PRODUCER
What were you doing in the time you took off?
Finn laughs.
FINN
Doing what every idiotic, dream-delusional chef does, of course — trying to open me own restaurant.
PRODUCER
What made you come back to yachting?
Long pause. Finn cracks his neck, smiles.
FINN
Masochism, I suppose.
Blink.
I needed to blink.
I needed to blink, to smile, to fuckingbreathe.
I was all too aware of the cameras trained on us, trained onmeas Finn waited for me to respond. But the nickname I never thought I’d hear again had sent an unwelcome warmth down my spine that had apparently seared my nerves and rendered me immobile.
This can’t be happening.
He can’t be real.
But he was. I knew it even as my brain tried to convince me otherwise. No defense mechanism was going to save me from the reality that Finn Pearson was in the crew quarters with me.
Two years had aged him, but only in ways that made him somehow even more attractive than he was the first time I met him in Greece. We’d worked the same charter there together for four months.
They’d been some of the happiest months of my life.
Until the memory of them became a repetitive heartbreak.
Finn and I had said goodbye at the end of the charter, and it wasn’t a pretty goodbye.
His boyish eyes were older now, more mature, the edges of them crinkling a bit as he threw that signature smirk of his at me.
God, how that smile made me weak. Even still. Even after he left me broken on the floor.
My knees buckled as I grappled, reaching through the depths of my emotions for anger but coming up blank. It seemed I was going to settle firmly with shock and disbelief, instead.
I found safety in cataloguing all the ways he’d changed, so I let myself focus on that while my brain scrambled to catch up and make words again.
His chestnut brown hair was longer than the last time I’d seen him, the locks messy and curling a bit over the edges of his ears. It somehow looked styled and like he’d just rolled out of bed all at once. I finally managed to blink, but with that came a flash of a memory long ago — my fingers tangled in that hair, gripping, pulling…
Stubble lined his jaw and upper lip, framing his stupidly perfect heart-shaped face. There were shocks of white in that dark beard that should have been reserved for a man twice his age. That somehow made him hotter.
The bastard.
And amid all that dark hair, sitting right above that cocky tilt of his lips were the eyes that had once been my downfall.
They were the color of the sea; green and blue with flecks of gold.