Join Harlequin My Rewards & Instantly earn a FREE ebook of your choice.
Earn points for every Harlequin print and ebook you buy, wherever & whenever you shop.
Turn your points into FREE BOOKS.
Don’t miss out. Reward the book lover in you!
Register Today & Earn a FREE BOOK*
*New members who join before Dec. 31, 2016 will receive 2000 points redeemable for eligible titles.
Click here to register
Or visit us online to register at
http://www.harlequin.com/myrewards.html?mt=loyalty&cmpid=EBOOBPBPA201602010001
A Dangerous Taste of Passion
by Anne Mather
CHAPTER ONE
HE WAS STANDING on the cliff that rose steeply at the end of the cove.
Was he watching her? Lily didn’t know. But she didn’t need her intuition to realise who he was. Dee-Dee had told her; had warned her actually. And Dee-Dee seemed to know everything.
But then, Dee-Dee also claimed she had the sight, and no one on the small Caribbean island of Orchid Cay would argue with her. And it was true, the old woman had foretold Lily’s mother’s illness, and last season’s hurricane that had almost destroyed the marina in town.
Lily’s father didn’t agree that Dee-Dee knew everything. He regarded their housekeeper’s visions as just mumbo-jumbo. But Lily supposed that as an Anglican priest he couldn’t be seen to have anything to do with the ‘black magic’ he declared Dee-Dee’s claims to be.
Still, right now, Lily was less concerned with Dee-Dee’s abilities than with her desire for the man to go away. She didn’t like thinking he was watching her and she wondered again what he was doing on the island.
According to Dee-Dee, his name was Raphael Oliveira and he was from New York. The old housekeeper had speculated that he’d got in trouble in the city and had bought one of the most expensive properties on the island to escape from justice.
But even Dee-Dee’s speculations couldn’t always be relied upon and no one had even known that the house at Orchid Point was for sale.
Whatever, Lily wished he would just turn around and go away. This was the time she usually took her evening swim, but she had no intention of taking her clothes off in front of him—even if he was more than a hundred feet away.
Folding her towel over her arm, she started back towards the rectory. She only permitted herself a surreptitious glance in his direction when she was almost home.
And discovered, to her chagrin, that he was gone.
* * *
A week later, Lily was sitting at her desk, entering the details of the previous season’s charters into the computer, when someone came into the agency.
She’d worked for Cartagena Charters ever since she’d left the university she’d attended in Florida. It wasn’t a particularly demanding job, but Orchid Cay was a small town and there weren’t that many jobs that her father would approve of.
Her working area, such as it was, was behind a screen that separated the counter from the office. Usually her boss, Ray Myers, attended to all enquiries himself. But today Ray was away in Miami, taking delivery of a new two-masted schooner. He’d told Lily there probably wouldn’t be any new customers until the weekend, but she was nominally in charge.
Sighing, as much at being interrupted as at the prospect of having to deal with an enquiry herself, Lily slid out of her seat and rounded the Perspex screen into the business area.
A man was there, standing with his back to her, staring out of the plate glass windows at the masts of yachts bobbing in the marina beyond.
He was tall and very tanned, with overly long dark hair, broad shoulders encased in a leather jacket. His thumbs were pushed into the back pockets of tight-fitting jeans, accentuating the fact that they clung to narrow hips and long powerful legs.
Lily swallowed. She knew who he was instantly; had sensed it, she realised, before she’d actually walked round the screen and seen him. It was the same man who’d watched her from the cliff a week ago, the man Dee-Dee had warned her might be dangerous to know.