Free What She Needs by Lacey Alexander Page B

beach chair and struggled to stop replaying the unbelievable memories of last night over and over in her mind. She enjoyed the sun and sea air and peaceful views and tried to quit stressing over the unexpected turn her trip had so quickly taken. She attempted to focus on the pleasant sensation that her skin was beginning to tan beneath her coconut-scented sunscreen. But all she really kept thinking was, I still can’t believe I had sex with that guy last night. Really hot sex.
    When a waiter who introduced himself as Ryan arrived out of nowhere, descending the dunes behind her to ask if she wanted a drink, she nearly fainted. Since this expanse of beach lay nowhere near the pools, restaurants, or main public buildings, she’d thought she’d found an isolated area to be alone—and that had been the idea, to get away from the Hotel Erotique for a while.
    “How did you even know I was here?” she asked, dumbfounded.
    The waiter, a good-looking, muscular guy in his early twenties who had surely been a jock in high school, just smiled. “Any place you find an umbrella on the beach is an area where we provide service. As a guest here, your pleasure is our business.”
    She drew in her breath, slightly flustered. “Oh. Well then, how about one of your, um, erotic rum punches?”
    “Coming up,” he said with a wink, then walked away.
    And for the first time, Jenna wondered—did people who worked here in other capacities, such as waiters, ever take part in the fantasies? Like this guy? Or Josh, her waiter from yesterday? What about Gabe? She shivered a little, despite the heat of the Caribbean sun, just curious, just beginning to cautiously imagine what a Hotel Erotique fantasy might be like.
    Of course, maybe a waiter here was only a waiter, and a . . . sexual partner was a sexual partner. But now, suddenly, she remembered the couple she’d seen on the beach last night—while Brent was inside her, touching her, making her come. Had the couple been living out a fantasy—of one, or the other, or both of them? Or were they just . . . fucking, as Brent would have called it, on their own, no fantasy attached?
    And . . . what sorts of ways would Brent concoct to fix whatever problems he thought she had? What kinds of fantasies was he perhaps creating for her this very moment? To her distress, she got a little wet just thinking about him planning sex for her.
    Of course, it still irked her that he thought there was something wrong with her. Just because she wasn’t wild or kinky, he thought she’d been damaged by her parents’ prudish attitudes and those other negative incidents in her youth. But what was wrong with not being wild and kinky? She supposed in his world wild and kinky were normal, but in hers, normal was . . . in the eye of the beholder. And she thought she was normal.
    Even if she tended to close her eyes through most of sex.
    Even if she sometimes had a hard time admitting she wanted sex, even to a guy she wanted it with .
    She was just . . . well, maybe a little more shy about sex than she’d been willing to confess to Shannon and Kevin—or even to herself, up to now.
    She bit her lip, remembering an instance last night when Brent had been behind her, touching her, and she’d had the urge to reach back and touch him, too—his thigh, or his butt. But as soon as she’d thought about it, she couldn’t do it. Even though she’d been responding to his advances, she’d been unable to . . . advance things any further herself. She’d been unable to be bold—even when that simply meant reciprocating a little.
    God, what if there was something wrong with her?
    Well, even if there was, Brent Powers couldn’t fix it with a bunch of kinky sex in two short weeks.
    So no matter how she looked at it, the smart thing was to write that note as planned. And she was going to do it early—she would return to the room by one, write and send the letter, then exit again quickly so that she’d be gone when his