Virgin's Sweet Rebellion

A chest that was now pressed alarmingly close to hers. Ben was still gripping her by the shoulders, their legs tangled together in the water. Her heart was thudding from the shock of the encounter, and something else as well.

Something she had no intention of acknowledging. In any case, she was coughing too much to say or even think anything.

Ben muttered something under his breath and with one arm under her armpits and across her breasts he started towing her to the side of the pool as if she were unconscious.

‘Just a second...’ she began, and started coughing again.

He hauled himself up onto the pool’s ledge and then unceremoniously hauled her up next to him. She lay slumped against him, his arm around her shoulders, as she attempted to cough up a lung.

Thankfully her coughing finally subsided and she drew in several agonised but much needed breaths. ‘Thank you,’ she mumbled. ‘I must have swallowed some pool water.’

‘Must have,’ Ben agreed tonelessly, and Olivia wondered why, out of all the people in the hotel, she had to dive straight into Ben Chatsfield.

She looked up at him, tried not to notice the water droplets that clung to his eyelashes and his chin...and his chest. Her gaze dropped down of its own accord and she swallowed hard at the sight of Ben Chatsfield’s well-toned six-pack. Nice.

Okay, looking up again. She smiled weakly and Ben smiled back, a cold curving of his mouth that told her she was so busted. Well, fine. A girl could look.

‘What did you mean, do I always leap before I look?’ she demanded, his words coming back to her rather belatedly.

‘Exactly that. You dived into a pool without checking if someone was swimming in it.’

‘I didn’t see you,’ she snapped.

‘Because you didn’t look.’

All right, maybe she hadn’t looked. She’d been tired and distracted and pretty darn grumpy because the first day of the festival had basically sucked. Two interviews cancelled, another reporter claiming she wasn’t interesting enough because her role in the film that was going to be her big breakthrough wasn’t yet confirmed, and she’d learned that twelve of her thirty-two lines had been cut from Blue Skies Forever, the indie film that was being shown at the festival.

And so she hadn’t done all her Girl Scout safety checks before jumping into the pool. Whatever.

‘I meant,’ she asked Ben now, ‘what you meant when you said always. As if you had experience of me jumping you in the pool before.’ Too late she realised what she’d said. ‘I mean, jumping on you.’

‘I know what you meant,’ Ben answered, and Olivia wanted to slap that knowing smirk right off his face. Or maybe kiss him. Both, probably, one after the other. Not good. Ben was out of her league, in a whole lot of ways.

She edged away from him and after a tiny pause Ben slipped his arm from her shoulders. She shivered, and then wished she hadn’t.

‘I said always,’ Ben told her, ‘because you pretty much leaped before you looked yesterday, when you came into my office with all your guns blazing, having made the assumption that I put you in that room on purpose.’

Olivia folded her arms across her chest. She had just remembered that she was wearing a skimpy hot-pink bikini. She’d forgotten to pack a normal swimsuit for exercise, because she’d been so focused on clothes she would be seen in. The wardrobe of a future Hollywood star.

‘I think it was a fair assumption to make,’ she told Ben coolly. ‘In fact, I’m far from convinced that you didn’t do it on purpose.’

Temper flared in Ben’s eyes, quickly tamped down, but even angry, especially angry, he looked hot. ‘Of course you are.’

‘Now what is that supposed to mean?’ she demanded, straightening in affront even as attraction jolted her insides in little lightning streaks. Ben slipped back into the pool, turning to face her with eyes that blazed and a mouth twisted downwards in derision.

‘Just that you’re exactly what you look and sound like, Miss Harrington. A high-maintenance, shallow, self-important wannabe celebrity. And so naturally you would think that the world revolves around you and your family, when in fact I couldn’t care less about the Harringtons, much less which room one of them is put in, in a hotel I’m only managing for two weeks. Goodnight.’

And with her mouth hanging inelegantly open, Olivia could only stare as Ben swam away from her, his lithe body cutting quickly through the water. He hauled himself up on the other side of the pool and then strode into the men’s changing room, slamming the door behind him.

* * *

All right, he should not have said all of that. Any of that. Yet it had felt good to let a little of his anger out, even if a lot of it wasn’t directed at Olivia Harrington.