Summer Love by Piper Rayne

Chapter Two

They had just shoved the last bag of sand into place when a blast of wind nearly lifted Mai off her feet. Her Good Samaritan steadied her and helped her climb over the bags and through the front door. He closed it and turned the lock not a minute too soon. As they stood side by side and watched, all hell broke loose outside. It was raining hard before, but now the rain was blowing sideways. Great sheets of water hit the shop’s front window.

“Well, I hope that works,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “Sorry about your car out there.”

“It’s a rental. Hope you don’t mind if I wait this out a bit.”

“You might be here awhile. But you’re welcome to stay.” She looked at the puddles of water gathering around their feet. Their clothing was saturated and dripping onto the floor. “Umm, I’m going upstairs to change into something dry. I, uh, don’t have any men’s clothing …”

“A towel will work, if you have one.”

“Do have those.” She hurried up the back stairs to her second floor apartment, her leather sneakers squishing and squeaking the entire way. She yanked them off in her tiny kitchen. They were almost certainly ruined. She grabbed a stack of towels and took them back downstairs.

“Here.”

She returned to her apartment to peel off her shorts and blouse, which—she realized belatedly—was so wet it was see-through. Oh well. There was a pretty good chance the guy downstairs had already seen her half naked, not that he would remember it. Outside, she’d been too busy to take a really good look at the guy who’d offered to help her with the sandbags. She was just grateful for the unexpected help.

But now that she’d had a good look at him inside, she was ninety percent certain that her Good Samaritan was either A) Ian Youngblood, lead singer of Pulse; B) Ian Youngblood’s identical twin; or C) one of those random universe doppelgangers who was an exact replica of Ian Youngblood.

If he was A … well, she had nearly hooked up with him two years ago in London.

Nearly.

She had a good excuse. Or a reasonable excuse, at any rate.

She and Kyle had gone to London for a romantic Christmas vacation. After a year and a half of serious dating, she’d been expecting a proposal on the trip. Along the Thames or atop the Eye. Something like that. Hell, Mai would have settled for the Tower of London.

Instead, Kyle had dumped her—leaving her to spend the rest of the trip by herself. One thing led to another and she had ended up in a hotel room with one Ian Youngblood. Fortunately, she came to her senses before becoming another notch on his bedpost. It was a story she hadn’t shared with anyone. Who would believe it?

She peeled off her bra and underwear, then wrung out her hair over the tub. She was soaked to the skin. After combing through the tangles in her wet hair, she pulled on clean clothes. Then she combed her hair again, fixing the part ever so slightly.

Yeah, she was stalling. There was a bonafide rock star downstairs! And, despite that near miss in London, Mai was not the type of person who knew bonafide rock stars. Sure, among St. Caroline’s summer and weekend residents there were some semi-famous people. But they were CEOs, tech gazillionaires, politicians. With the exception of the singer Simone Adkins, who had a personal childhood connection to the town, St. Caroline did not harbor celebrities on the order of Ian Youngblood.

She stalled a few more minutes, then resigned herself to going back downstairs. There was no chance he remembered her, anyway. Out of all the women he must meet every day? Mai was nothing more than a blip on the radar. She would pretend that she had no idea who he was.

She turned off the lights in the apartment and closed the door behind her. She heard him moving around as she descended the stairs. Still, nothing could prepare her for the sight of a mostly naked rock star sweeping up the trail of sand that had spilled from the bags. He was all smooth tan skin except for the white towel wrapped around his waist.

She could have sworn the towel looked bigger in her bathroom.

She stopped on the last riser and gawked. Yep, that was definitely the body she had spent the past two years fantasizing about. Broad shoulders, narrow hips, shapely ass. In London, his dark blond hair had been long—below his shoulders. It was cropped close to his head now. It looked better short. The fewer distractions from his fabulous body the better.

She halted that thought right in its tracks. What are you thinking?It doesn’t matter whether you like his hair. You had a chance at Ian Youngblood in London and you blew it.

She spotted his wet clothes piled on the floor and made a beeline for them. “I’ll put these in the dryer.” It would give her a minute to rein in the inappropriate ideas that were swirling around her brain. And other parts of her body.

“Thanks.”

She took a deep breath. That voice. Rich. Deep. It had lured her so close to trouble before. She appreciated a beautiful male body as much as the next woman, but she was a sucker for a beautiful voice. It got her every time.

She clutched his wet clothes to her chest and practically ran upstairs.

* * *

So that’s how she’s going to play it—that she doesn’t recognize me. Huh. He’d recognized her the minute she turned her rain-soaked face toward him on the sidewalk. She was the karaoke woman from London who had entranced him with her voice, bewitched him with the promise of her lovely body, and then walked out on him—leaving him naked and hard in his hotel suite. As much as he might like to forget that particular humiliation, he hadn’t.

Quite the opposite, in fact. He remembered every minute of that evening in vivid—if excruciating—detail. Minus the one detail he really needed. Her name. Without that, he’d been unable to look her up. And he’d wanted to look her up. If not for the purpose of finishing what they had started in the hotel, then to ask her to record a duet with him.

Now I’ve found her in a small-town coffee shop in Maryland. In the middle of a raging storm. And I’m wearing nothing but a towel.

There were so many directions this could go. Not all of them good.

He looked around the coffee shop. Nice place. Exposed brick walls. Small wooden tables and chairs scattered about in the front. In the back, which looked like a newer addition, deep leather sofas beckoned. Behind a long glass pastry case was a lineup of espresso machines and a quaint chalkboard announcing the day’s specials. The aroma of coffee and warm sugar lingered in the air.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs announced her imminent return.

“Your clothes will be dry in half an hour, I think,” she said.

He cocked his head toward the front window and the maelstrom beyond. “I don’t think I’ll be leaving in half an hour.”

Damn, but she was really lovely. Even more stunning two years later, if such a thing was possible. There had been a sadness about her in London, a mood he hadn’t probed. They hadn’t gotten into each other’s personal lives. It had been the day after Christmas and they both were sitting in a nearly empty karaoke bar. That right there said a lot about their personal lives, didn’t it?

Instead they’d talked about music and singing for a bit, and then agreed to walk to his hotel down the street. At the time, he assumed she knew who he was. She hadn’t offered her name and he didn’t ask. An anonymous hookup between two people in a karaoke bar on the day after Christmas had struck him as oddly—desirably—something normal people did. And he hadn’t been merely a normal person in years.

“Hurricane Ian out there is still going strong,” he added.

The corner of her mouth twitched, like she was stopping a smile. Maybe she did remember him? Maybe she remembered him, but hadn’t recognized him in London. Was that possible? He was Ian Youngblood, after all. You’d have to be living under a rock to not recognize me.

Either way, now here she was—gorgeous in cutoff shorts and a black tank top that was slightly damp after carrying his wet clothes upstairs. The sadness about her was gone.

“I believe it was downgraded to a tropical storm. Can I get you something to drink?”

For a split second, her eyes dropped to the towel around his waist. Well at least the interest was still there.

“What are my options?”

Again with the little twitch of her soft, pink lips. Lips he had kissed the hell out of. Lips he had dreamed about too many times to count since.

“Pretty much anything that doesn’t involve alcohol. I’m going to have an iced coffee myself.”

“That works.”

He watched as she moved gracefully behind the coffee bar. “Do you own this place, manage it, or just work here?”

She looked up from a pitcher of cream and gave a wry smile. “All of the above.” She carried two glasses over to a table by the front window, before going back to retrieve two generous slices of pound cake.

As Ian took the seat across from her, the lights flickered. Once. Twice. Then the power went out.