He looked at her warily. “How long have you been out in this sun?”
“Forget it,” Sunny said, and uttered a long-suffering sigh.
She couldn’t lie back down. It was bad enough having to look up at him from a sitting position. She stubbornly refused to secure the neck strap of her bikini. The bra was snug and stretchy enough to stay up by itself. She wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of seeing her rattled. Groping for and tying the straps would make her look like a flustered old maid in the company of her first gentleman caller. Well, she wasn’t an old maid. And he sure as hell wasn’t a gentleman.
He plopped down on the bare deck beside her. “Won’t you have a seat?” she asked sweetly.
He merely grinned again. “Thanks.”
To give herself something to do besides stare into his mirrored sunglasses and wonder what part of her exposed body he was looking at, she took off her own sunglasses and unnecessarily cleaned the tinted lenses with a corner of her towel. “What are you doing here?”
“I was fishing on the lake and just happened to see you sprawled out here, lying half naked. That’s why I said you’ve got a lot of nerve. You were issuing an open invitation to any pervert on the lake to come over here and take a gander, possibly do you bodily harm.”
“I’ve been sunbathing on this pier practically all my life, and no one has ever bothered me before. In fact, you can’t even see this dock from the open lake. You have to come into the cove. And as far as I know, there’s never been a pervert on Latham Lake...until now.”
His laughter was deep and richly masculine. “Well, I’ve admitted to being interested in your body, but I wouldn’t do anything too perverted.” He paused for several beats. “Unless you like it that way.”
Sunny got the impression that he winked behind his sunglasses. She hastily began tossing things into her canvas beach bag. Paperback book. Sun visor. Transistor radio. Deciding to leave her towel where it was for the present, she stood up and began stalking barefoot across the planks.
“Where’re you going?”
His arm shot out. Sunny gasped. His hard fingers encircled one of her ankles. He didn’t make her stumble, but he effectively stopped her in her tracks just the same.
“Indoors. I prefer sunbathing in private. Beyond that, I don’t want to swap sexual innuendos with you, Mr. Beaumont.”
“Chicken?”
“No!”
“Then come back.”
It was a challenge Sunny had to accept. But she would have agreed to anything just to get his strong fingers from around her ankle. The contact was shooting alarming sensations up her leg and into her thigh. She worked her ankle from his firm grip and sat back down on the towel, her expression mutinous.
“I was only being neighborly.” She glanced at him with patent disbelief. “I was,” he said defensively. “I was only trying to make you feel welcome.”
“I don’t need the welcome mat rolled out. I grew up here, remember?”
“Then by comparison that makes me the newcomer. You should be nice to me.”
She trapped a smile just before it broke across her lips. Give this man an inch and he’d take endless miles. He needed no encouragement, not even a simple smile. Sunny only wished his charm was easier to ward off.
He was dressed in cutoffs and a faded sleeveless shirt, which was opened almost to his waist. She couldn’t help but notice that his chest was muscled and matted with crinkly, sweat-curly, dark blond hair. He had nice legs, too, if you liked hard, well-shaped muscles, tanned skin, and sun-gilded body hair. He wasn’t wearing any socks with his tennis shoes. And he had on a bill cap.
Sunny associated bill caps with baseball players and rednecks with “Honk if you’re horny” bumper stickers on their muddy pickup trucks. Neither type appealed to her. But Ty Beaumont under a bill cap wasn’t bad at all. Perhaps because of his blond hair curling around the sides of it, and the way he wore it low on his brow right above his opaque sunglasses. When he smiled, his teeth shone whitely in his bronzed face.
His shirt clung damply. There were beads of perspiration trickling down his neck and making sodden points out of strands of his hair. Sunny rarely saw a man sweating. The men she came into contact with were usually inside air-conditioned buildings. They were dressed in business suits and ties. They always had on socks.
Beaumont was a shock to her system, that was all. The scent of sweat and sunshine and lake water on a man was new to her.
That was the only way she could account for her accelerated pulse and the fact that the bottom had fallen out of her stomach. She wanted to run just as fast as she could back into the security of her cabin. But she couldn’t retreat without losing face. So, she would stay and be “nice” to him if it killed her.
“Catch anything?” she asked, nodding down toward the boat.
He leaned back, stretching his long legs out and propping himself up on one elbow. “Not yet.”
His simple answer vibrated with undertones that made Sunny uncomfortably aware of just how skimpy her bikini was. It was the color of cayenne and set off her golden coloring to full advantage. She wished she had brought along the jungle print sarong that went with it. A cover-up hadn’t seemed necessary when she left the cabin. Now she longed for one. A T-shirt, a robe, a bear rug, anything to shield her from Ty Beaumont’s gaze. She couldn’t see it behind his glasses, but she could feel it moving over her, resting on places that felt abnormally warm.
“It’s hot today,” she said briskly.