The moment the camera shifted away from them was like a breath of fresh air, and Jett let the polished smile disappear from his lips. He was still smiling of course—how could he not, when he and Anna had just won a whole ass tournament?—but the defining grin had been replaced with a more natural and slightly lopsided expression than he usually showed to an audience. Even though he hadn’t played chicken since he was in high school, it felt good to win the silly competition. He’d always been competitive, sometimes to a fault, so it was a stroke to his ego to know that they’d come out on top of all the other pairs at the beach house.

Feeling a tap on his arm, he turned to Anna and blinked, mildly surprised by the bright smile on her face. He didn’t know exactly when it had happened, but at some point since the night they’d met, he’d decided in his own head that she wasn’t capable of looking that chipper. Right now though, she looked about as happy as a kid in a candy store, and it stirred something warm in the pit of his stomach that made him worry for a fleeting moment that the heat had made its way up his neck and onto his cheeks. She was actually kind of cute. Suddenly, he was reminded why he’d had so much fun dancing with her at the welcome party.

He cleared his throat and grinned back at her, “I’ll say. You did do most of the work though. All I did was hold you up to knock over all the other girls. I was pretty much a glorified booster seat.” With the short interview out of the way, he turned his attention back to the smell of food coming from inside the house. After the many rounds of chicken in the pool, he’d worked up a hearty appetite; and since his dietician was all the way on the other side of the country, there was nothing holding him back from pigging out on as much unhealthy food as he could fit on a plate. Malibu was turning out to be heaven.

“Want to go inside and raid the buffet line? I think they’ve got a Hawaiian barbeque thing going on,” he said, nudging Anna eagerly in the side. After the match, he was willing to let bygones be bygones and forget about their argument earlier in the morning.