later after she finished changing, Rayne joined Liam on the balcony, where he was standing at the wall, looking out at the water.
"I have to leave, Liam."
He turned, noticed the suitcase she was carrying, and the sight of it gave him a mont’s panic that she’d leave and never return to him before he realized she’d need it to pack her things at the villa.
The cheerful mood of a few minutes earlier turned somber as she put the suitcase on the table and walked over to him to say goodbye.
"Are you sure you don’t want
to go with you and wait sowhere inside the hotel restaurant while you talk to him?" he asked, slipping his hands around her waist.
Rayne rested her hands against his chest and shook her head. Beneath his white knit polo shirt, she could feel his heart beating in a slow, steady rhythm, and she drew strength from that.
"I need so ti alone before I see him, ti to separate ntally and emotionally from us and focus on him instead. I’ll et you in Pineville, right where we got off the boat yesterday, at 5:00 PM."
"Depending on how he reacts, you may end up there in a lot less than three hours after you break the news to him." He pointed out.
"Then I’ll use the ti to separate myself from him and begin to focus on us. How about that?"
Liam nodded and smiled down into her green eyes, admiring her ethics and sense of fairness.
She smiled back, the breeze teasing her hair, her fingers splaying across his heart in a tender touch he was already associating with her. She was absolutely right, Liam knew, about the wisdom of forgetting about ’them’ for the next few hours.
"Kiss
goodbye," he said, prepared to give her a brief, chaste kiss, but she wrapped her arms around him, molded her parted lips to his, and gave him a long, scorching kiss that made his hands flex and his fingers dig into her back.
"I’m going to miss you," he whispered as the kiss ended and she picked up her suitcase.
"I’ll be back before you know it." She assured, beaming at him.
Liam stayed where he was, rather than walking her to the door of the suite, but his view from the balcony included the main entrance of the hotel, so he saw her a few minutes later when the doorman signaled a car arranged for her and put her suitcase into the backseat.
As the car passed below their balcony, she smiled and waved at him through the open window.
"Hurry back!" he called to her, and she nodded.
The car made a U-turn and drove off down the private drive toward the main road, and Liam watched it vanish. Then he turned his head toward the beach and leaned his forearms on the balcony wall, watching a cruise ship gliding slowly across the horizon.
Tomorrow, he decided, he’d take Rayne to his new ho in the country he’d planned to move to. He would arrange his jet, and they would go there for a few days. When Neil and Mia returned from New York, he would tell them the news of him finally taking a girlfriend he genuinely liked from the bottom of his heart.
Rayne was going to like his new ho; he knew it. And though Neil would make fun of him for going against his words of never sticking with one woman, he didn’t give a damn. He’d found the one for him, and he would never let her slip away. Never.
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