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I stayed where I was. The stool was warm, the margarita was cold, and Mateo had just given me a look that went straight to my knickers.
He leaned his elbows on the bar. “Can I ask you something? What’s the pale stripe on your finger?”
“Ten years of marriage,” I said. “It’s fading. Faster than the marriage did.”
“His loss.” He said it simply, no punchline, and went back to cutting limes with a precision that was frankly obscene. “I finish at midnight. I walk the beach after, to switch my head off. Usually alone.”
“Usually.”
“Usually.” His mouth twitched. His eyes dropped to my bikini top, and my nipples hardened under it like they’d been asked a direct question.
Something brushed my shoulder. A woman had stopped behind my stool with a rolled yoga mat under one arm and a long black braid down her back. Thirty-two, wiry, brown-skinned, a dimple in one cheek. Ana, the resort’s yoga instructor. I’d said good morning to her three days running and had never once got out of bed for her class.
“Sunrise session, six-thirty,” she said, smiling at me, not at Mateo. “You keep promising.”
“She promised me first,” Mateo said, mock offended.
Ana’s eyes slid to him, then back to me, amused and unhurried. “Tonight or tomorrow, Sophie. I hear you have options.”
I did have options. I’d forgotten what that felt like.