Page 13 of Holiday Home 4
Victoria’s piercing blue eyes returned to her phone, and she spentminuteslazily swiping through her phone. If he’d had the choice, he’d have picked being waterboarded over this torturous waiting. He knew she was subjecting him to it purposefully. She hardly needed to find theperfectpicture; anypicture of her was guaranteed to take his breath away.
He almost started to wonder if she was just swiping through a single album repeatedly so that she could see if he could become so tense with anticipation that his head popped like an Airhead commercial. If she kept him waiting any longer, he felt certain that he might start rattling, at the very least. His blood was sprinting like the devil was on its heels through his veins.
At long last, Victoria showed a change in her expression. A glint of approval?
She tapped her phone’s screen a handful of times. Mere microseconds after the final tap, his phone buzzed in his hand.
Avoiding looking at the message on his phone immediately required a degree of willpower that he hadn’t known he had. Like a strongman grunting under the sheer exertion of hefting a boulder and placing it on its stand at an event, Liam practically felt himself come undone. A handful of seconds passed by. He managed to stay still.
He waited until Victoria raised an eyebrow—she’d been doing that a lot today, though she’d yet to seem annoyed by his curious decisions—at him. And then, breathing in with the expectation of losing his breath shortly thereafter, he opened the message on his phone.
He didn’t try to date the picture, figure out which beach she was on, or anything like that. He just looked at her, in all her stunning sexiness.
In this picture, Victoria, with toes in the sand while waves lapped at the beach behind her, wore a black bikini with a high waist. Two straps crisscrossed across her lower stomach, coveting the right to squeeze tightly around her sides as they wrapped around to the back. Her top had similar straps, these crossing just below the base of her neck. And a black, transparent mesh covered the plentiful degree of cleavage on display.
Her hair was shorter than he’d seen before, barely reaching her shoulders. She was also smiling, though it was still reserved in her typical fashion. Mere seconds before the photo, one hand had reached up to move a pair of wide sunglasses down to the end of her nose, revealing marvelous blue eyes.
The words sounded off in his mind like machine gun fire.Beautiful, stunning, sexy, captivating, gorgeous…
“Delicious,” Liam said. Saidwithoutmeaning to! He froze like a deer in headlights, feeling a surge of panic. How hadthatword, among all the options, slipped out of his thoughts and became a word spoken aloud? Whispered, yes, but Victoria was barely two feet away from him.
He winced visibly, cursed his stupidity—things had been going so well!—then slowly lifted his gaze from a picture of Victoria to the real deal.
Yep, her eyebrow was still raised. So, however, were the corners of her lips.
“Delicious?” she said, smiling as if wondering if she’d heard him right. “I can’t say I’ve heard that one before.”
Liam felt heat scour his face. “Erm…”
“Any other words you’d like to toss out? Scrumptious, delectable?”
She was teasing him. She wasteasinghim. Victoria Moreno, smiling, teasing…flirting.
Maybe that was a leap too far, but her amusement wasn’t a momentary blip between emotionless stares. It remained on her face, stayed around long enough for Liam to identify it and then enjoy the sight of it.
He didn’t backtrack, not by apologizing or saying he’d misspoke. The old him would have. The old him wouldn’t have a picture of Victoria in a bikini on his phone. And a hope to get even more.
“Delectable is an okay one,” he said, trying to play things off coolly. Less like his stiff self, more like he was comfortable with making such compliments. Among all the skills he’d been developing with help from Avril and Tess, confident flirting was the one he still struggled with from time to time.
“Mouthwatering, then?” Victoria asked, picking up the bottle of wine. She refilled her glass, then brought it back to her lips.
“Luscious,” he said, then returned to her picture. His heart was racing. “Elegant would work too. Maybe bewitching?”
“I’d hardly try to convince you that I’mnotall of those things,” Victoria said with a smile.
Liam nodded, then remembered that therewasat least one word he was supposed to share with her. He chewed on the inside of his cheek. He wanted to be honest, but he also wanted to suggest there was room for improvement. Not in her—she was pretty much perfect all the time—but she’d been toa lotof beaches back in the day. So, there had to be more revealing pictures. There had to be bikinis that showed off more of herdeliciousfigure.
“I’ll give it a three out of five,” he declared.
“Middling? That’s the best I can get for that…deliciouspicture? What happened to all those compliments you were just heaping upon my shoulders?”
“They’re still there,” he said, nodding at each of her shoulders. The bared one again enflamed his desires. Wherewashe supposed to look?!
“But…” Victoria said, setting him up to continue.
“But those descriptions belong to you no matterwhatyou’re wearing. If you sent me a picture of you wearing a trash bag on the beach, that’d still be the case.”
“Then what am I being judged on, exactly? I’m afraid I don’t quite understand the criteria.”