by Trish Morey
Only it didn’t, and it wasn’t, and it was all because of one thing: he had Fletcher’s sister.
No news was definitely good news. Three days would be more than enough. Fletcher would have to accept defeat this time and more than likely Daniel would have had his fill of Sophie. They all paled after a while, no matter how tempting they’d been in the beginning. Sophie was good, he granted her that, but three days surely had to be enough for this crazy fire to burn out?
More than enough.
There was a tap at the door and it slowly opened. ‘Daniel?’ the subject of his thoughts said tentatively. ‘Dinner’s ready if you are.’
He was at her side in a heartbeat, determined to make the most of the next three days. He curled his hand around her neck and hauled her into his kiss. ‘Oh,’ he said after she’d been thoroughly and deeply kissed so that her taste and scent filled his senses, stoking the flames of that fire once more. ‘Believe me, I’m ready.’
They made love in the plunge-pool afterwards, a slow, delicious tangling of bodies, tongues and limbs, an exquisite pleasure-filled torture where delay heightened desire and where postponing the inevitable increased the need. Until finally, their eyes driven dark with desperation, they came together in a writhing, heaving conflagration that churned the water until it was white with foam.
Later, when both the water and their heartbeats had calmed and she lay like a sleepy cat against his body, he wondered about those three days being enough. He’d just had the best sex of his life; the way this woman felt under his hand, the way his body reacted to that touch, there was plenty more to come.
She stirred in his arms and stretched deliciously against him, her eyes fluttering to wakefulness—but it was the smile she gave him, a heady mix of innocence and temptation that made him feel that the bottom had just dropped out of the pool. ‘Thank you,’ she said, her hand lazily stroking his chest.
He picked it up, took it to his mouth and kissed it before softly dropping it down again. ‘For what?’
‘Lots of things. For sex in the pool. And sex on the deck. And sex in the shower. I don’t think I’ll forget that for a while.’
He found himself grinning along with her. Was it only last night they’d first come together? They’d made love so many times already, it felt like it must be longer.
‘My pleasure,’ he growled, meaning it, liking the way her fingers had found his nipple, how her nails raked tiny circles around its peak.
‘I never knew it could be so good—the sex, I mean. Not that I’ve had that much experience, of course. Not like you, I imagine. You’ve probably had loads and loads of women.’
That many? He couldn’t recall. ‘Does it matter? You’re the best so far.’ She blushed, the way she did, but this time she seemed to blush all over.
‘Yeah, sure.’
He didn’t know why he’d admitted it, but it was out there now, and he wasn’t about to argue the point. ‘So, how many lovers have you had?’
She screwed up her nose. ‘It’s a bit embarrassing really. Only the one. Two, really, if you count the first time, but really just one.’
‘So who was he?’
‘A guy I met. I did a volunteer programme for a year doing English as a second language in a small village in Thailand.’
‘That’s where you learned to cook so well?’
‘You really liked it?’ Her head lifted from his shoulder, her eyes bright with pleasure.
‘I loved it,’ he said, kissing her on the tip of her nose. ‘Thank you.’
She snuggled her head back down, the water lapping at their joined skin. ‘I’m glad. Anyway, Craig was another volunteer from New Zealand. We were the only foreigners, and it was pretty isolated. I was homesick, and Mum had just got sick—not too bad, at that stage, but I was worried about her because I had six months left on my contract, and…’
‘And Craig was there.’
Her fingers made whirls in his chest hair. ‘And Craig was there. He was a nice enough guy, but we knew it was temporary. Kind of like sticking on a plaster: it helped cover the wound when I was a bit sad and lonely.’
He nodded. ‘So who was the other one?’
She screwed up her nose again.
‘That was a bit more embarrassing. I had a bit of a crush on this guy at school. Anyway, someone laced the punch with alco-pop at the end-of-school party and Simon and I got a bit carried away—maybe more than a bit, if you know what I mean. It was awful. We were both so horrified, we never spoke to each other again.’
He knew what she meant. He’d done his own fair share of experimenting when he was in high school. Until he and Emma had become an item.
God, he didn’t want to think about Emma now. Not here, not while he was screwing Fletcher’s sister.
He pushed away, letting go of her as he sat up, his head in his hands, waiting for the explosion of pain he knew would come. The guilt at his betrayal that he should be sleeping with this woman.
That he would be enjoying it, after what Fletcher had done!
And the pain came, though nowhere near as intense as he had expected. Dulled through too much sex, he assumed. It was a wonder he had feelings left at all.
‘What’s wrong?’
He looked skyward, to the blanket of stars and moon overhead, and sighed. ‘It’s late and I’ve got an early start. Let’s go to bed.’
Whatever had been bothering him that night—first in disappearing so abruptly into his office before dinner, and then his all-too-rapid change of mood in the pool—it hadn’t hung around. Sophie looked dreamily out of the window of her office, wondering if she’d ever regain the ability to focus for longer than two minutes at a time. The last few days and nights had been amazing and it was hard to imagine a time when sex or memories of their love-making hadn’t figured so prominently in her life.
But how could she—as someone who had never hungered for the touch of a man, who had never missed it from her neatly ordered life—suddenly be so obsessed by the sensations stirred within her?
And how could Daniel make her feel the way he did with just one look, one caress? How could he reduce her to nothing more than a mass of screaming nerve endings again and again?
Those nerve endings made themselves known to her now. She looked at the clock; he would be home soon. He’d been coming home earlier and earlier every day. When Millie had commented on it, he’d said there wasn’t much on, but he’d winked at her while he said it and had given her that look and whisked her off to the bedroom before dinner. And last night he’d had Millie prepare a picnic basket and they’d had dinner on the private beach in the cove below, taking turns at swimming, making love and feeding each other with treats from the basket.
If he kept this up, a girl could almost think she was special. Almost.
If he hadn’t told her that she was his best lover so far, she might already believe she was. For, even if he’d been telling her the truth that night, his words had been a stark reminder that she was one of many and that Daniel was used to moving on.
As he would no doubt do again.
With a sigh she forced her thoughts back to the reason why she was here—to organise a wedding, not fall head over heels with Daniel Caruana. There was no future in it, no point to their relationship. Because even if their affair lasted that long once Monica and Daniel were married there was no reason for her to stay on the island, no reason not to return to Brisbane.
She refused to look at the clock again, to see how much or how little the minute hand had moved since she’d last looked. She had to keep her head, not lose her heart.
If only he didn’t make it so difficult.
The computer on the desk behind pinged with incoming mail: hopefully confirmation at the last of the printing job’s completion. She turned to her desk, happy to have an excuse to think about work, and clicked on her email programme. She smiled when she saw it was from Jake instead. She opened it, thinking they must be back from their cruise, wondering how it had gone eve
n as her smile turned to a frown.
I need to talk to you. Urgently. Are you alone?
J
She stared vacantly at the message, hit reply with trembling fingers and sent off a brief message.
Bare seconds later, her phone buzzed. ‘Jake,’ she said, ‘what’s wrong? Is Monica okay?’
‘She’s fine. She’s at the hairdresser. We’re both fine.’ But he sounded anything but, his words tight and clipped and angry as hell. ‘I need to give you a message for Caruana.’
‘Sure, what is it?’
‘Tell him I don’t want his money. Tell him to call off his dogs.’
Her blood ran cold. ‘What money?’ But somehow she knew before he’d uttered another word.
‘The money he offered me to dump Monica. We hadn’t been here ten minutes and his thug was on the phone, offering me half a million to leave her cold.’
‘He offered you that?’ Sophie dropped into her chair. It was an obscene amount of money, but what she’d been doing with Daniel while he’d been plotting to rid himself of her brother and this marriage was more obscene.
She’d slept with him, practically offered herself to him.
And, all the while he’d been pretending to go along with the plans she’d been making, he was busy planning to ensure the wedding never happened.
‘That was just the opening gambit,’ her brother continued. ‘I told him to get lost and he’s upped the offer to a cool million now.’
Something squeezed tight in her chest. This couldn’t be happening. Why would Daniel want her here, organising a wedding he was busy trying to ensure would never happen? She’d actually believed he was coming round to the idea.
Yet hadn’t Daniel practically boasted how he’d got rid of Monica’s previous boyfriends?
Despite everything, despite all she knew and suspected, she still had to ask the question. ‘You’re sure it’s Daniel?’
‘Oh, yeah. It’s him. And this thug who calls himself security—Jo Dimitriou—I know him, but I didn’t know he was working for Caruana now. I’ve got this really bad feeling about him. Watch out for him. He’s dangerous.’
And Daniel wasn’t? Jo gave her the creeps, she was the first to agree, but who was the more dangerous—the man who offered you money at someone else’s behest, or the man who made you believe in one thing when he was busy destroying everything you were trying to build up while you were looking the other way? ‘I should have warned you, Jake. He’s done this before—offered money, I mean—to get rid of Monica’s boyfriends.’
‘Bastard! Monica told me she was beginning to think if there was something wrong with her, not being able to hold onto a man.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Stay here for now. I figure Monica’s better off out of it. I haven’t told her yet. She thinks the sun shines out of her darling brother.’
‘I understand.’
‘Listen, Sophie, I’ve told this Jo guy no. There’s clearly no way Caruana’s going to listen to me, but if he hears it from you he might actually believe it. Can you tell him? Tell him to save his efforts? It doesn’t matter what he offers me, the answer’s still no. Tell him I’m marrying his sister, whether he likes it or not.’
Sophie put the phone down, her mind numb, her body in shock, and a great, gaping hole where her heart should have been. She’d thought she’d been wrong about him. She’d thought it had been the shock of the wedding announcement that had turned him into a raging monster that first day, and that he was coming round—had come round—to accepting that the wedding would go ahead. Bit by bit, he’d seemed to soften.
Or was that her? Falling into his bed and wanting to believe he was different, so that her first impressions had been wrong. Seduced by sex until she’d believed the monster was the lie, that the man was better than that.
When clearly he’d been a monster all along.
She looked around the office: at the pictures she’d stuck up on the walls; at the various lists that seemed to cover every horizontal surface; at the samples of stationery and swatches of fabrics she had for colour matching.
Daniel had no intention of this wedding going ahead. So what was she even doing here?
From down the hallway came the sound of voices and she had to fight the sudden urge to retch.
Daniel was home.
It had been the day from hell. A bank in one of his shopping centres had been host to a hold up, there’d been another blow-up with the Townsville negotiations, which meant he’d have to head back up there first thing tomorrow, and Jo had been giving him grief about upping Fletcher’s offer again in the wake of this latest rejection. And the worst thing about that was the random thought he’d had that maybe Fletcher’s reluctance to accept an offer meant Fletcher really did love his sister. He’d shoved the idea away as quickly as it had arisen, but the sick feeling had lingered all afternoon.
If he hadn’t had Sophie to come home to, there would have been nothing to make the day worth living.
Millie handed him a beer and he chugged half of it down before drawing breath. ‘Thanks, I needed that,’ he said, looking around, surprised Sophie wasn’t hanging around the kitchen where he usually found her this time of day. ‘Where is she?’ he asked.
‘Still working in that office of hers, I imagine. Probably didn’t hear you come in. Why don’t you go and pry her away from that computer? She’s been in there all day.’
It would be his pleasure. The second half of the beer met the same fate as the first, and he put the empty bottle down. He was feeling better already.
He’d already kicked off his shoes and unbuttoned his shirt by the time he was halfway to her office. If he had to pry her away from her computer, he didn’t want to waste any time on the basics.
Already he could feel her cool hands on his skin, feel the flick of her tongue over his straining tip, feel her trembling with need beneath him in that hitched moment of anticipation before he lunged into her.
Oh yeah; already he was feeling a lot better.
The door was open and he found her standing by the windows, her back to the door. Just one glance and already he’d worked out how he was going to get her out of the little strappy number she wore in the minimum time. ‘Knock knock,’ he said.
Then she turned, and a foul day turned belly up.
She looked like the eye of a storm, he thought, the brief moment of respite after one onslaught and before all hell broke loose. She stood as straight as a pillar, her features drawn tight, her eyes ice-cold and malevolent, the storm building within; he wondered what the hell had happened to bring this on. Just this morning she’d been telling him she couldn’t wait for him to come home. And now this?
Maybe he’d been right. Maybe three days had been long enough for whatever it was to burn out. A pity, in that case, given Fletcher had said no to this latest offer, that potentially they had more time together before it must inevitably end.
But the thought that she might have lost interest first irked him. He’d assumed he’d be the one to know when it was over.
‘How was your day?’ he asked, determined not to be swept into her foul mood. If she wanted to tell him whatever was bugging her, that was fine, but he was no masochist. He wasn’t about to go poking about, looking. Better to turn to something he knew she could talk about ad infinitum. ‘Get lots of wedding things organised?’
Her head jerked up, her eyes flashing fire. ‘And you really care because…?’
He’d provoked a response, that was something, not that she’d given him any clues with it. ‘I’ll admit, talking weddings doesn’t hold the same appeal for me as it does for you. But don’t let that stop you. There’s nothing I adore more at the end of a long day than being regaled with tales of the latest decision about flowers or decorations or the advantages of two tiers versus three.’
‘You bastard!’
The words didn’t stick. He’d been called much worse in his time, no doubt would be again. But it didn’t help t
hat he hadn’t spoken the complete truth. He had no interest in her pointless wedding arrangements, that was true, but at the end of his work day he’d liked nothing more than hearing her talk. He didn’t care about what, he’d just loved her enthusiasm and energy and hearing the laughter in her voice.
But there was no laughter now.
‘I don’t know what’s bothering you, but clearly you’re in no mood for company. If you’ll excuse me?’
He’d barely made it to the door when he heard the words. ‘Did you offer Jake money to break off with Monica?’
So she wasn’t in on it. That was his first thought. He’d suspected Fletcher was taking advantage of her all along and he was right. So why would he have told her now?
But that didn’t matter. What mattered right now was that she knew and that was why she was so angry. Damn. He spun around. ‘Did he tell you that?’
‘Answer the question! Did you, or that henchman you call a security boss, offer Jake money to break off with Monica? Seems to me it’s got your modus operandi written all over it.’
He stiffened and dragged in a breath. So the truth was out. There was no point denying it, even if he wished she didn’t know. Even if he wished for that other Sophie back, the warm, sensual woman who responded to his touch as if she was made for it. But that Sophie was gone, probably for ever, and even though part of him ached inexplicably at the thought he’d always known it would happen some time.
And now he could only defend his actions. His record might damn him in her eyes, but history was on his side, after all. ‘He’ll say yes. They all do.’
He watched her almost crumple in a heap. Her fisted hands came up over her face as her knees buckled beneath her. But she didn’t fall. She pushed herself up straight, thrust her arms away and glared at him, her eyes like polished stone. ‘For God’s sake, Daniel. Can’t you see? Jake loves Monica.’