by Diana Palmer
“And that brings back a memory, doesn’t it?”
She hadn’t expected him to bring it up. In eight years they’d never talked about it. She shifted her stance, trying not to let him see her face.
“Aren’t you going to answer?” he chided.
“There’s nothing to say. What I saw happened a long time ago.”
He put his smoldering cigar in his mouth and forced the broad tip back into bright orange life. “It isn’t a memory I like,” he said gruffly. “It shamed me to know you’d seen me with Terri on the beach. I was aroused enough to be careless.”
“I didn’t even realize you were out there with her,” she replied tersely. She tried to blot out the memory of Josh’s aroused, nude body poised over Terri’s writhing form, but it was impossible.
She looked away, shivering with reaction. How that memory had haunted her, the sight of his big hand on Terri’s hips as he’d jerked her up to him in a sharp rhythm. When she’d cried out and convulsed, Amanda had been horrified. Then Josh had found his own satisfaction and the sight had burned into her brain like acid. She’d run away, so fast, trying to escape the erotic images.
She closed her mind to the rest of it. Turning, she walked along the beach. Her body felt oddly on fire.
“I know it was traumatic for you,” he said quietly, falling easily into step beside her. “Maybe I should have brought this all up at the time, but you were pretty naive at fifteen.”
She wrapped her arms across her chest, trying to forget the memory of his face as he’d suddenly given in to his own pleasure. In all her life she’d never seen anything like it.
“There’s no need to explain it all, Josh,” she whispered in anguish, turning her head away. “I understand now what was happening.”
He took a sharp breath and jammed one hand into his pocket. “All right,” he said angrily. “We’ll skirt around it some more, just as we have for the past eight years. I just wanted to clear the air. You brought up the noisy, amorous guests next door to you, so, it seemed like the right time. But I guess you’ve had enough to deal with lately without my bringing up embarrassing memories.”
She stopped walking and turned to him, her face shadowed as she looked up. “Dad protected me so,” she began slowly. “I’d...never even seen a naked man.”
“Your father sheltered you too damned much,” he said.
She lifted her hair away from her hot face without looking at him. Her body felt funny. Hot. Clammy. Throbbing with some sensation she couldn’t understand.
Josh paused in front of her and reached out and touched her shoulder. His fingers fell lightly on her heated flesh. She caught her breath. His touch was the most erotic she’d ever felt, and she couldn’t hide her reaction.
His dark eyes slid down to her thin gown, to the small, hard peaks that betrayed what she was feeling. That, and her ragged breathing and the set of her exquisite body, told him things he didn’t really want to know just yet.
“You’re vulnerable,” he said curtly. “The night, the strain of the past week, the excitement tonight...maybe even the memory we share, it’s all knocked the pins out from under you.”
“Yes,” she said, her eyes wide as they searched his in the flood of light that came from the house.
His fingers trailed along the throbbing pulse in her throat, and further, to the faint outline of her collarbone. Her breath caught, but she didn’t protest or push at his hand.
His lips parted as he watched her face. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew this was dangerous. She was unguarded, and he was aroused. It had been a long time since he’d been with a woman. Just after Terri had left, there had been a Latin heiress with whom he’d conducted a very lukewarm, long-distance affair. And yet the tiny sound that suddenly escaped Amanda’s throat aroused him more than Louisa Valdez’s naked body in a bed ever had.
Amanda shivered. In one moment she’d recognized the years of frustrated longing she’d felt for him, and suddenly she needed him more than ever.
He couldn’t quite believe the look of desire he saw on her face. It unsettled him. The cigar dangled in his free hand, and he fought the sudden shift in his perception of her.
She still hadn’t moved, but his mind had. His fingers lifted as if her soft skin were white fire. He didn’t dare touch her again. He didn’t move. His face poised above hers as if it had been carved from stone.
“Joshua?” Was that husky whisper her voice?
His gaze fell to the taut thrust of her breasts against her bodice, down to her smooth hips and her long, elegant legs, to her pretty bare feet. Her silver shoes lay scattered on the white sand, the foaming surf just touching them. He had to remember why he couldn’t get involved with a woman, especially not with Amanda.
With a soft curse, he moved away from her all at once. “Here,” he said gruffly, “you’ve left your shoes in the surf. They’ll be soaked.”
His words brought Amanda back to reality.
“They’re old,” she said. “I touched them up with some of Harriet’s silver hairspray.”
He looked for his cigar and found it lying in the water. He sighed and shoved his hands in his pockets. He smoked too much, anyway. “Harriet’s hairspray?!” he replied suddenly.
She laughed. He sometimes seemed to be listening when really he was miles away. “That will teach you to pay attention when I talk to you,” she said, and in seconds he was smiling and everything was back to normal.
Afterward Amanda could hardly remember when or how they’d gone inside. But once she was upstairs, she almost collapsed with burning heat on her bed. Her head was really splitting now, and she was feeling particularly vulnerable.
She wanted Josh. She could no longer deny the sensations she felt. But she’d make sure that she stayed in control from now on. Having only just escaped her father’s domination, she was in no hurry to rush back into emotional slavery.
At least Josh wasn’t going to take advantage of her weakness. He’d rejected her, but not unkindly. She’d heard some of the rumors about his lovers. A lot about Terri, the woman she’d seen him with on the beach so long ago. She knew he didn’t want to get married, but that he was an honorable man. He knew Amanda too well to lure her into his bed for a few minutes of pleasure. Maybe that was a good thing, but all the same her body throbbed until dawn. The worst thing was that she hadn’t even had the presence of mind to mention the job press at the newspaper office to him.
* * *
JOSH GAVE UP on the idea of sleeping when his company finally departed. He’d won his deal with the oil sheik, and he should have felt satisfied. But he didn’t.
He felt as restless as ever. Imbued with an ongoing urgency about life, he often wore out employees who simply couldn’t meet the demands he placed on them. Like many overachievers, he was impatient with people who lived at a normal pace.
“Go to bed, for God’s sake,” Josh said to Ted. “You’re asleep on your feet.”
Ted chuckled as he rose from his comfortable chair. “I don’t mind keeping you company,” he said. “But a few hours of sleep sounds great. You seem to live on catnaps.”
Josh shrugged. “In the early days it was the only way I could manage to save the company. Now, it’s a habit.” He frowned. That wasn’t quite true. What he’d felt with Amanda bothered him. He lit a cigar impatiently.
“That will kill you,” Ted remarked at the door.
“Life kills people, too,” came the sardonic reply. “Dina’s enrolled me in a stop smoking seminar,” he added. “I’ll kick the habit. But not tonight.”
Ted shrugged. “Suit yourself. See you in the morning.”
The door closed, and he was alone with his thoughts, his memories.
He was going to miss Harrison Todd. Amanda’s father had not been a perfect human being, but Joshua had learned a lot from him in the early days. Knowing he woul
dn’t have Harrison around had been a blow. Brad was a good salesman, but Harrison had years of experience neither Lawson brother had had a chance to accumulate.
Business, he mused. Even when he was alone, it dominated his mind. Better that than Amanda’s soft, pretty body, he reminded himself. His young life had been a kaleidoscope of affairs not unlike his parents’ adulterous adventures. He could remember his father flirting openly with other women, and it wasn’t a rare occurrence. His mother had been a little more discreet, but there were always men half her age traveling with her, helping her spend her money.
Sent off to school at the age of six, Josh had never known a family environment or honest love. Amanda’s tender concern for him over the cactus so many years earlier had surprised him. He wasn’t accustomed to people caring about him more than his money.
Amanda stayed near him at the worst times of his life. When he’d broken his leg on a skiing trip, it had been Amanda who’d come to see him in the hospital with potted plants and sympathy. She’d fussed over him when he was sick, teased him when he was well, become an integral part of his life. But in all that time he’d never touched her. Not even under the mistletoe at Christmas.
Everything had changed a few hours earlier on the beach. Now he didn’t recall her nurturing ways. He wanted her, but he didn’t know how to reconcile that with his affection for her, with their friendship.
With other women, relationships were simple. His lovers were experienced, sophisticated women who could settle for sex without emotional involvement. He knew that wouldn’t be possible with Amanda. He equated Amanda and sex with marriage and children and forever after. Since marriage had become an impossibility for him, he had to reconcile himself to keeping his hands off Amanda. Tonight had been a moment out of time. She’d sensed his rejection at once and with grace and dignity. He had to make sure that he didn’t put her in that position twice, because he didn’t like seeing Amanda humbled. It didn’t suit her spirited nature at all. He’d spent years prodding her temper, helping her stand up to her father. Now he had to keep her on the right track.
He flung open a file folder and buried his thoughts in business.
CHAPTER THREE
THE OCEAN OFF Opal Cay was every shade of mingled green and blue in the color spectrum. Like the rest of the Bahama Islands chain, the water was crystalline, unpolluted. Virginal.
Amanda smiled at the unspoiled beauty and hoped that this exquisite sugar-white beach would never go the way of so many other beautiful coves that now boasted casino and hotel complexes.
She pushed her hands deeper into the pockets of her short white robe. She’d just been swimming, and her slender body was still wet, like her long black hair. She lifted it to the ever-present breeze, feeling the hot, wet wind pull at it, drying it. Under the robe was a yellow bikini with red stripes, the first unconventional statement she’d made since her father’s death.
She knew she should have felt something. Sadness. Grief. Loss. Emptiness. There was only relief. What a eulogy for Harrison Sanford Todd.
“I must be heartless,” she said aloud.
“Why?” came a deep, cynically amused reply from over her shoulder.
She turned, her pale green eyes wide. They softened helplessly at the masculine perfection of the man who approached her. She pushed back her long, windblown hair to keep it out of her mouth in the crisp breeze. “I thought you were going to Nassau.”
“Not until eleven-thirty. It’s barely seven. Why are you out so early?”
“I dreamed about Dad,” she said. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was close enough. She rammed her hands deep into her pockets. “I wish I could miss him.”
“He wasn’t exactly a family man, Amanda. Don’t waste time on unnecessary guilt. He gave what he could, and so did you. Let that be enough,” Josh said in his soft, deep Texas accent. His dark eyes flashed like the reflection of the ocean in sunlight as he looked down at her from his imposing height. “Didn’t I mention the undertow and the danger of swimming alone?”
“You probably did,” she agreed with a grin. “And I probably didn’t listen. But I only went out a little way. I’m not terribly adventurous. Yet,” she added.
He smiled. “You’ll get around to it. It’s a big world.”
“And full of sharks,” she mused.
His eyes narrowed as he glanced seaward. A smoking cigar dangled from one lean, darkly tanned hand, its only adornment a thin gold watch buried in the thick hair of his strong wrist. He was wearing white slacks with a sedate gray T-shirt, tediously conventional. It was like flying a false flag, because there was nothing, absolutely nothing, conventional about Joshua Cabe Lawson, as his business adversaries had learned to their cost.
He towered over her, despite the fact that she was tall and slender. His blond good looks and superb physical presence drew women like a magnet. His scandalous reputation had dimmed only briefly during the time he was seeing Terri. Although Josh had genuinely loved the woman, she’d left him because he didn’t want to get married. He was incapable of commitment except when it came to business matters. Then he was as dedicated as any workaholic.
Amanda, fresh out of college and brimming with ideas, had some small understanding of the aphrodisiac that a career could provide. She wanted desperately to have a chance to make the Todd Gazette’s small job press grow to its full potential. The present manager, Ward Johnson, had been in his job so long that he just slogged along from day to day in the same old rut, never bothering to change anything at all. His first love was the weekly newspaper. The job press was only a worrying sideline to him, and like Josh, he wanted to close it down or sell off the equipment. Amanda didn’t. She knew it could pay for itself. If only it were run right!
Amanda loved working at the paper. Although she didn’t have a journalism degree, she did have one in business, and she had some innovative ideas about how to upgrade the antiquated equipment, reorganize the print shop, and structure the job descriptions of the staff who overlapped both businesses. But repressed from childhood by her overbearing, domineering father, she hadn’t yet learned how to be aggressive without being offensive, and when she made gentle suggestions, no one would listen to her. Least of all the man at her side.
She looked up at him and wondered idly why he never made her feel smothered even when he did exercise his protective instincts. For a year after she’d come home from a finishing school in Switzerland, he’d hounded her until she’d entered a local San Antonio college, late, at the age of nineteen.
Joshua had steered her toward college when her father hadn’t even noticed her lack of occupation. Women needed to train in a profession, Josh had insisted, and not be dependent on anyone else for a living—even a husband, if she ever married. She’d taken that one piece of advice and gone on to major in business and minor in marketing. She’d graduated summa cum laude while Josh watched her accept her diploma. Her father had been closing a deal in London.
Josh had gone into business with her father eight years before, and despite the fact that he seemed to hate almost everyone he associated with, he’d been kind to Amanda since the first time he’d seen her.
She remembered that meeting with amused delight. Tough Joshua Lawson had fallen into a prickly pear cactus because of her cat, Butch—a fourteen-pound monster of a cat with the disposition of a rattler. Amanda had been horrified that her pet was going to be strangled, but her compassion for Joshua had been even stronger than her fear for Butch. She’d rushed to get a pair of tweezers, and it had taken her twenty long minutes to pull out every cactus hair. She’d done it painstakingly, while a surprised and then amused Joshua sat docilely and allowed a personal invasion that he would have tolerated from no one else. Amanda hadn’t known that until years later, when he’d confessed it with rueful amusement.
“What are you smiling about?” he murmured.
“The prickly pear cactus,” sh
e said immediately.
He chuckled. “Yes. The prickly pear. What ever became of that blue-eyed cat?”
“He died, remember? While he was staying with Mirri last year,” she replied, a little sad.
“Tiger Lily,” he muttered.
His reference to Mirri made her smile. “Her temper is no worse than yours,” she pointed out. “And she’s the best friend I’ve got.”
“She’s a lot like you,” he said disgustedly. “Incredibly repressed and hopelessly locked into a self-destructive pattern of solitary living.”
“Well, thank you for that professional analysis,” she said sarcastically. “And you aren’t supposed to notice that Mirri’s repressed,” she reminded him gently. “She certainly doesn’t give that impression to strangers.”
“I know,” he replied. “She puts on a good act when she’s dressing like a third-rate prostitute, piling on makeup, flirting outrageously, and publicly announcing that she wants to have some man’s children.” He chuckled. “And how they run! But one day she’s going to find someone who’ll mistake that image for the real woman. And I’ll feel sorry for her when she does.”
“I hope it never happens,” Amanda remarked.
“So do I. Her scars are deep enough. Like yours.” His eyes narrowed on her face. “Someone should have taken a horsewhip to Harrison years ago. I considered it a time or two, on your behalf. What he did to you was criminal. I could never make him see it.”
She was surprised and touched that he’d cared enough to try. “He could be cruel,” she agreed. “But he wasn’t all bad. He did find good people to take care of me, and I always had everything I wanted.”
“Everything except love,” he agreed. He touched her chin, and his fingers felt hard and cool against her face as he lifted it. “Some lucky man is going to enjoy you one day, Amanda, with all that love and need welled up in you, just waiting to pour out.”
She smiled at him, ignoring the sweet explosions that were going off all over her body. “Just as long as he can cook and use a vacuum cleaner,” she teased.