Ahead of him, she sashayed through the Piazzetta with a slightly drunken grace. How she could move so effortlessly in the cobbled square on those heels was a source of endless fascination to Eric. She seemed to bring out the gawking teenager in him, much to his consternation. He’d barely been able to control himself while sitting beside her in the restaurant, and even now, if he touched her bare arm, he feared he’d erupt like Vesuvius. He should have made more time for mindless anonymous sex in the last few months—penciled it right in the book, in between board meetings and festival preparations and speeches to restive stockholders. He could imagine Cathy’s solemn expression never changing, even as she jotted “Sex at six” into his daily planner.
He shook himself out of his reverie and took several gulps of the crisp salt air, clearing his mind.
Amanda stopped moving. Moonlight shone in her hair as she tossed him a backward glance. “Which way from here?” she asked. “And shouldn’t I be following you? You know your way around this island better than I do.”
She planted her hands on her hips—full, round, welcoming hips and petite hands with no rings. Her nails were short and unpainted, even a little ragged—the hands of a woman who did something with her day, rather than spending it lounging beside a pool and complaining about the quality of her maid service. Cathy said she’d been a nature reporter, and her tanned body reflected the time she must have spent outdoors. The golden tones of her skin were authentic, not something that washed off in the shower. A natural girl with no jewelry and no perfume except the one she’d bought this morning—the very image dazzled him, so contrary was it to the women he’d had in the past.
He strolled up to her side and spoke. “I say, didn’t you mention you were an environmental reporter once? I’m thinking of greatly expanding Greyford’s environmental coverage. Possibly even starting up some new publications in that field. What do you think of the idea?”
“I think I’d like to apply for a job, sir.” Amanda laughed, and the merry openhearted sound went straight to his heart.
“I’d be happy to have you.”
“Does Stacey like the great outdoors, too?” Amanda asked.
The answer to that was an emphatic no. He’d talked Stacey into a camping trip a number of months ago. Two days into the adventure, she’d fled to the nearest luxury hotel.
“It’s not one of her favorite things.”
Amanda grinned. “I went camping and canoeing a lot back in Arizona—but that’s pretty tame stuff. I’ve always wanted to do whitewater rafting—and all those other crazy sports you do.”
“Are you very athletic?”
Amanda shrugged. “I’d like to say yes, because I know it would impress you. But no. I’m certainly not in your class, at any rate. I was on the rowing team in college, and I did okay, probably because I got to sit in one spot the whole time. Also, it wasn’t a very good team. With most team sports, it’s much safer for all concerned if I stay on the sidelines and watch. I once gave a friend a concussion when we were playing volleyball.”
Eric laughed.
“So I like the outdoors, but I wouldn’t call myself a real athlete. But I admire athletes, especially people like you who can do all that risky stuff like snowmobiling and whitewater rafting. And you race cars, too, don’t you? Dan—that’s my editor—she mentioned you did. That must be quite a thrill.”
“No, not anymore. Not since—”
The darkness rose up in him again, the same darkness that had been threatening to engulf him for a year now. The warm, sensuous mood between them evaporated more quickly than a rain cloud in the Capri sky. He cursed under his breath and clenched his fists.
“I’m so sorry!” Amanda covered her mouth with her hand. “Your brother. The car crash. That was incredibly insensitive of me.”
Eric thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“But you aren’t,” Amanda insisted, her eyes searching every inch of his face. “Were you two very close?”
“As close as two brothers might be who are nearly ten years apart. Which is to say, I looked up to him, and he put up with me. I’d rather not talk about him.” He fixed her with a stern warning look, but like most reporters, she failed to take the hint.
“Sometimes talking about things helps.”
She reached towards him, then seemed to think better of the gesture and withdrew. Eric hated the disappointment that coursed through his veins, the weakness of it. She was meant to be an empty diversion for an evening, and instead, she fancied herself a psychotherapist. He should have had her arrested after all, and then made a date with that empty-headed Italian model, the one who didn’t speak English. Hell, she barely spoke Italian.
“Is that the road?” Amanda asked, frantically trying to make amends for her faux pas. She gestured beyond the town hall to a narrow stony lane.
“Yes, it is.”
She peered down the narrow path and hesitated. “And that’s really the way to the fantastic view?”
Behind her, Eric watched as a light breeze ruffled the loose wisps of her wheat-gold hair. She looked askance at him again, with a timid, girlish smile.
“Yes,” he admitted. “The view is quite fantastic.”
Moving ahead of her in the crowd, he stretched out a hand and then pulled it back, stuffing it into his pocket once again. He’d nearly taken her hand. Wouldn’t that look grand in all the tabloids, what with everyone thinking he was Stacey’s boyfriend? More than her boyfriend, judging by the photographer’s ‘Mr. Stacey Dakota’ remark earlier in the day.
Eric wondered if Stacey was looking forward to their publicly staged break-up after the festival as much as he was. Although he didn’t regret the friendship that had grown out of their proximity, Eric seriously regretted allowing the public to believe the two of them were lovers. He’d exploded in fury when he’d realized his own brother had planted the initial rumors about his “love affair” with Stacey, a mercenary effort to boost Greyford Publishing’s name recognition and give it a more youthful image. His last conversation with his brother had been an argument about the stories.
“Hello in there!” Amanda’s sing-song voice intruded on his thoughts.
“Sorry. Thinking about work.”
“I must be pretty disappointing company, then, if I can’t keep a man’s mind off a pile of newspapers for a few hours.”
Eric halted in front of the Piazzetta’s famous clock tower. “No, you aren’t disappointing me at all. I have a great deal on my mind. I’m sorry if I’m being inattentive.”
“Hey, I told you I’d give up on the story for Fame.” Amanda grinned, her chocolaty brown eyes sparkling at him. “I’m here because you promised to show me the sights, but if you’re not in the mood, I can go back to my room.”
“Don’t.” He closed the distance between them. He wanted to crush her against his chest right here, right now. Forget the crowds and the public image, forget everything else as he learned the taste of her skin and the sounds she would make as he touched her in her most secret places. “I don’t want you to go. Not yet. Let’s enjoy the night—with no hidden agenda on either of our parts. You say you’ve abandoned your story. I’ll abandon my rather base designs on you, and we’ll just—”
“What? Be friends?” Amanda gave a sharp laugh, eying him as though she feared he might become dangerous at any moment.
Eric’s skill with women, once legendary among his friends, had vanished under Amanda’s unnerving combination of naïve goodwill and cynical humor. While he struggled for a witty comeback, she turned away from him. With a twitch of her hips, she was strolling ahead, up the narrow medieval road that led to the Arco Naturale.
Eric lagged behind, preferring to watch the high, round shape of her luscious bottom as she climbed the road’s slight incline. That bottom could make a man commit treason. The constricted sensation in his groin began to flare again, and he cursed himself for trying to play the bloody gentleman with her. Her curva
ceous body cried out for the very opposite of gentlemanly behavior.
“I have to admit,” Amanda called over her shoulder, “this isn’t what I expected you to suggest when I said I was looking for fun.”
“And what were you expecting?”
“I don’t know—a quick hustle back to your room and a tumble in the sheets before being kicked into the hallway around two a.m.”
Eric eyed her back with unabashed amusement. Her bluntness reminded him of Stacey, but he liked Amanda’s packaging much better. He hastened to join her. “You Americans do say what you think.”
“Well, isn’t it what you were planning?”
That had been his intention when he’d first found her in his room, bent over that dresser drawer in her tight skirt and sky-high heels. The idea still held its attraction. Yet he couldn’t believe that was what Amanda wanted.
***
They rounded a corner on the twisting, ancient road. Stone houses lined either side of the street, crowding so near they gave one a sensation of claustrophobia. The noise from the Piazzetta faded away, like music on a radio when the batteries have run down. Few people passed them, and those who did looked more like island natives than upscale tourists. Amanda began to understand Eric wasn’t moving so slowly after all. He was merely drawing her away from the bustling crowds down at the center of Capri, leading her to some lonely, wild place where he didn’t have to worry about the prying eyes of hotel clerks or paparazzi. Now would be the time to bail out, if ever.
“So you wrote for newspapers before you went over to the dark side and joined Tate Global Multimedia?” Eric asked, his brandy-smooth voice rendering her defenseless and sparking an electric jolt in her belly.
“Um, yes.” She glanced at him, and then turned her attention to a less exciting sight, an old house that sported boxes of trailing bougainvillea at every window. “It’s so beautiful here.”
“Yes, it is.”
Amanda dared not look back at Eric when he spoke. She could tell from the husky timbre of his voice that he wasn’t referring to the flowers.
“Talk to me,” he urged. “How’d you wind up working for Fame?”
“My mother encouraged me to take the job before she passed away. The pay is phenomenal compared to what I made at the Lake Havasu Star.”
“I’m sure it is,” he purred, his soothing voice hypnotic in this quiet place.
“Deep down I kept hoping –”
“What did you hope?”
There, she’d almost gone and told him about her childish dreams of forging a real relationship with Peter Tate. She didn’t want anyone to know that man was her father, least of all Eric Greyford. Tate Global was trying to take over his family-run company, after all. He’d never speak to her again if he learned who her father was. The fact that she should care about any future conversations with Eric proved clearly that she’d had too much to drink at the restaurant. This is all about the now, she reminded herself. No worries about future conversations.
“Amanda? What did you hope?”
“Nothing much,” she shrugged. “I guess I hoped I’d learn to like it. But I don’t. In fact, I may not be doing it much longer. I may resign when I go back to New York.”
Where the heck had that come from?
Eric stopped walking and turned to face her.
“You could work for me. I was serious earlier. We aren’t like Tate Global. Our papers and magazines focus on hard news. Or they did, until my brother started trying to compete head-on with Tate. I think that was a mistake, rather like a mouse roaring at a lion—all he did was cause Tate to pay even more attention to us.”
Eric reached up and ruffled his unruly hair in a gesture of exasperation.
Amanda longed to run her own fingers through those thick, dark waves. Would his chest be full of dark hair too, or bare and smooth? Somewhere in the files of Fame there must be pictures of him shirtless. How could she have missed those? Maybe pictures of him at the beach with Stacey, or images from some of his high profile outdoor activities—yachting, diving, climbing. Okay, definitely no shirtless pictures of him climbing mountains, that would be weird. Yet there must be more pictures somewhere. Of course, she could just let the night play out as he’d originally envisioned it. She’d get to find out for herself first hand. Meanwhile, she’d have to focus her energy on maintaining some semblance of conversational skills.
“I appreciate the offer,” she told Eric as they resumed their walk. “But I don’t know what I want to do next. Maybe go back to the newspaper where I used to work in Arizona. They’d be happy to have me. Or I was thinking about getting into teaching. I like kids, and it looks like it’s going to be quite a while before I have any of my own. And with a job like that, I’d have more time to have a personal life, you know?”
Eric chuckled. “I used to have one of those. Now, I meet.”
“You meet?”
“Board meetings, meetings with advertisers, stockholder meetings. I meet. That’s what I spend my life doing now.”
“Couldn’t someone else do the day-to-day running things and you just sit on the board and, I don’t know, collect cash from your stock options?”
Eric narrowed his eyes and gave her a sharp, suspicious gaze. She’d meant to offer friendly concern, but he was clearly wondering if the reporter in her was gathering intel for a story. Come to think of it, maybe she was gathering intel for a story. Dan would be the first to tell her she could have her cake and eat it too. So to speak. Have fun, but not too much fun. Keep it casual, get a good story, get the guy—and then get the heck out of town. That’s what Dan would do. Eric’s creamy English accent totally disrupted Amanda’s line of reasoning.
“My father very much wants me to be the one running the company,” he said. “He wants it to remain under family control. In fact, though, the family control is an illusion. The stockholders and the board are what control a public corporation. I’m a rubber stamp for their recommendations. I’ve been trying to find a way to change that, but so far, I haven’t found a good one. Unlike your employer, Greyford Publishing is a very conservative company, very old line. It took some effort for my father to convince them to appoint me as acting Chief Operating Officer after Antony died. Some days, I’m sorry he succeeded.”
Amanda frowned. Although the alcohol at dinner had loosened her up, made her feel more willing to be spontaneous and experimental, it appeared to be having the opposite effect on Eric.
“Are you sorry you inherited your brother’s job?” she asked.
“I suppose I am.”
She got the feeling he was trying the words on for size, discovering the truth of them for the first time.
“I couldn’t say no,” he added after a long pause. “I had other plans, but my father’s health is failing. He made it clear he needed me. Fathers can be like that.”
A stab of jealousy knifed Amanda’s heart. “I wouldn’t know. Mine was never around.”
They stopped at the crest of a steep hill, beside a small whitewashed medieval church. Only a few inches separated them, and Eric turned to face her, the spicy scent of him addling her concentration once more. His gaze locked with hers and concern creased his smooth brow. “Is your father dead?”
“No, just couldn’t be bothered.” Trying for a levity she didn’t feel, Amanda added, “I’m his shameful secret. My parents weren’t married.”
“Ah.” Eric nodded, his eyes searching her face, apparently trying to gauge how to respond to her news.
“It’s no big deal.”
“But rough luck for you.” His voice was soft. A look of tender sympathy darkened his eyes, and he raised a hand to her face. With the care of an artist, he used his fingertips to trace the lines of her cheekbones. “If your mother was half the beauty you are, a man would have to be insane to abandon her.”
“Oh.” Amanda lost all command of the English language as his touch went on, exploring the shape of her nose, her cheeks, her throat. At last, his fingers came to res
t, cupping her chin in his hand like a snifter of brandy.
“Enough about business. I’m thinking about kissing you right now.” A wry smile turned up one corner of his mouth.
Amanda smiled and relaxed into his touch. “I’m thinking about it too.”
His lips brushed against hers, tentative and gentle, then more firmly. His tongue parted her lips, invading her with a restrained force that both excited and alarmed her. He backed her up against the church wall, his hands slipping down along the sides of her body, tracing her contours with sensuous attention. When he broke the kiss at last, his fingers laced through hers and clasped her hand tight.
“Shall we go on?” His voice flowed over her like the sweetest honey.
“Yes.” She nodded. “I’d like that.”
He led her up over the crest of the hill. Beyond the edges of the old medieval city, they entered onto a much wilder path, lined with scrubby pine trees and sturdy, long-stemmed wildflowers. The full moon cast its silvery glow on everything around them. Beneath one of the taller pine trees, he stopped. Some distance ahead, Amanda glimpsed the sea. A shaft of light split the dark, still waters and seemed to point its way towards them. All around, she heard the cries of night birds and the flutter of their wings.
“It’s very peaceful here.” She looked up at him, but his face lay in deep shadow. She didn’t want to feel uneasy, and yet she did. Not that she thought Eric was in some way a danger to her. Her own feelings were the real problem. She wanted to be wild and sexy and adventurous, the way Dan would be in this situation. Yet she also couldn’t help wondering—what would happen afterward? If this evening was a slow build-up to getting her into bed, would she find herself out in that hotel corridor the next morning? And would she be able to deal with that?
Eric tugged on her hand to get her attention. “Your thoughts are a million miles away.”
“No, I’m thinking very much about what’s happening right now.” She disengaged her hand from his and went to lean against the pine tree. “Do you think you might want to kiss me again?” she asked, in the most seductive voice she could manage. Her blood pounded in her ears, and she was glad of the darkness, knowing that her face must have turned scarlet when she spoke so boldly.
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