CHAPTER ONE
Ross Tarrant!
It had been over a decade since Francesca Lewis had laid eyes upon him, but she recognised him instantly. He had barely changed. He was still big and fantastically handsome, the maturity of years adding to, rather than diminishing his attractiveness.
Francesca blamed her dizziness on the shock of his sudden appearance, but the plunge of her heart and the tingle shooting up her spine were old, annoyingly familiar signs. She had always felt breathless and lightheaded in his presence... even a glimpse of him used to be enough to set her off.
Ross Tarrant. Where had he been all these years? With his great athletic prowess, everyone had expected him to win fame for himself and his country in the international sports arena, but in the years since she had left Whaler's Bay Fran had heard nothing of him. Secretly she had been relatively unsurprised. It was just as she had predicted. He didn't have the drive to succeed. Everything had always been too easy for him. He had no need to stretch himself because everything he had ever wanted had always fallen straight into his lap.
Her eyes travelled up over the booted feet, up the tight, faded denims that hugged his thighs and strained across the strong hips, and over the wide expanse of rumpled fisherman's-rib sweater. God, he might have grown a bit with the years, but she could swear he was wearing the same clothes he had worn when he was seventeen!
By the time she looked up into his face she was braced against its devastating effect. His hair was darker than the teenage Tarrant's had been. It was a thick, glossy chestnut now instead of sun-bleached fair, and cut unfashionably long to brush the rolled neckline of his sweater. The nose which had once been broken in a game of rugby was, to her surprise, perfectly straight. Plastic surgery hardly fitted in with the swaggering macho image he had cultivated as the local, lovable 'bad boy'. The square jaw still did, and the eyes...those fathomless blue eyes, drooping slightly at the outer corners to give him the lazily sensual look that had plunged numerous schoolgirls into fits of delight. Francesca, too, at one time.
The memory brought her up short. 'Don't you know that it's dangerous to point guns at people?' she snapped belatedly, hoping that he wouldn't realise it wasn't the sight of the double-barrelled shotgun aimed in her direction that had frozen her with shock, but the man behind it.
His wide-spread stance relaxed, the shotgun drooping against the hand that supported the barrel, the stock resting securely in his crooked elbow. Now he smiled, the lop-sided smile that had been famous over three counties. Fran found it as endearing as a crocodile's grin.
'Not half as dangerous as what you're pointing at me,' he drawled.
Horrified, Fran realised that the underwater light, which she had switched on when she got into the spa, was still on. Ross Tarrant, standing above her, could see all... her breasts bobbing freely just beneath the surface of the steamy pool, the ribs lacing her new slimness down to the curving spread of her hips with their dark, shadowed centre. With an angry gasp she reached up and hit the light switch on the tiled edge of the sunken pool, then the bubble button for good measure, sinking deep into the water as the concealing froth drew an opaque screen over her nakedness. Oh, why hadn't she stopped to put on her bathing suit? She had been stiff and tired after the three-hour drive from Auckland and had merely dumped her luggage inside the cabin before seeking out the screened-off spa on the deck, too grateful for the luxury to question why it was switched on when no one had been expecting her arrival. She had thought the lateness of the hour and the cabin's isolation guarantee enough of her privacy.
'How dare you walk in here and threaten me?' Fran-cesca blustered in the voice which she used to keep junior nurses jumping on the ware. 'You can just turn around and walk straight out again!'
'Uh-uh.' He shook his head, grinning, gun now pointed at the deck as he looped his thumbs into the front of his jeans. 'How do I know you won't plug me in the back?' He dropped into a grating Bogart impersonation, 'Stand up, sweetheart, and reach for the sky. I want to make sure you're not packing any concealed weapons, other than that lethally gorgeous body of yours...'
'Am I supposed to be amused by your cuteness?' she demanded stiffly. There was a time when she would have paid in blood to receive a compliment from Ross Tarrant. Thank God she had grown up! 'Is that thing loaded?' she demanded quellingly.
'Do I look stupid?' He shifted his weight, confidently inviting the negative.
'Frankly, yes!' Fran snapped, though it was far from true. As well as being a star sportsman, Ross had been highly intelligent at school, but too lazy to take advantage of it, content to coast through his lessons with minimum effort. 'Too stupid, obviously, to know that you shouldn't point a gun—even an unloaded one—at people.'
; 'I was out hunting possums when I saw the light on.' He looked amused at her little lecture. 'There have been quite a few thefts lately from holiday homes—with firearms among the stolen goods. It doesn't pay to be too trusting these days, especially in an isolated place like this.'
'My sentiments exactly, Ross Tarrant. Now would you mind going and waving your lethal weapon at some other innocent citizen and leaving me alone.'
His eyes narrowed at her use of his name. 'Do we know each other?'
'Unfortunately, yes.' Now that was real flattery, his not connecting her twenty-eight-year-old self with the shy, pudgy teenager who had proved so embarrass-singly easy to humiliate. Not that he had much to go on. Her long, dead-straight hair was now permed into shoulder-length brown curls, and her recent illness had given her cheekbones for the first time in her life. The blue-grey colour of her eyes was too uncertain to be memorable and, in any case, Ross Tarrant had good reason not to want to remember Francesca Lewis. It gave her pleasure now, to remind him.
'I'm Francesca, Francesca Lewis. I've come up from Auckland to settle Grandfather's estate.'
'Francesca?' His thick brows shot up and then snapped down again as his humour quickly died. The blue eyes were filled with a speculative contempt that made Francesca bristle. Did he still bear a grudge after all these years? He had, after all, only got what had been coming to him...
'Well, well, well...' The brown-sugar voice burned acrid with mockery. 'Princess Lewis in the flesh. Should I genuflect?'
The nickname had never been an affectionate one, and Fran was dismayed at the defensive prickle it evoked. Suddenly she could feel the steam heating the sweat beading her damp face and knew that it was time to get out of the water. But she couldn't, not while he was standing there looking down at her with such bold scorn.
'I don't care what you do, as long as you don't do it here,' she said hollowly, blinking to try and dispel a sudden wave of dizziness that she knew, this time, had nothing to do with his disruptive presence. 'Would you mind going away while I get out?'
For a moment he didn't move, his eyes on her steam-wreathed head, then he squatted down, putting the gun carefully aside and frowning into her flushed face.
'Are you all right?'
'No, I'm not all right, I want to get out.'
'Feeling dizzy?'
'A bit.' She hazily resented his demand.