by Sara Wood
Her extraordinary hair was tousled and there was such an air of sensuality about her that she looked as if she’d been recently hauled away from a particularly energetic orgy.
Dexter tried to keep his scowl going but it was hard. He felt as if all the darkness that inhabited his body had been lit up by an arc lamp. But he couldn’t let himself be diverted. There were far more important things on his mind.
‘I’d given you up,’ he muttered, his voice hoarse from the inhalation of the dust and smoke he’d been working with all day.
He had already focused again on the matter that had occupied his mind and body for the past week: the wreckage of his old family home. Or what had once been a home.
His mouth tightened into a grim line and his features settled into a heavy frown. He was impatient to get back, get things done.
‘Oh, dear. You do look cross! It wasn’t my fault, though. The fact is, I was searched!’ she cried, grey eyes all wide and astonished. ‘Every scrap of my luggage—and almost me! I’ve heard what they do and I was scared, I can tell you. Now, give me your honest opinion. Do I look as if I’m a drug addict?’ she asked indignantly.
Reeling from her chatter, he checked, working his way up and down. Her glittering gold top seemed to be wrestling with her breasts, which were making a bid for freedom. They were unnervingly close to succeeding.
Suddenly he realised to his horror that he’d started to sizzle with a vital energy, the blood roaring around his veins as if it were racing to reach his heart to win a prize.
He scowled. She was certainly altering his body functions. He supposed it was a long time since he’d been even vaguely interested in a woman and he wished his hormones hadn’t chosen this particular moment in time to make themselves known.
But the curves of her lush figure literally took his breath away. To say nothing of the tight leather skirt and slender legs which went on forever and which were causing a glow to spread in the direction of his loins.
Feeling irritable with himself, he answered her query with a shrug and assumed cynically that the officials had just wanted to keep her in their sights as long as possible.
‘Perhaps they thought you were on amphetamines. Some kind of stimulant,’ he suggested.
‘The only stimulants I’ve had in the past twenty-four hours are coffee and life.’ She giggled, spread her arms wide as if to embrace everybody within reach. ‘And that’s more than enough for me!’
‘Shall we go?’ he groused, wondering why she was so all-fired happy.
Maddy looked at him from under her lashes, trying very hard to look coquettish.
‘Let’s. But would you be a sweetie and push my trolley?’ she chirruped. ‘It keeps going left when I’m heading right and I lurch into people. Some like that, some don’t, and I’d rather not upset anyone.’ She flashed him an enormous smile and virtually purred, ‘You look strong enough to control it.’
His mouth tightened. Typical of the female burble he loathed. Flatter a man, twist him around your little finger, suck his bank balance dry. He’d met plenty of those in his lifetime.
And yet her admiring glance had apparently hit the spot. His pulses were racing madly.
Disgusted that his body had, like the trolley, developed a mind of its own, he took charge of the waywardly swerving luggage.
And there on the top of it all he noticed a book entitled How to Catch Your Man. Beneath that chilling title were the words and Make Him Marry You.
His stomach muscles clenched with horror and any passing interest in Maddy suddenly ceased.
‘This way,’ he growled, intent on getting rid of the threat to his freedom as fast as possible.
She beamed. ‘Right. Take me to your leader. I can’t wait to meet him!’
He grunted. Blithely Maddy sashayed along beside him. Dexter quickly realised that the whole airport was grinding to a halt around her. People were grinning, staring, commenting. Men openly lusted. Women looked sour and made catty comments behind their hands.
And she swayed on regardless, her walk uncomfortably reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe in Some Like it Hot.
Dexter surreptitiously ran a finger around his collar, thinking that the temperature had certainly risen a few degrees since she’d arrived.
‘You know, you look a bit like Dexter,’ she ventured. He started, and she must have thought he was insulted by the comparison, because she said with a placatory haste, ‘Only fleetingly. Just something about the eyes. I doubt he’s as—er—well-built as you. Do you work for the Fitzgerald family?’ she asked breathily, apparently mesmerised by the sooty streaks across his chest.
Presumably she was finding it hard to breathe because she was having difficulty keeping up. For some reason, his stride seemed to have increased to a half-jog.
Easing up, he tried a noncommittal, ‘Uh,’ still toying with the idea of pretending to be someone else.
‘You haven’t told me your name,’ she encouraged.
‘Nope.’
She waited but he didn’t elaborate. He wanted to keep conversation to a minimum. That way he could hang on to his dignity and not start panting like a dog on heat.
Stealing a sideways glance at Maddy, he saw that some of the bounce had gone out of her—though he doubted that had anything to do with him. A woman who was this confident wouldn’t be bothered in the least if she was snubbed by a grubby driver in a cinder-stained T-shirt and torn jeans.
Gloom settled over him again. He was filthy because he was working night and day, eating on the run and even occasionally crashing out in the smoking ruins of the Quinta.
Whenever he closed his eyes, all he saw were the charred timbers and scorched earth. His mind constantly raced with the thousand and one things he had to do. When he slept he dreamed of fire consuming whole forests. When he woke the images of desolation became reality.
His head was perpetually filled with the consequences of the disaster. The disruption to his life. His enforced return to Portugal. The destruction of thousands of valuable stock plants in the nursery and the knowledge that he was the only person who could build the business up again.
The forest fire had devoured several thousand acres of eucalyptus trees around the Fitzgerald estate. It had swept on to the eighteenth century manor house, the Quinta, which had been in its path. The majority of their land had been laid to waste and his distraught grandmother had summoned him from Brazil to recreate the farm and the nursery-garden business from the ashes.
Of course he’d agreed to come. Whatever had divided them before, his grandmama was elderly and she needed him.
But he felt trapped. Missed his travels. The joy of plant hunting, obtaining permissions for propagation and seed collection, organising production and despatch. A life of freedom and independence. The life he had chosen when his beloved mother had deserted him for Maddy’s father, Jim Cook, when his safe haven had suddenly become cold and unwelcoming.
Wretched with grief after the terrible accident had wiped out his parents and Maddy’s, he’d turned his back on everything he’d once loved. He didn’t miss his macho, authoritarian father, who’d made it no secret that a reserved, myopic son had been a disappointment. But his mother had loved him for his kind heart and his passion for plants. Until Jim Cook had turned her head.
If it hadn’t been for the fire, he wouldn’t be here. His grandmother wouldn’t have nagged him about producing an heir. And he wouldn’t be fending off the avaricious daughter of the man who’d seduced his mother and enticed her away…
He stopped himself from thinking further. Too painful.
Anger surged through him. His jaw tightened and his dark eyes glittered with loathing. The last person on earth he’d marry was the daughter of Jim Cook.
Even before he’d met her, he’d decided to make her feel completely unwelcome. Ensure that her stay was unpleasant. And he knew just how he could do that. By the time he’d finished with her she’d be hitching a lift back to the airport and taking the next plane home.
He wasn’t going to marry anyone from the Cook family. Especially a gold-digger. More important, he wasn’t ever going to marry again. Full stop.
CHAPTER THREE
GRIMLY plotting mayhem, Dexter lobbed Maddy’s luggage with studied carelessness into the back of the pick-up, on top of the equipment he’d collected from the builders’ yard.
‘Gosh,’ she said, with an appealingly infectious giggle. ‘You could get work as a baggage handler any day.’
Dex met her amused glance with a blank stare. Privately he’d expected Maddy to have changed—but not this much! Maddy had rarely spoken unless given permission by her bullying grandfather.
Old man Cook had ruled his family like a dictator. For the first time it occurred to him that this might be why Maddy’s gentle, plant-loving father might have wanted to escape the evil old tyrant’s influence.
‘Get in,’ he said curtly.
Just in time, he remembered not to open the door for her, or to offer to help her up the high step. He had to give her the maximum of aggravation. And in that skirt she had a serious handicap, he thought with malicious satisfaction.
‘This’ll be fun. I’ve never been in a pick-up before!’ she declared enthusiastically. ‘Right.’ She took a deep breath that threatened the fragile construction of her straining top. ‘Here we go. Avert your eyes.’
He did nothing of the kind. Sourly he watched while she hitched up her soft leather skirt to eye-blinking heights, slipped off her spiky shoes and hauled herself onto the first step.
Perfect thighs. Toned and firm and clearly the result of high-maintenance work-outs in the gym. Cynically he saw her wrench open the buckled door a few inches and virtually limbo-dance her way in through its reluctant gap.
He couldn’t believe that Maddy could be so uninhibited. Or assertive. But he steeled himself not to show his grudging admiration.
‘Crikey! It’s very dirty in here,’ she commented, when he clambered into the driver’s seat beside her.
Illogically it annoyed him that she was stating a fact and didn’t seem in the least bit put out by the mode of transport, or its ramshackle nature.
‘Been too close to a fire,’ was all he offered, starting up the engine.
‘Oh. Camp?’
‘No. I’m straight,’ he replied, deliberately misinterpreting her.
She gave a little gurgle of laughter.
‘I mean was it a camp fire?’
‘Forest.’
‘Were you in it?’
‘The forest or truck?’ he drawled, annoyed to be enjoying the exchange.
‘Truck!’ She laughed in delight.
‘No.’
‘Lucky for you,’ she said, sounding surprisingly heart-felt.
Other than that, she made no comment about the fire. He assumed that was because his grandmother had already warned old man Cook about it—and also reassured him that the Fitzgerald wealth could easily weather the disaster.
Dexter’s mouth grew cynical. Maddy had come, even though she’d known she’d be making do in a small cottage on the estate. She must be desperate to marry a fortune!
Breaking the silence that had fallen, she sighed and shot all his nerves to pieces by stretching wantonly in a flurry of sensual limbs and writhing curves.
‘I’m absolutely shattered,’ she confided. ‘Don’t be surprised if I fall asleep on the journey. No criticism of your conversational skills. It’s tiring being on show,’ she added absently.
What the devil did she mean by that? He frowned and deliberately drove fast over the humps in the road in an effort to get back as quickly as possible. But behind them the scaffolding clanged up and down in metallic protest and she let out a squeal.
Mistakenly he flicked a quick look at her and then concentrated fiercely on the road again. Unfortunately his vision retained the image of two firm, flawless breasts quivering seductively as the truck bounced over the uneven surface. And his body responded with the kind of enthusiasm that any self-respecting male would expect.
‘Sit tight,’ he growled irritably. ‘This truck isn’t designed for women.’
‘You can say that again. My bits are going everywhere. So why did Dexter send it for me?’ she demanded, yanking up her bodice indignantly.
‘I was coming to Faro for supplies,’ he clipped, annoyingly unable to forget the alluring sight of her ‘bits’. ‘No point in two vehicles making the journey. Takes two hours to the Quinta.’
She groaned. ‘My bones’ll be jumbled into a completely different person if we go on like this! If you don’t want to end up with a Quasimodo next to you, I suggest you attack the bumps with less vigour.’
He intended to do just that. His libido was giving him enough trouble as it was, without witnessing another seismic shift of her body.
‘Got to hurry. Get back to work,’ he muttered in excuse.
‘Doing what?’
‘This and that.’
For a moment she looked floored by his reticence, then gamely started the conversation again.
‘I used to live here, you know.’
‘Mmm.’
As sure as hell, he wasn’t going to encourage reminiscences.
‘Yes,’ she said, undeterred. ‘My grandfather and Dexter’s grandfather set up the garden centre together. They’d been friends since childhood and chose to go out to Portugal because it was an up-and-coming place for ex-pats to settle,’ she told him, and paused for his comment.
Hoping his silence would shut her up, he just glared at the road. Annoyingly she launched off again, clearly in a chatty mood.
‘Grandpa was the business brain, Mr Fitzgerald was the plantsman. They married Portuguese women. So did my father, so I have Portuguese blood,’ she announced. ‘I was born on the farm, like Dexter. I was there for the first eleven years of my life.’
‘Really?’
He didn’t want to think about it. Unfortunately she ignored his plainly uninterested comment and forged on, opening old wounds, old memories.
‘Mmm. Our two families lived together because it was cheaper than running two houses and they could put more money into the actual business. I suppose it was more convenient, too. Not so far to commute.’
She went quiet for a moment and he shifted uncomfortably. There had always been tensions between the two grandfathers. One saw the Quinta purely as a commercial venture, the other as a wonderful way of life.
‘My grandpa says Mr Fitzgerald senior died a year or so ago.’
‘Yes.’
She wasn’t put off by his curtness. ‘I liked him. Those were the days,’ she continued dreamily. ‘We all mucked in together at the Quinta. Not much money, but bags of hope and mega-size dreams—built on the back of the new villa developments in the Algarve which needed their gardens landscaped. We were two close families, working all hours to build up the business.’
Close families! Too damn close. Grimly he turned on the radio, not wanting to hear any more. He had enough to deal with. Memories could stay where they were.
‘You’re very grumpy. I thought you’d be interested,’ she said, sounding hurt.
He snorted but didn’t reply. Privately crushed by his abruptness, Maddy watched him scowling at the road ahead as if it deserved his revenge.
And yet despite his sullen, antisocial manner, he was quite a dish in a basic kind of way: tall, well-built and undeniably handsome.
The smell of smoke hung around him and he clearly hadn’t washed his clothes for days or cleaned his fingernails. His hands were ingrained with dirt and there were streaks of black decorating his broad forehead and strong cheekbones. Even his voice sounded husky, as if he’d chain-smoked all his life.
But his profile was to die for: a dark and brooding eye beneath a lowered black brow, the firm jut of a nose and a chiselled mouth that Michelangelo would have been proud to have created. Though, she mused, Michelangelo might have stopped short at the designer stubble, however sexy it looked.
This was a tru
e labouring man, she decided. Rough and ready. No conversationalist. And yet passion lurked in those dark eyes. Pity Dex couldn’t be more like him instead of detached and distant. Thinking of their imminent meeting, she shuddered with apprehension.
‘If you’re cold, there’s a sack in the back you could put over your shoulders,’ he suggested sardonically.
Her mouth twitched at the caveman offer and, thinking of Debbie’s instructions to stay in character, she raked up a reply to suit her personality.
‘A sack? Moi? I’d rather freeze,’ she said with a giggle and, in the absence of a decent chat, opened her book on getting her man for some quick revision.
The truck suddenly lurched forwards and she struggled to find her place as the Hunk hurtled along the motorway with scant regard for the suspension—either the truck’s or hers.
All she needed to do, she reminded herself, dismissing her grumpy companion for more important things, was to make sure her behaviour was the exact opposite of what the book advised.
She mustn’t be a woman with wife potential. She had to be a ‘good for now’ kind of girl. That was a task she felt was within her grasp, since she’d practised on the rugby team. They’d been hugely appreciative and their delight in her company had given her confidence a huge boost.
It had been fun, too. The most fun she’d had ever. Nothing heavy, just wall-to-wall flirting and endless laughter. All perfectly harmless.
Frowning with concentration, she delved into the chapter on how to charm a man with sweetness and submission. Always agree, always defer. Hmm.
Her eyes gleamed as she planned her tactics on going completely against her character and doing nothing of the kind.
By putting a spanner in the attempted matchmaking, she was only being kind. Her subterfuge was all for the best. Dexter needed a battleaxe of a wife who’d stand up to his domineering grandmother.
Maddy smiled wryly to herself. Just as she needed a gritty, assertive husband who wouldn’t shake like a jelly when he met her stern grandfather.