‘You’ll have to buy me another pair, in that case!’ He turned to the two old ladies with a smile of utter charm. ‘She is such an incurable romantic! Loves to surprise me with little gestures to show how much she cares!’
This was taking it all too far, she thought helplessly. She could understand his reasoning about not wanting his guests to know why they were there. The hotel business was a notoriously fickle one, with new corners of the world opening up daily in an attempt to entice tourists, and he couldn’t run the risk of his own hotel coming under any public scrutiny unnecessarily, but surely he didn’t have to overdo the phoney husband-wife connection?
She knew that she was probably overreacting, and that he would run a mile if he had any idea how much his slightest look or touch or, worse, empty endearment sent her imagination into overdrive and just fuelled her own unwanted cravings. Still, it took a lot for her to banish thoughts of him from her head and instead concentrate on what was going on outside.
In the far-off distance, between the wildly cavorting coconut trees, the sea was just about visible, a churning mass of angry black water thundering against the sand, desperately trying to crawl up the beach and take its onslaught to the hotel.
It was eerily comforting when Nick returned to feel his arms around her shoulders; they were the very epitome of the loving couple as they stared out of the window together, mesmerised by the sheer power of the wind and rain.
In extreme situations, he informed her, violent spirals of air could lift cars and houses and certainly whip roofs off some of the less sturdily built dwellings. Lucy shivered and his arms tightened around her. Instead of objecting, however, she allowed herself to soften into his embrace, welcoming its warmth.
Lunch was a subdued business. The steady roaring of the wind made conversation sporadic and a fair number of the guests seemed reluctant to retire to their rooms, preferring the security of numbers.
In an attempt to alleviate the atmosphere, which had gone from panicked to plucky to depressingly aware that they were prisoners of a force over which they had no control and which showed no signs of abating, Lucy unearthed a cupboard full of games. Most were new, having been supplied to cater for children, who were not regular visitors to the resort.
‘You go ahead,’ Nick shouted when she showed him the selection. ‘I’m going to catch up with some work.’
‘Oh, no, you most certainly are not, my beloved little cabbage!’ she yelled, to the delight of most of the guests, who seemed enamoured at the sight of young love. ‘We can form into groups for those who want to play!’ She distributed games and packs of cards. ‘And you,’ she said to him, ‘can join Edie, Gracie and me in a game of Monopoly!’
‘I hate board games!’
‘Don’t be such a spoilsport!’ Lucy looked to her two companions for support and received it. Yes, it was a small triumph to see him cave in simply because he had no choice, given the lovey-dovey situation he had engendered, but it was a triumph well worth having, especially when it became apparent that he was on the road to losing.
‘These dice are loaded against me!’ he complained when he had landed on Park Lane, her property, for the fifth time in a row.
‘I hope you’re not going to be a sore loser!’ She grinned, quietly pleased with herself. While the wind continued to howl outside, she had at least managed to divert the gathering gloom of the occupants. No one was moaning or imagining the worst. They were joining in with enthusiasm and, from the looks of it, most of them hadn’t been near a game for decades.
She should have won. She had by far the most hotels. He should have lost comprehensively. As it turned out, she couldn’t find out because there was a flash of brilliant lightning, the electricity went and the place was plunged into immediate darkness.
Amidst the sudden confusion, Nick clapped his hands loudly and announced that they would have to retire to their rooms. It was unlikely that the electricity would return in the foreseeable future. He knew, he said in a psychologically skilful manoeuvre, that he could depend on them to deal with the situation with the same level of cool-headedness with which they had dealt with the hurricane.
Several of the guests puffed themselves up with pride at the compliment.
He informed them that he would see to the staff, make sure that they were all OK, and then he, too, would be retiring to bed.
It was hard not to feel utterly safe with him in charge, Lucy thought dreamily, until she heard him say, in closing, ‘And Lucy and I will be in the Toucan room! If any of you should feel alarmed during the night, for whatever reason, feel free to knock on our door!’
Her head snapped up in alarm and she leant forward in her chair, trying to decipher an expression on his face and failing miserably.
‘Now, please remain here until I bring torches for everyone. No candles, please! And try to conserve the batteries in the torches, just in case…’
Just in case they were cooped up for another few nights? In which event, the cosily married couple would still be sharing the same harmonious marital chamber, ever alert to any alarmed guests?
She could feel her heart thumping by the time he reappeared with a handful of torches, distributing them and answering questions about when they could expect some of the weather to subside and how long before electricity would be reinstated.
By the time he got to her and flicked on their torch she had a whole host of questions of her own, none of which included anything to do with the hurricane.
‘I’ve decided that Edie and Gracie can have the room next to ours,’ he informed her. ‘It has already been cleared out and prepared for them. I thought they would feel…safer…being a bit closer to us…’
On cue, the two ladies twittered their agreement and Lucy stifled a groan of impotent dismay.
‘Cleared out?’
‘Oh, yes, cleared out.’ His voice was thick with meaning, and just in case she was still in the dark he draped his arm over her shoulder and whispered into her ear, ‘Your things are now in my room. I told Maisie and Janette just to leave them on the bed. Thought you might want to sort them out yourself.’
‘This is ridiculous!’
‘Shh! Keep your voice down! Don’t forget, we are the steady rocks. We have to maintain a united front.’
‘But this wasn’t the arrangement.’ Lucy heaved a sigh that bordered on a sob.
‘Nor was being struck by the tail-end of a hurricane,’ Nick pointed out. ‘Sometimes we just have to play things by ear.’
Gracie and Edie followed them to their new room, inspected it by torchlight, pronounced that they were satisfied and then thanked them for being thoughtful enough to know that they would have felt very nervous had they remained in their original rooms at the furthest end of the hotel complex.
‘We chose them because we wanted peace and quiet!’ Edie raised her voice to explain.
‘Little did we know!’
Little indeed, Lucy thought grimly the minute she stepped into Nick’s room, which mirrored the layout of her own.
‘This is a farce!’ She faced him belligerently with her hands on her hips, but her aggressive stance was lost in the darkness, which was broken only by the limited circle of light radiating from the torch.
‘What could I do?’ He headed towards the bedroom, taking the torch with him, and Lucy followed, fuming, in his wake.
‘You could have put them into a room closer to someone else!’
‘They would not have felt as safe. They like you! They are old! Old and frightened, however chipper they appear to be!’
Lucy looked away and down to the king-sized bed with growing horror.
‘And where am I going to sleep? Huh?’
‘On the bed, of course. Where else would you expect to sleep? Here, you keep the torch so that you can put your stuff away. I’ll have to leave the bathroom door open, though, so that I can see what I’m doing when I shower.’
‘You can’t leave the door open!’ Lucy spluttered.
; ‘How else will I get any light?’ He turned away, oblivious to her simmering away in front of the bed, on which her clothes lay in neat bundles, and presently there was the sound of the shower, at which her mind reared up and she raced through the process of sticking her clothes in whatever free drawers she could find.
By the time he emerged with a towel around his waist everything had been disposed of and she was ready to take up her protests exactly where she had left them.
‘And before you ask,’ he told her, ‘I have no intention of sleeping on a chair overnight. Like it or not, we are going to share this bed. I am going to open some of the small shutters in the bathroom and above the doors there so that we can have some kind of ventilation. Might be noisy with the sound of the rain, but if we don’t we’ll end up sweating. And we will have to sleep under the netting. Now, off you go with the torch and have your shower. By the time you get back I will be safely ensconced under the blanket and tucked away on one side so that there is no chance of our bodies touching.’
An impossibility, he acknowledged to himself without the slightest shred of doubt in his mind. There was no way he could lie in the same bed as this woman without touching her.
He was waiting for her when she finally emerged from the shower, wearing a long T-shirt. He could just discern her outline. He watched as she switched off the torch, placed it on the trunk at the bottom of the sprawling bed and edged her way to its side.
True to his word, he had left her a lot of space.
And, Lucy thought, he appeared to be asleep. She wasn’t all that surprised. It wasn’t that late but she felt exhausted. The day had been mentally stressful and it had been worse for him because, as owner of the hotel, he had had the full weight of responsibility land on his shoulders. He’d had to check the kitchens, the grounds, the staff, the food supplies, not to mention take on the task of soothing the ruffled feathers of his very expensive guests.
Mentally he must be drained.
She tentatively climbed into the bed, keeping herself as far removed from the gently breathing bulk to the left of her as she possibly could, letting the mosquito netting fall so that they were now in their own little cocoon.
When there was no sound from him she allowed herself the luxury of relaxing. After a few minutes she rolled from her cramped position, curled on the very edge of the bed, to a more comfortable one, lying half on her stomach.
He had opened the windows, as he had told her he would, and the room was cool even without the benefit of either fan or air-conditioning. And it was as noisy as he had told her it would be. The rain was like the sound of gunfire, battering against the windows and the walls, although the wind seemed less terrifyingly strong.
She could feel her eyelids begin to droop, and as she burrowed herself onto her side, curling into the blanket, the last thing she expected to hear was Nick asking her whether she was all right.
Her eyes flew open, and then he turned towards her and the bodies he had assured her wouldn’t touch did exactly that.
Her knee, at right angles to her body, was straight against his thighs. Thighs that were not covered with anything. Lucy squeaked, and as her knee moved a few inches higher she felt something else, something that was similarly unclothed, something hard and erect and masculine and very much awake.
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘I NEVER sleep in pyjamas.’ It was the truth.
He wanted her. In fact, what he felt was bigger than want, it spilled into the realms of need. It was a force that had been building up inside him, he now realised, for months.
And everything had worked in his favour. He had planned to seduce her and events had seemed to lend his seduction a helping hand from every direction. The island, with its flavour of the exotic, the shimmering heat that slowed people down and gave them time to forget about the everyday pressures of trivial things that formed a wall between them. And then the hurricane. The hurricane, howling outside and gusting against the curtains so that they billowed frantically up. In a crisis, people were drawn to one another like magnets, seeking refuge with one another. What could have been more natural than that they should find one another? The fact that he had arranged for them to be sharing his quarters and his bed had been an act of providence because the old ladies really had not cared for the thought of being isolated on the other side of the hotel.
And she wanted him too. He had felt their attraction crackling like unseen electricity in the air, however much she tried to pretend that it wasn’t there.
The problem was that now the stage was set he no longer wanted to seduce. He wanted to be the object of her seduction, he wanted her to admit her attraction to him, he wanted to hear her say it and feel her yield because she could do nothing else.
She had scrambled away from him like a terrified rabbit and he clicked his tongue in irritation at himself.
Lord, but it would be easy to move those crucial few inches that would make her escape impossible.
‘You could have worn…something!’ Lucy heard the nervous, panicked edge to her voice with dismay and took a few deep, steadying breaths.
‘I could have,’ he admitted.
‘Then why didn’t you?’
Nick propped himself up on his side, resting on one elbow, with the blankets draped haphazardly over his lower body.
‘Because I wanted to make love to you.’
‘You…what?’ A warm, sweet sensation filled her body. She wriggled herself up into a sitting position and drew her knees into her body, with her baggy T-shirt pulled over her legs. She had to hug herself tightly to prevent herself from shaking.
The noise of the wind and the rain hurtling around them was like the distant roll of thunder.
‘Don’t tell me that you haven’t guessed by now that I am attracted to you.’
‘We’re here on business!’ She clung to that scrap of truth with tenacity. ‘And…and you’re my boss!’
‘That didn’t stop us once before.’
‘That time was…was different!’
‘Yes, and now I want to make love to you without the minor drawback of being under the influence of alcohol.’ At least she hadn’t tried to take flight as yet, but he knew that if he so much as edged a centimetre closer to her she would. Even if it meant sleeping in the bathroom.
‘You…you can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because…because I’m not your type! We…we had this conversation before, do you remember? I’m not your type and the only reason you…well…is because there’s no one else available…and, well…’
‘You underestimate your powers of attraction.’
She heard the thick sincerity in his voice and drew her breath in sharply.
‘And…and I already have a boyfriend.’ Lucy weakly grasped the excuse and held on to it for dear life. He was attracted to her. She had spent so long wrapped up in her own crazy attraction to him that to hear him tell her that should have filled her with elation.
But she knew him too well. He might be attracted to her because they were far away from reality and the circumstances were, again, out of the ordinary, but, whether he admitted it or not, she wasn’t his type any more now than she had been eight months ago when he had given her that speech in his office. She had seen his type close up. They were not small, boyishly built women with short hair and flat chests.
She had also seen how casually he discarded his women. After Gina, no woman had the ability to pin him down for longer than a few weeks, and that should be fine but she wasn’t cut out for the one-night stand.
That was why she really should hold on to Robert’s image. Even if he wasn’t the one for her then another variation of him would come along sooner or later and, who knew, she might find Mr Right after all?
‘No, you do not.’
‘What do you mean? Of course I do! Robert—’
‘You don’t care about him. I doubt you are even attracted to him. You forget that I have seen you out together. You’re like good friends.’<
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‘Successful relationships are built around people being good friends!’
‘You’re going to fall backwards off this bed any minute. I assure you that I won’t lay a finger on you, Lucy…unless, of course, you want me to…’
‘Of course I don’t want you to!’
‘Are you so sure?’
There was a charged silence that stretched between them for a long time. Above the deafening sound of the elements raging outside, she seemed to hear the equally deafening sound of her own heart hammering inside her. And, try as she might, the shadows and angles of his torso whipped up a series of images in her head that was making the blood rush through her veins like acid.
‘So if I touch your arm with my finger you are telling me that you won’t want me to go further?’ he asked with lazy, idle, utterly sexy speculation in his voice. ‘Mm? You’re telling me that you won’t want to feel my finger trail along your collar-bone? That you won’t want my mouth to touch yours? And then to—’
‘I’m not listening!’ She flattened her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes tightly shut.
She felt the shift of his weight on the mattress and then his hands covered hers and he gently but very firmly pulled her hands down.
‘Coward.’
Lucy opened her eyes and stared at him helplessly. ‘I’m not the sort of girl who has one-night stands…’
‘We’ve already had our one-night stand,’ Nick pointed out. He brushed his thumb against her cheek and then stroked his fingers through her short hair. ‘Even after only a few hours in the sun you’re already beginning to go a golden colour,’ he murmured. ‘Would you tan naked on a beach for me, so that your whole body goes gold? No swimsuit lines anywhere?’ He felt her tremble and had to restrain himself from plunging in. Instead he traced the outline of her slightly parted mouth, dipping his finger in, and with a little shock of piercing reaction Lucy closed her lips around it, drawing it in with a moan of surrender.
‘Do you want me to leave you alone?’ he whispered huskily. ‘Do you want me to get into some boxer shorts and a T-shirt and occupy my half of the bed like a well-behaved gentleman?’
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