“Tayla, what’s the weather like there?”
“Mid-seventies, barely a cloud in the sky, and gorgeous. Want to see?”
I flip the camera on my phone and start slowly panning the Jeju Island shoreline in front of me for my sister to see.
“Wow, it’s beautiful. I didn’t expect South Korea to look like that.”
“What did you expect?”
“Well, I’ve seen all the episodes of M*A*S*H, but it never looked like that.”
“Lainey.” I’m laughing so hard the phone is shaking. Good thing I’m not recording this.
“I never saw anyone on M*A*S*H that looked like that either.”
Me neither.
A very tall, very gorgeous man is running along the shore. He makes eye contact, then looks at the phone in my hand. I realize I have it directed at him still, but I can’t seem to get it together enough to move. I don’t recognize him, but he has to be a K-drama star or a model. If not, the industry is missing out on some of its best eye candy.
He looks over his shoulder and then at me again. Now he’s picking up speed and running right toward me.
“Why is he running toward you?”
Lainey’s voice barely registers, but I have no answer for her and most likely couldn’t get the words out if I tried.
When it comes to fight or flight, I definitely fall into the flight category, but the part of my brain that controls that function is momentarily out of order. Next thing I know, I’m tangled up with over six feet of Asian man, and we’re barrel rolling across the sand.
We land with me sprawled out across his broad chest. My senses come to life as we stare into each other’s eyes in a moment that stretches on forever. He’s breathing hard, and I can feel his heart beating beneath my fingertips. I don’t know what kind of cologne he’s wearing, but single men would cease to exist if they all smelled like this.
Then he holds a blue plastic Frisbee up where I can see it. “I was trying to catch this to keep it from hitting you.”
Shock radiates through me because he sounds American. Not only that, he has a Southern accent. But even more important than that, his voice is deep enough to make my toes curl.
“Well… you succeeded.”
His chest vibrates beneath me as he throws his head back and laughs. As good-looking as I thought he was before, his smile could cure the blind. This man has to belong to someone, and I’d like to keep every hair on my head. I don’t need to be snatched bald by a jealous girlfriend.
I push against his chest to stand. Pain stinging the skin on my knee has me sucking air through my teeth. My hip hurts too, but that ache runs deeper.
“Are you alright?”
I sit down on the ground next to him and gently brush sand and shell fragments from the scrapes on my knee and lower thigh. My elbow is in the same shape. “I’ll be sore for a while, but I don’t think anything’s broken.”
“Hello! What’s going on? What happened? Tayla, are you okay? Please answer me!”
I look around for my phone and see it next to the chair where I’d been sitting. Gorgeous guy helps me stand and then retrieves the phone for me before I can get to it.
“I’m fine, Lainey.” I center my face on the screen so she can see for herself that I’m okay. “We took a tumble across the sand. I’m a little skinned up, but nothing major.”
“We?”
I can’t give her all the details she wants with him standing right behind me. “I’ll call you when I get back to the hotel.”
Wrinkles crease her brow, and I already know she’s about to go into mom mode again. “You need to put something on those scrapes. Did you pack Band-Aids and antiseptic?”
“No, but I’ll find some.”
“You need to be better prepared than that.”
I salute her image on my phone. “Yes, Mom.”
She gives me a pointed look and even though I can’t see it, I know her hand just went to her hip. Lainey hates when I call her that, but bossy older sister doesn’t give the same effect.
“I’ll call you later. Love you.”
I end the call before she can add anything.
“She’s not really my mom. She’s—” I turn as I speak to the man I’ve yet to introduce myself to, but he’s not there. I scan up and down the beach, and he’s nowhere to be found.
Did I dream him up? No, my dream man wouldn’t injure me and then vanish.
A sigh escapes as I ease down into my chair. After adjusting my ponytail, I pull a bottle of water from my backpack and begin washing the scrapes on my leg. I’ll have to find a pharmacy and hope someone there can speak English. Figuring out which box holds Band-Aids should be easy enough, but you wouldn’t want to mistake hemorrhoid cream for antibiotic ointment.
I travel to too many places to learn all the languages. I only learn the bare minimum from online videos, which I share with my followers. They don’t usually include words for first aid help. But I’ve never needed them before either.
Heavy footfalls pound the ground behind me, and I tense up before turning to look. I don’t need another tumble across the sand.
Gorgeous Asian Man is back and he’s holding a pharmaceutical bag. Maybe he is my dream man after all.
“There’s a drugstore across the street. We’ll have you fixed up in no time.” He kneels in front of me and pulls out a box of gauze. He uses my bottle of water to wet a few of them and begins dabbing at the scrapes on my leg.
I grit my teeth through the pain but offer no complaint. When he pulls a bottle out of the bag with Korean writing on the label and pours it on the scraped skin, that’s a different story.
I grip the arms of the chair and lift my rear from the seat. Not sure how that’s going to help but it’s what I did—while sucking air through my teeth and trying not to cuss. “What’s that made of? Chili peppers harvested by the devil himself?”
Mr. Gorgeous chokes out a laugh before giving a not so convincing sorry. “I didn’t know it would sting.”
He starts blowing on my leg and flaming heat shoots up my middle to my face. The heat quickly cools when he pulls a slender box from the bag and takes out a tube of some kind of ointment from it. He applies some to a bandage, and I draw up when he comes toward my leg with it.
His gaze roams my face before he looks into my eyes. “I don’t think this will sting, but I can’t guarantee that. It’s supposed to be antibiotic ointment.”
Watching for my reaction, he presses the gauze to my leg. The stinging disappears in an instant, and I sag with relief. Then he turns my arm to look at my elbow and the torture begins again.
Afterward, he starts to put the first aid supplies away, and I stop him with my hand on his. “You’re next.”
He gives the deer in the headlights look. “Huh?”
I grab his arm and tilt his elbow to get a full view of the large patch of missing skin.
“Oh. I didn’t even notice.”
“So you’re not a wimp like me?” I smirk. “We still need to get that cleaned up.”
He shifts from his knees to sit on his rear and presents his elbow to me. I get to work with the water bottle and gauze to clear out the debris.
“I’m sorry this happened. You’d have been better off if I’d let the Frisbee hit you.”
I look up into his brown eyes. “Koreans say mianhamnida.”
“You speak Korean?”
“No, and I can tell by the smirky grin you already knew that. This trip will probably be the only time speaking Korean would come in handy, so I only learned a few words and phrases. What about you? You look like a native but don’t sound like one. Can you speak the language?”
His voice goes deeper as he rattles off a whole paragraph of words that are foreign to me and I shiver.
“Um.” I clear my throat and try again. “I can’t believe we’ve made it this far without introducing ourselves. I’m Tayla Cook. I’m a travel agent and social media influencer visiting here from South Carolina.” I stick out my hand.
The warmth from his hand in mine causes goosebumps. “My Korean name is Lee Sang-ook, but back home I go by Sang Lee.”
I raise my brows. “And where exactly is back home?”
“What in the fiery pits is in that stuff?”
I honestly forgot how bad the antiseptic burns. With a firm grip on his arm to keep him from escaping, I begin blowing as best as I can while laughing.
He huffs out a laugh of his own. “Is this payback?”
I grin at him. “Mm, maybe.”
He’s blushing and looking away now. Did that come off as flirty? I’ve been accused of being too forward and, at times, too flirty, but I wasn’t trying to flirt. Even if I was, there’s no crime in it and who could blame me? He no doubt gets it all the time. You’d think he’d be used to it by now.
“How old are you?” I’m careful not to look at him when I ask that question. I take my time smoothing down the tape on his bandage because he still hasn’t answered. He didn’t answer the question about where he lived either, come to think of it. I peek at him and as soon as our eyes meet, he stands.
“I need to go.” He points down the shore at who knows what. “I, um, have something I need to be doing.”
Liar.
He doesn’t even wait for a response before heading in the same direction he’d come from, first at a walk and then a run.
Well, that’s insulting. What in the world did I do to him?
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Andrea Boyd 