Excerpt from The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The goat curry roared in her mouth.

"I'm impressed. I don't think I could eat that stuff," remarked the man sitting two seats down from her. He was somewhere in the midst of middle age, a bust of a man, all chest and shoulders, with a ring of blond, bristling hair circling his head like the laurels of Julius Caesar and a boxer's nose beneath bold, undefeated eyes. He was the only other guest that wasn't with the wedding party. She'd seen him around the hotel and on the beach and had been uninspired by his business magazines, his wedding ring.

She nodded back at him and took an especially large spoonful of curry, feeling the heat oozing from every pore.

"Is it good?"

"It is, actually," she admitted, "in a crazy, burn-your-mouth-out kind of way." She took a sip of the rum and Coke she'd ordered; it was cold and startling after all that fire.

"Yeah?" He looked from her plate to her face. The tops of his cheeks and his head were bright pink, as if he'd flown right up to the sun and gotten away with it. "Mind if I have a taste?"

She stared at him, a bit nonplussed, and shrugged. What the hell.

"Be my guest."

He moved quickly over to the seat next to hers. He picked up her spoon and she watched as it hovered over her plate and then dove down and scooped a mouthful of her curry, depositing it between his lips.

"Jee-sus," he said. He downed a glass of water. "Jee-sus Christ." But he was laughing as he said it, and his brown eyes were admiring her frankly over the rim of his water glass. He'd probably noticed her smiling at the bar boy and decided she was up for something.

But was she? She looked at him and saw it all instantaneously: the interest in his eyes, the smooth, easy way he moved his left hand slightly behind the roti basket, temporarily obscuring the finger with the wedding ring.

He was in Port of Spain on business, a corporate man who had done something lucrative with a franchise, and he'd decided to give himself a little "vacay" to celebrate the deal. He said it like that, "Vacay," and she had to stifle a wince—who said things like that? No one she knew. He was from Houston, where she'd never been and had never felt the need to go. He had a white gold Rolex watch on his tanned wrist, the first one she'd ever seen up close. When she told him, he took it off and put it on her own small moist one, and the thing dangled there, heavy and sparkling. She liked the feel of it, liked its strangeness on the same freckled hand she'd always had, liked watching it hover like a diamond helicopter over her goat curry. "It looks good on you," he said, and he glanced up from her wrist to her face with such directness of intent that she blushed and handed him back the watch. What was she doing?

"I guess I should get going." Her words sounded reluctant even to her own ears.

"Stay and talk with me some more." His voice had a note of pleading in it, but his eyes remained bold. "Come on. I haven't had a decent conversation in a week. And you're so…"

"I'm so … what?"

"Unusual." He flashed a smile at her then, the ingratiating grin of a man who knew how and when to use his charms, a tool in that arsenal that nevertheless flared, as he looked at her, like metal in the sun, shining with something genuine—real affection coming right at her in a blast of heat.

"Oh, I'm very usual."

"No." He considered her. "Where are you from?"

She took another sip of her drink; it fuzzed her edges a bit. "Oh, who cares about that?" Her lips were cool and burning.

"I do." Another grin: quick, engaging. There and gone. But … effective.

"Okay, then I live in New York."

"But you're not a New Yorker originally." He said it as a statement of fact.

She bristled. "Why? You think I'm not tough enough to be a New Yorker?"

Excerpted from The Forgetting Time by Sharon Guskin. Copyright © 2016 by Sharon Guskin. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.