Free Sex on the Beach (Cosmo Red-Hot Reads from Harlequin) by Delphine Dryden Page A

satisfied with that. “Also sex hormones.”
    “Yes, they do bring the stupid, don’t they? Crap. What am I gonna do, Jules? Seeing him again, it’s like I grew back an arm I didn’t realize I was missing. It feels so natural I can’t believe I went without it for a year.” Okay, maybe she didn’t need another drink to reach full-disclosure mode. “But then I think maybe it’s because I’m lonely and it’s so nice to be part of a couple again. I don’t want to make a mistake.”
    It echoed in her mind—
I
don’t want to make a mistake...a
mistake...a
mistake
—and she nearly missed the importance of Julie’s response.
    “God, I know. That’s so similar to where I am with Alan right now.”
    Huh?
Wait...what?
    “Alan? What do you—No way! Wait, seriously? Why didn’t you tell me you were—?” Her brain grasped for the usual baseline assumption that Julie and Alan were destined to end up together, but for once it was simply failing to compute. “Oh my God, I was hanging all over him yesterday, I had no idea.”
    “We weren’t, then. This is recent.”
    “That was last night. How much more recent can you get?”
    “Um, later last night. We danced, and I started talking to some guy, but he turned out to be a total sleazebag, and then he kissed me. Alan, not the sleazebag. Then he told me about the time he got crabs in college from wearing his roommate’s jeans. Which is a sucky way to get crabs.”
    Oh
,
for God’s sake.
Seriously?
What idiot college boy with an STD doesn’t try to palm off that lame story on a girl?
Why didn’t he just tell her he caught it from a toilet seat?
And wow
,
good thing I didn’t end up sleeping with him
,
after all...I
guess.
“And you believed that?”
    “Well, yeah. Actually, yeah, I did. I do. It was a good story. And after that...you know.”
    To her chagrin, she did know. Boy, did she ever know. There but for the grace of God, and all that. “He told you about his experience with venereal disease, so you slept with him? Seems logical.” In bizzaro land. Where she was evidently vacationing.
    “It made more sense in context. Also I maybe, just possibly, a teensy bit—”
    Oh my God
,
what now?
His last girlfriend didn’t really understand him?
He can’t do it with a rubber because he just can’t bear not feeling the full experience?
Ugh.
“Spit it out.”
    “I may have been in love with him for about three years.”
    Oh
,
was that all?
“Well, duh.”
    As far as she was concerned, that was all she needed to say. The whole thing had been obvious to her all along. Thank heavens it was now out in the open.
    She snagged the waiter on his next pass, billed everything to their room, and within minutes she and Julie were on the beach, enjoying the Technicolor sunset. Pinks, purples, reds...too many colors to name, in tiers across the sky. It was a postcard in the making, almost too pretty to be beautiful. It called for rendering in pastels, watercolors, a young girl’s diary. Hearts and flowers. A cotton-candy sort of sunset. Amanda wanted to be world-weary and cynical, but she couldn’t keep it up. Had she been wearing socks, they would have been knocked off by the hot chromatic tango the sky was executing as she watched.
    She took off her flip-flops and dug her toes into the sand, considering a stroll down to the water’s edge. If she toe-fisted there, the tide would run in around her ankles, billow the sand up, bury her deeper before it receded. She could burrow into Oahu, and pretend she never had to leave this fairy-tale place with the ferociously great sex and the magical sunsets.
    Julie, however, was in a less willfully oblivious frame of mind. “You’re really gonna drop that ‘duh’ into the conversation with no follow-up?”
    Yeah
,
I
was.
We’ve been friends a long time;
I
think an occasional
“
duh
”
is not only acceptable
,
but probably de rigueur for a relationship like this.
And you’ve been in love with the guy since you met