Mistress for a Night

Obviously he was her current live-in lover. He’d certainly sounded pretty sour when he’d given Jason the information that Georgia had left that morning for her island in the sun. In a strop because they were a couple and he hadn’t been invited along?

Whatever. It wasn’t any of his business. The only thing he was interested in was her reason for aborting their child. For seven years he’d believed he’d managed to put the anger behind him, forget it, forget her. But meeting her again had brought it bubbling back to the surface, and he couldn’t get it out of his head.

He only missed colliding with her because he’d neared the shoreline and decided to wade back through the chest-high water.

She was floating on her back, the silky soft nakedness of her open to his eyes. With a ragged gasp that stopped his heartbeats he took in the sheer beauty of her body, the provocative sexiness of the pert breasts tilted towards the blue sky, hair streaming around her head like a fantastic species of seaweed, the tiny span of her waist and delicately curved tummy, the long and lovely legs slightly parted.

With another ragged gasp his heart thundered on, and he was floundering, struggling to get his footing, because the tempting loveliness of her had made him giddy with raw, primitive desire.

Another flurry of water, thrashing the satiny surface to a white-lace foam, and she was twisting around with the litheness of a mermaid, the evident fright in her wide golden eyes deepening and sharpening as they locked with his.

Tense expectancy danced between them, as sharp and as brilliant as the sunlight glittering on the sea. It locked the air in his lungs, his voice in his throat. His eyes were drawn to her; he wanted to feast on her beauty, ached to touch her, possess her. Touch and possess every bewitching inch of her.

Briefly closing his eyes, he hauled himself together. He would not be led down that road again, no matter how hard he was tempted.

‘Sorry if I startled you.’ He was the one to find his voice first. Was relieved to find it creditably normal. She was still looking as if a bomb had just exploded in her vicinity.

He found his footing on the sandy bottom, slicked wet hair back off his face and suggested evenly, ‘Time we both got out of the water, got covered up before we burn,’ and waded back towards the shore, wryly aware of the hollowness of his words.

He was already burning. Burning for that delectable body. And he had nothing to cover up with. Of necessity he’d left his denim cut-offs and T-shirt back in the boat.

Thankfully, though, his body’s automatic response to the unexpected, glorious nakedness of her was back under control. She was behind him, probably reluctantly following his advice, seeing the sense of protecting her skin from the sun. Regretting her naked state? Or did the little witch enjoy driving men mad? Did she revel in the power she had?

Too late for modesty now, though she probably wouldn’t see it that way. He found her abandoned swimsuit and turned briefly to toss it to her.

She caught it deftly, but before she clutched it to her body he saw the sunlight glitter on the myriad droplets of water that spangled her skin.

Battening down the driving urge to follow the tracks of each and every one of those droplets with his lips, his tongue, his hands, he turned his back to her and said, ‘I’ve got something to ask you, and it’s important.’ His voice sounded raw. ‘We’ll talk over there, in the shade.’

There was a gaily patterned umbrella erected near the low cliffs. He headed for it, collecting her beach bag and canvas slip-ons as he went. No towel. She wouldn’t have seen the need for one, so near to the house. Pity. He could have spread it over his lap.

But thinking of the abortion, keeping his mind exclusively on that, should put a dampener on any wayward designs his body might have.

The black swimming trunks he was wearing were disgracefully brief, Georgia thought with a tinge of annoyance as she padded over the hot sand behind him. No man had the right to look so sinfully sexy. The sun-kissed tan of his skin was sleek over hard muscle and bone: wide, rangy shoulders, broad, sinewy back tapering down to that hard, flat waist, mean and moody hips and long, long strong legs.

It was too much! She tried to keep her eyes pinned anywhere but on him, but they seemed to have taken on a will of their own and kept winging back to him.

Sighing, she followed to where he’d settled in the shade. She’d scrambled into her swimsuit, wondering how much of her nakedness the water had hidden from his eyes and deciding that she’d be better off not coming up with the answer to that.

‘What is it you want to ask?’ The swimsuit, which had seemed so ordinary when she’d put it on, now felt too high-cut on her hip bone, the neckline too low, the whole thing too revealing. She hovered, wanting to take flight. But he had said it was important. Probably something to do with her inheritance. ‘I think we’d be more comfortable back at the house, don’t you?’ she suggested hopefully. After she’d dressed, armoured herself against those steady, smoky, penetrating eyes.

‘And have Blossom order us to make ourselves respectable and sit down to lunch like good children? I don’t think so, do you?’

The apparent wry amusement was underpinned by a definite strand of steel. He looked and sound

ed like a man who would tell anyone who got in the way of what he wanted—and that included the redoubtable Blossom—to move! He’d obviously decided he was going to say whatever it was that had to be said right here, and if she didn’t want an argument on her hands she’d have to do as she was told.

She’d give him five minutes. She wouldn’t be able to stand being in his as-good-as-naked company for longer than that.

Not bothering to disguise her sigh of resignation as anything but just that, she sat, drawing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around them. Hiding as much of herself as she could.

She would just have to try to pretend the sexual attraction wasn’t there.

But it was going to be very, very difficult.

Fixing her eyes on the horizon, she asked, ‘Well, what is it?’

She had no real reason to feel nervous, she reassured herself. Yesterday he’d got the message that she didn’t want him to touch her, and last night he’d been kind. If you discounted the long years of enmity then superficially, at least, they were almost back to being buddies…