Kiss Me Again

Crunch!
Every cell in Riley Flynn’s body jolted in shock.
The unmistakable sound of fiberglass colliding with carbon fiber meant only one thing. She’d backed into Sam Rutherford’s brand-new Alfa Romeo Spider. The man barely tolerated her as it was. How much more was he going to hate her for backing into his precious car?
Riley sank her hands into her hair and held her head as she slowly forced her gaze to the rearview mirror.
Was her week destined to keep getting worse? First, she got fired—okay, she should’ve been smarter than to carp about her boss on a social networking site, but still!
Then, if that wasn’t harsh enough, she arrived home last night to find a wedding invitation from her ex-fiancé.
Her ex-fiancé of all people. The snake she packed up her life in the UK five years ago and moved 4,116 miles to Nevis to be with. What a total idiot she’d been.
Now she was stuck here in the Caribbean without a job, very little money, and no fiancé. What was she thinking when she followed Beto here?
Oh yeah. She loved him. What a joke.
And, of course, he and his bride couldn’t have a normal wedding like ordinary people. Oh no, they would have to get married on a Caribbean beach at sunset.
If that wasn’t a poke in the eye, she didn’t know what was. The scuzzbag had stolen her wedding plans and given them to another woman, then had the boldface front to invite her. She bet he expected her to refuse the invitation, which was what she wanted to do, with a few added choice words for him, but her pride wouldn’t allow her the easy option. She would force herself to that wedding and hold her head high. Beto-the-insensitive-jerk would never know how much he’d hurt her, or that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to date anyone since he left eight months ago.
In her rearview mirror, Riley watched as the driver’s door to the black sports car opened and her neighbor stepped from his car—all six-foot-two of athletic muscle, sex appeal, and raised hackles.
She gulped down the lump lodged in her throat. She wasn’t sure whether her sudden inability to breathe was due to dread, or the sight of Sam Rutherford looking especially dashing this morning. She cracked open her car door and eased out of her pink Toyota Aygo.
When Sam paced to the back of his sports car, glanced at the bumper, then focused his blue-gray stare on her, Riley quaked.
“I’m so sorry.” She rushed to inspect the damage. A small dent and a bit of a scuffmark on the Spider’s rear end. Her Aygo had sustained most of the damage. The knock had resulted in a smashed bumper for her pretty, pink car. Yet despite the damage to her vehicle, relief allowed her to breathe again. At least Sam’s sporty number hadn’t been as dented as she imagined.
“Oh, thank goodness. That was lucky.” The morning sun warmed her while the briny sea breeze ruffled her hair. She pushed the strands back from her face.
“Lucky?” Eyelids squinting, he clenched his teeth.
“Lucky?” He folded his arms. Riley tried not to notice how wide and deep his chest appeared beneath his white dress shirt. Or how his neatly trimmed stubble always made him look so chiseled and drop-dead delicious.
“Lucky for whom?”
“Well…lucky for you, obviously.” She gestured toward the back of his car with a hand that shook. She interlocked her fingers in front of her in an effort to disguise the nervous tremor. What was it about this man that made her insides jitter every time she saw him?
“Your car hardly has a scratch, while mine…well, look at the poor thing. The bumper is about to fall off.”
“Let me get this straight. You smack into the back of my car and I’m lucky?”
“Only in the sense that you’ve no more than a few scratches.” Riley rubbed at the pink scuffmark her car had left on his. “I bet we can buff it out. It’ll be good as new.”
The sound of teeth grinding drew her attention back to Sam. He looked like steam was about to shoot from his ears at any second.