flirtation was calculated, but that didn’t stop him from wondering how the performance would’ve left him feeling had it been true, if her heart had been in it even half as much as her head.
He was a smart enough guy to know it hadn’t been, and so his time spent with her pictures wasn’t about wishing and hoping. It was about pros and cons. Working with her versus not. He was already in Miami, and the job that had brought him here had a lot of downtime built in. If he could shoot Olivia while Roland was at work, the situation held a lot of win-win potential.
The only thing holding him back was Olivia herself. As intrigued as he’d been by the mystery of her offer, he’d gotten over his initial lust pretty damn fast once he’d realized how easily she’d played him. He didn’t like her assumption that showing a little skin was going to get her what she wanted.
And then there was the photo shoot of her striptease. She might have followed his directions when taking off her clothes, but only because it suited her to do so, because she hoped to take as much out of the game as she put into playing it.
Quite frankly, he didn’t need that shit. He’d left Texas to make a new start because he was tired of being a pawn. He much preferred being a king. He liked the sun coming up for him before anyone else got a glimpse of the morning, liked that he was the first to breathe the air carried to him by the currents above the Atlantic.
All he needed now was to finish the repairs to his own deck on his own beach. Which was why he’d probably take the job Olivia had offered. The cash. No other reason. The greenbacks and nothing more.
“McLain?”
“Out here,” he called to his client, who had generously offered him a place to stay—though it worked in the other man’s favor, saving him from having to pay the cost were Finn to lodge elsewhere.
He hadn’t heard the front door open; the sound of the waves rolling in kept him from hearing anything else—a big part of the reason he liked spending his mornings in the company of the surf and the sun.
Glancing down, he quickly closed up the folder of Olivia’s photos just in case his instincts were off and his gallery-owning client and her gallery-owning friend weren’t one and the same.
He was pretty sure they were, and that had him considering fate and coincidence as Dustin Parks settled gracefully into the chair on the other side of the table, crossed his legs, adjusted the crease over his knee, and closed his eyes.
“I don’t come out here often enough. I really don’t. I forget there’s more to South Beach than tanned skin and six-pack abs cut sharply enough to slice butter. There’s actually sunshine and air that’s delicious to breathe.”
He opened his eyes, his gaze crawling from the end of his deck to the water’s edge. “You know, this would be the perfect spot for beach volleyball. I wonder what it would take to sponsor a charity tournament. I must get Jodi on that.”
Finn remained silent, watching as Dustin pulled his iPhone from his waistband and typed himself a memo. He and Finn were of similar size, height, and build, making it possible for Finn to fit into Parks’s clothes. Body type was where the comparison ended, however.
Finn was dark, his skin ruddy from exposure to the sun, his hair black and longer than he’d ever worn it in his life. He wasn’t big on looks, only used a mirror for shaving when he bothered. Yeah, he’d become quite the bum since his move. Parks, on the other hand, was pretty. Finn could be completely hetero and still recognize the other man’s blond-haired and blue-eyed Brad Pitt appeal.
“So,” Parks began, having finished his note. “Have you learned anything that I wasn’t able to learn for myself?”
Finn slid the folder containing the pictures he’d taken of Roland Green across the table. “It doesn’t look like it.” He waited while Parks studied the photos. “There was an altercation outside of
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