Mistress for a Night

Tomorrow, he thought, flinging himself face-down on the bed, he would have calmed down enough to talk to her rationally, get the truth and leave.

Georgia woke at midday, but only because Blossom came into the bedroom with a tray of fresh fruit and steaming hot coffee.

The housekeeper opened the shutters and let the bright light in, washing the cool lemon walls with gold. ‘Has that headache gone? Mr Jason said to leave you to sleep, but I thought you needed some food inside you; ’specially since you didn’t eat supper.’

Georgia blinked. Even Blossom’s most solicitous whisper was loud! ‘I’m fine, now, thank you.’ She pulled herself up against the pillows to accept the tray, aware that she’d fallen into bed still wearing the scarlet robe. The dose of whisky Jason had put into her hot milk must have been of knock-out proportions.

Thinking of him injected that familiar squirming, tightening sensation deep inside her. She wished her stupid body would grow some sense, stop responding so catastrophically to him. No other man could do that to her. And more than a few had tried.

Hoping her face hadn’t gone as red as she felt it had, she dug the spoon into the bowl of diced fruit. Inwardly deploring her need to know, and trying to sound off-hand, she asked, ‘What’s Jason doing?’

‘Gone fishin’ with Elijah. Let’s hope it improves his bad temper!’

‘Bad temper?’ What had brought that on? Last night—despite the strange madness that had overtaken them both in the afternoon, and to which, thankfully, he hadn’t referred—he had shown her nothing but consideration, offering her the release of talking about her early years with a mother who had never wanted her. Only when he’d spoken of Harold’s serial philandering had his voice grown harsh, and that was understandable, considering what his mother must have had to endure.

‘Bad mood, more like,’ Blossom amended. ‘Like a black crow sitting on his shoulders! Why want to be like that on such a lovely day?’

Why, indeed? Georgia thought as Blossom left her to finish her belated breakfast in peace. Pouring herself a second cup of coffee, she decided she wasn’t going to let it bother her. After last night there was too much to think about, so today, with Jason safely out of the way, she would just go with the flow, relax, enjoy all that this small slice of paradise could offer.

After her shower she got into her one-piece swimsuit. The amber colour matched her eyes—eyes which seemed oddly wide and innocent this morning.

Pushing her feet into canvas slip-ons, and cramming a floppy-brimmed straw hat on her head, she reflected that she seemed to have left her sharp, street-wise persona back in the coldness of the English winter.

It didn’t bother her. She’d get it all back, no question, as soon as she returned home and took up the threads of her real life again. Then, as she was stuffing her tube of sunblock, her sunglasses and a fat paperback into a flowery cotton shoulder bag, she wondered if this relaxed, go-with-the-flow mood was down to island magic or Jason’s presence.

The island, of course. She dismissed the other possibility out of hand as being utter nonsense. She was feeling good despite his presence, not because of it! And she needn’t give him a second thought, because he was out fishing, bad mood and all. He could keep his bad mood to himself!

The water was perfect. After a few lazily executed breaststrokes Georgia turned on her back and floated, allowing her mind to drift around the sensation of being naked in the gently moving, warm, crystal-clear salt water of the isolated cove.

It was, she decided, a very, very sensual experience. She’d heard that skinny-dipping was

something else, and so hadn’t quashed the sudden impulse to strip out of her swimsuit when she’d reached the water’s edge.

This was a private island and no one came here. Jason and Elijah were well out of the way, somewhere in the open seas, and if Blossom came down to the shoreline and hollered at her to, ‘Get right back here this minute, Miss Georgie, and make yourself respectable!’ she’d ignore her, pretend she hadn’t heard.

But all she could hear was the gentle lapping of the wavelets on the white, hot sand, birdsong from the forest that clothed the hills… And then, terrifyingly, the total disruption of the water beside her, the splash of dozens of cascading waterfalls.

She twisted frantically, her heart pumping, because surely to goodness some great fish was about to swallow her whole, and found herself staring into something far more dangerous.

Jason’s eyes.

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE fishing trip hadn’t worked. He’d hoped that going out in the boat, listening to the lazy, hypnotic slap of the water against the hull, to Elijah’s slow drawl as he recounted local gossip gleaned on the larger sister island, would have eased the black demon from his back.

If anything, the restricted confines of the small vessel had made him even edgier. And when Elijah had pulled in the rods and announced that they might as well go out beyond the headland, to more productive fishing grounds, he’d cried off, stripping down to his black swimming briefs and diving off the stern of the boat into the sheltered blue crystal waters.

He knew very well what was bugging him. That unfinished business with Georgia. Bobbing about in a boat on the Caribbean Sea, waiting for fish to bite, wasn’t going to give him the answers he needed.

And, dammit all, that was what he’d come for. Answers. Nothing else.

A fast crawl for the first few hundred metres had unknotted tense muscles, stretched them, soothed away some of the tension that had been a tight band inside his head since he’d woken at daybreak.

The shoreline of Blue Rock’s secluded cove well in sight, he’d eased off the punishing pace, settled into a leisurely side-stroke, and firmly reminded himself that what Georgia had done to earn her inheritance didn’t matter at all to him.

She hadn’t blinked so much as an eyelash when he’d spelled out exactly the type of man Harold had been. She obviously hadn’t cared, so long as the pickings were rich enough.

Well, she was more than welcome to the lot. He wasn’t and never had been, interested in his stepfather’s fortune. And he definitely didn’t care what she did in her private life. The guy who’d answered her number on his third or fourth attempt to contact her after she’d left Lytham was the same guy who’d answered when he’d phoned her that first time, to let her know the time of Harold’s funeral. He’d recognised the voice.