Off Limits

Trying valiantly to ignore the heat between my legs, I drop my towel onto a lounger and dive in, long and low, holding my breath for as long as I can before kicking to the surface and swimming all the way to the end. I rest my arms on the sun-warmed coping and stare out at the harbour beneath us.

It looks like someone has shattered a thousand diamonds and thrown them over the water’s top. The way it glistens is almost impossible to believe.

He swims up beside me. ‘You’re angry at me.’

He doesn’t touch me, but the words feel like fingerprints on my chest.

I turn to him slowly, my hair wet, my eyes surrounded by clumps of black lashes. ‘No.’

His expression is one of impatience. ‘I’m no good at this. Tell me what I’ve done so I know.’

‘What you’ve done?’ It’s so ludicrous that I almost laugh, but an equal urge to cry rises in my chest. ‘You haven’t “done” anything, Jack. I thought we’d agreed that this is our deal? Sex—fine. Work—fine. Nothing in between.’

But out of nowhere I remember the way my grandma talks about meeting Grandpa. I look at Jack and my heart hammers. Damn it.

He stares back at me. I can practically see the cogs turning. ‘You’re in your late twenties?’

‘Twenty-six,’ I clarify, and the distinction is a small but important one, for some absurd reason I can’t comprehend. Am I vain about my age? Really?

‘And you’ve never been in a relationship?’

‘Why do you say that?’ I ask, though he’s right.

‘I just don’t see you as someone’s girlfriend.’

‘Gee, thanks,’ I mutter, turning my attention back to the view.

His fingertip on my shoulder is so light that I almost wonder if I’ve imagined his touch. But then he runs it down my wet arm, all the way to my elbow, and cups me there, squeezing gently. I turn towards him once more and he pushes out from the wall of the pool, bringing me with him, deeper into the water.

I’m a good swimmer, and I tread water without his help. But he stays close, his handsome face mesmerising me with ocean-green eyes and darkly tanned skin.

‘Am I wrong?’

I shake my head. ‘Not necessarily.’ A smile flicks across my lips without my permission. ‘I’ve dated. And been with men when it’s suited me. But I’ve always had demanding jobs, and not a lot of time to do the whole dinner-and-a-movie thing.’

He laughs. ‘That sounds boring as shit.’

My thoughts exactly. ‘How did you meet her?’

I don’t need to say his wife’s name. We both know who I mean. He expels a breath and looks away, his jaw clenched.

‘It’s fine if you don’t want to talk about it,’ I say, making to swim away, but he grabs my wrist and pulls me towards him. And I’m glad. I need him to need me, and it’s a sign that he does. My heart smiles.

‘You keep running away from me when you don’t get your own way—did you know that?’

Do I? ‘I’m not running away. I’m swimming away,’ I say, in a very lame attempt at humour. ‘And it’s not because I don’t get my own way—it’s because talking to you is like talking to a brick wall. It’s easy to...to run away when you’re being pushed.’

His eyes widen in non-verbal acknowledgement of the point I’ve made. ‘She was working at a restaurant in Edinburgh.’ His eyes flash with remembered pain. ‘I’d just wrapped up a meeting and was heading to the hotel. Thought I’d stop for a late dinner.’ He clears his throat, but his voice is still gravelly. ‘And I saw her.’

Jealousy fires inside me at the look of total wonderment that briefly crosses his eyes.

‘She was finishing up and I made her nervous as hell.’

‘Nervous? Why?’

Though, I remember belatedly my first meeting with Jack and the trepidation that lived in me. I hid it beneath a layer of finely honed bravado but, yes, I was nervous, too. He has a machismo and dynamism that is at once overpowering. I have truly never met anyone like him.

‘She hadn’t had a lot of good experience with men,’ he says tightly, a muscle jerking in his square jaw.