by Joss Wood
‘No problem.’ Jason nodded and jotted some notes on the pad in front of him.
‘I’m not saying yes to this,’ Nick stated. ‘It’s not going to happen.’
Clem stood up and looked him in the eye. ‘Yes, it is. You’ve already considered it a couple of times because your foundation needs that money and fast. So, I’ll sweeten the pot. I’ll match any donation you get via the show, capped at five hundred thousand dollars. That’s my fee for doing this additional series.’
Nick blinked. ‘What?’
‘They pay me to do this series, Nick.’ She turned to Jason. ‘They do pay me, don’t they?’
‘Of course they do.’
‘So, I’ll pay you, Nick. I’ll give you a down payment of fifty thousand dollars, right now, non-refundable.’
‘You’re going to pay me fifty grand to do this?’
‘Yes, and I’ll match every donation to five hundred grand. For that, you give me a few weeks of your time.’ Clem angled her head, hoping he couldn’t see her heart jumping out of her chest. Say yes, Nick. I don’t want to leave yet …
‘Think of those rhinos, Nick.’
‘You play dirty, Copeland,’ Nick sighed and Clem knew she’d won. She just stopped herself from punching the air.
Clem nodded to Jason, who said a quick goodbye and disappeared. Nick stepped closer to Clem and sent her an enigmatic look. ‘If we are going to have cameras in our faces for the next two weeks, then there’s something I’ve got to do first.’
‘What?’
‘This.’
Nick stepped forward, gripped her wrist and yanked her against his chest. His mouth slanted over hers and she thought that he was more than she’d imagined—darker, spicier, hotter. When her mouth opened he plummeted inside … and the air around them exploded. Power clashed with power, need with need. Tongues darted and teeth scraped and the world spun off its axis as his arms banded around her as they feasted.
It had been so long since she’d been touched—touched properly—and she’d missed it, missed … this. Missed feeling so completely at ease—physically—in a man’s arms, missed knowing that someone knew exactly what she liked, and needed.
She’d never had him but she’d missed him. It made no sense.
It was Nick who lifted his head on a groan, Nick who pulled away. He looked down at her with eyes that were miserable and passionate, determined but longing. ‘Damn it.’
Clem made a sound between a snort and a laugh. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve kissed anyone beside that loser but I’m pretty sure that’s not a good response.’
Nick picked up her left hand and grabbed her ring finger, where a square centimetre pink diamond glinted. ‘You’re coming out of a long-term relationship. I don’t do emotionally battered women.’
‘I haven’t been in a real relationship for a long time,’ Clem said quietly. ‘Not in a way that meant anything.’
‘Yeah, well, I don’t believe that and I have no intention of being your stepping stone back to normality. That was the first and last time that’ll happen.’
Clem looked at him from under her lashes. ‘Why don’t we make that the second and last time?’
Nick held out for about ten seconds before he dived in, cradling her head in his hands, turning her head to deepen the kiss. Then one of his hands slid down her back to her bottom, the other was spread between her shoulder blades, both pushing her so that her breasts pressed against his chest and his thigh pushed between her legs.
Clem whimpered in his mouth, utterly at the mercy of the hands, his mouth. Unable to stop herself, she slid her hands up and under his shirt, across the long muscles in his back, round to his stomach and the six-pack she knew was lurking under his clothing. Her fingers tap danced their way across the ridges and it felt so natural to let them drift lower …
Nick sprang back and away from her as he muttered an obscenity. Clem staggered back, her hands looking for the desk she thought was somewhere behind her. She felt the smooth wood and clutched the edge, hoping that her knees would lock some time in the near future.
Clem clutched at any straw she could find. ‘I kissed you because I’m on the rebound,’ she gabbled. ‘I haven’t had sex for the best part of a year and, honestly, I haven’t had good sex in, well, forever.’
And I’m attracted to him because he’s the exact opposite of Cai—reticent, reserved, quietly commanding, introspective and, damn it, mostly calm, Clem thought. Not when he kissed her, obviously, but generally.
She bit her lip and kept her eyes on her feet. ‘So why did you kiss me?’
‘Because I’m an idiot,’ Nick retorted. ‘I’ll see you at the car.’
Clem blew out her cheeks ‘Again, not quite the response I was looking for.’
Later in the week, Clem, tired of being on the receiving end of Nick’s drill sergeant style of getting her out of bed every morning, decided it was high time that she gave him a dose of his own medicine. They had an even earlier start this morning because they had to fly to the town of Mbom-something to pick up the film crew for the show, so Clem knew she had to get up ultra-early to give Nick a taste of what his yelling at her put her through every morning.
So she set her alarm for forty-five minutes earlier and eventually got up when it blared at her for the third time. Or was it the fourth? Anyway, the lengths she would go to for revenge …
She dressed in a pair of beige hipster shorts and a white tank top that rode up her stomach and slid her feet into a pair of funky beaded flip-flops. With her teeth and hair brushed, eyelashes mascara-ed, she quietly made coffee and, seeing she had time, perched on the dining table to enjoy the relative quiet of the early morning.
Clem looked across the lounge and deck and sighed at the band of mist that hovered over the waterhole and swirled around the trunks of the trees. What was she doing here? With Cai, she’d lived the life of a pampered poodle—emotionally kicked around admittedly—but with every comfort and amenity available to her. She hadn’t lifted a finger, made a bed or washed a dish in over a decade.
Yet she’d been restless, unfulfilled and unhappy.
Here, at Two-B, she had her nose to the grindstone ten hours a day, ate good but not gourmet meals and was up at the crack of dawn daily.
And she felt … How did she feel? Tired, obviously, and frequently at sea because she didn’t know what she was doing half the time, and irritated because Nick was so bossy …
But she wasn’t bored and she wasn’t unhappy. She wasn’t happy, precisely, but she did feel … oh, damn it, how could she admit this? Secure. For the first time in her life, she felt secure enough to be herself … whoever that might be.
She was still trying to work that out. But finding out who she was and not who anybody else expected her to be was … Clem searched for the word to describe the emotion she felt bubbling inside. Frightening? Yes. Exciting? Hell, yes. Liberating? So, so liberating.
Clem smiled at herself and rolled her head. She was stiff again. Tipping her head to stretch out her muscles, her eyes fell on a piece a paper on the table next to her thigh.
Although peppered with figures, Clem could see that it was originally a document stating the rates for the Lodge, private villa and tented camp. She whistled soundlessly. Even she, no stranger to whipping out her credit card and flinging it about, raised her eyebrows at the prices he charged.
Nicholas, Nicholas … What was she going to do about him? Since their hot and steamy encounter at the Lodge, they’d been even ruder to each other than normal in an effort to pretend that kiss hadn’t happened.
But it had and it did and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She’d tossed and turned every night since, reliving the feel of his lips, the texture of his skin under her fingertips, the heat and hardness of that spectacular body …
Checking her watch, she smiled, picked up the other—now lukewarm—cup of coffee and quietly walked down the short passage to his room. The door made no sound as it opened and she peeked
inside. He slept on his stomach and his sheet was blinding white against his tanned lower back.
Clem stepped inside and looked around. Big black-framed, sepia-coloured and mesmerizing seascape photographs dominated the wall above his leather headboard. Three pillows had landed on the floor next to his boots and his black and white checked easy chair was draped with clothes.
Books and DVDs sat in wonky piles on the floor and his wallet, mobile, radio and keys were on his chest of drawers, along with a pair of pliers, a couple of electrical adapters, an iPod and a heart rate monitor.
He was still sound asleep. She fought the urge to slip out of her clothes and to climb into bed with him, to stroke her hands through that thick hair, down that long back, tracing the line of his spine. To wake him up with a hot kiss and insistent hands.
Concentrate, Clem, you’re here to annoy him, not seduce him. So she banged the coffee cup down on his bedside table and whipped away to yank the curtains open.
‘Get your lazy ass out of bed, Sherwood. You’re going to be late!’ Clem snapped, raising her voice and clapping her hands. ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes or you go as you are.’
She bundled his mosquito net into a messy knot and bent down to yank his sheet away at the same time that Nick groaned and rolled over.
‘Come on! Up! Up! Up!’
It took Clem ten seconds to realize that, unlike her, Nick did not sleep in pyjamas.
She looked down at his chest, lightly covered in hair, moved onto his six-pack stomach, then lower and … oh, dear God.
She came to her senses and slapped her hands onto her face, knowing that her entire body was blushing. ‘Whaaaah!’
She heard the rustle of the sheet and Nick moving to, she presumed, sit up. ‘Clem? What’s the matter?’
She heard the amusement in his voice and blushed deeper. She looked for her tongue and managed to get it working. She turned her back to him, dropped her hands and stared at the floor. ‘I was trying to wake you up, like you do me, and I …’
‘You what?’
‘Got distracted,’ Clem muttered, utterly mortified. ‘You sleep naked,’ she whispered.
‘Clearly.’
Clem took a step towards the door. ‘I’ll leave now … give you some privacy.’
‘Bit late now, Red.’
Out of the corner of her eye she watched Nick stand up, stretch. He seemed utterly at ease in his skin. Clem caught a glimpse of those long thighs, a pale buttock as he walked into his en suite bathroom, and she seriously considered running after him and …
Oh dear. What the hell was she going to do?
CHAPTER FIVE
Luella Dawson’s blog:
Clem’s back! Thank the gods and goddesses of reality TV, who were torturing us with Cai and Kiki …
My little bird told me that Clem will take part in the second season of the CC’s and filming is due to start at the Baobab and Buffalo Lodge and Rehabilitation Centre where Clem is working—that has to be wrong, Clem working?—as a trainee game ranger.
As I write this I’m thinking that maybe my little bird has fallen off his perch and knocked his head … none of this makes sense! But I write it as I hear it.
AT THE airstrip, Nick parked by the hangar and looked across at Clem, who was looking anywhere but at him. Nick grinned; she hadn’t met his eyes since she’d left his bedroom that morning and he found it hysterically funny. Who would’ve thought that the society princess would feel so embarrassed at seeing a naked man? A fully—and, to be fair, aroused—naked man, but she didn’t need to get her panties in a wad about it.
Nick rubbed his chin. As she stood up and hopped off the Landy, he wondered if she knew how close to the edge she’d pushed him this morning. He’d had to grip the sheets in an effort not to rear up and yank her down to the bed to join him.
He wanted her like he wanted to take his next breath.
‘You’re going to have to look at and talk to me some time.’
Clem stared at her feet, seemingly fascinated by her pretty pink toes. ‘Does never work for you?’
‘I’ve never seen anyone blush with their entire body before. Or turn that particular shade of pink,’ Nick said conversationally, picking up his set of keys from the dashboard. He slipped his mobile into the pocket of his cream and rust untucked button-down shirt and shoved his sunglasses onto the top of his head. His radio went into the back pocket of his brown cargo shorts.
‘Can we just not talk about it any more?’ Clem asked.
Nick jerked his head for her to follow him to the hangar. ‘I would like to say that, for the record, I think it’s deeply unfair that you’ve see me in the buff but I’ve only seen you in your underwear.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s not going to change any time soon,’ Clem said.
Oh, if they weren’t very careful they both knew it could and would.
He’d had enough women to know that she liked the way he looked, that she wanted him as much as he wanted her. If she was just passing through, wasn’t his partner’s daughter, was fractionally less crazy he’d have had her already. But they had to work together, be together, have those cameras in their faces for the next two weeks.
All good and solid reasons for keeping his hands off her, but the most compelling reason he needed to keep his distance was due to the neon sign flashing behind his eyes.
Danger! Emotional curves and connections ahead. Proceed with extreme caution!
He’d navigated that corner before, lost control and tumbled down the cliff. He was not crazy, or stupid enough to repeat the experience. He wasn’t that good a driver.
Nick pushed open the hangar doors and walked inside the dark interior. On auto-pilot, he grabbed the aircraft tug, fitted it to the light aircraft and pulled it into the sunshine.
‘Close the hangar doors,’ he told Clem, who just stayed where she was, arms folded and looking at the sky. When he realized what she was waiting for, the corner of his mouth kicked up.
‘Close the hangar doors, Red. Please.’
‘Ah, so he does have a rudimentary concept of manners,’ Clem said before swaggering away. She tossed a naughty grin at him over her shoulder.
‘Pretty cocky for someone who was perving at me this morning,’ Nick called after her.
Clem threw a look at him over her shoulder. If he didn’t know better, he would’ve called it flirty. ‘I was not perving!’
Nick laughed and banged his head against the door of his plane. ‘Tell me again why you were in my room?’
Pushing the doors closed, Clem tapped her thigh with her finger and rocked on her heels. Embarrassment or lust? He couldn’t be sure. A bit of both?
‘I was trying to wake you up. Act like a jerk to show you what it feels like to be woken up by someone shouting at you.’
‘Sounds like an excuse to take a look.’ Nick watched as she leaned back against the plane and he moved so that he was standing in front of her, his hand on the frame behind her head. He looked at her mouth and remembered her taste. ‘You could’ve just asked, you know.’
She dropped her head back in a move that was as natural as it was seductive and her hair glinted in the early morning sunshine. Gold and blonde and red and orange … He could count a hundred different shades.
‘You have the most fantastic hair,’ Nick quietly said, unable to stop his fingers from sliding into the curls, the tips of his fingers making circles on her scalp.
Clem licked her lips and Nick watched her eyes deepen and darken, felt her fingers reach up to encircle his wrist.
Nick stepped closer to her and rested his forehead against hers. ‘We can’t do this, Clementine.’
He felt her nod. ‘I know.’
‘I want to anyway,’ Nick admitted. ‘I want you but I don’t want to want you.’
‘Me too. You and I are exact opposites, from different worlds.’ Clem’s thumb brushed the inside of his wrist. ‘We don’t even like each other.’
‘The real problem is this heat between
us.’
Clem lifted her head and their eyes caught and held.
There it went.
Just like every time. When she looked at him like that—as if he was the one man who could ever, had ever made her react like this—the world receded and all the air was sucked out of his lungs. After an intense minute just staring at each other, Nick stepped back and Clem shoved a hand into that fabulous hair and lifted slim shoulders in a small shrug.
‘Heat is not enough,’ Nick muttered. ‘Trust me, bitter experience has taught me this.’
‘I’m not arguing with you,’ Clem quietly replied but he could see the pulse in her neck hammering. ‘But I still want you to kiss me. Sorry, but I do.’
The last time he checked, he wasn’t a freaking saint … Oh, wait, he’d never been a saint or anything close to one so he gripped her wrist and pulled her towards him. He held her against him, on her toes, her body flat against his, his mouth a scant inch from hers. Nothing was important but this girl and her soft body and hot eyes.
Clem felt tension curl and swirl in her stomach, knew that she was about to lick her upper lip and couldn’t help it … Her hips moved closer to his. Couldn’t help that. His mouth opened and Clem waited in breathless anticipation. She knew what he wanted to say, to ask. Why did he even bother—surely he could see her answer in her eyes, on her face?
It’s crazy and wild and I’ll probably regret it but … yes, kiss me again, make me yours.
Like the last time they kissed, she expected him to swoop and devour, but his mouth was more gentle than she expected. He nibbled and explored and tempted. Clem’s hands found their way to his back, up and under his shirt, to feel that hard, warm, male flesh …
‘Nick, come in. Switch to channel thirteen.’
The radio in his back pocket squawked but Nick didn’t release his grip on her when he lifted his head, flipped channels with one hand, brought the radio to his mouth and hit the call button to talk. ‘Yeah, Jabu, what is it?’
‘Bad time, mfo?’