Lachlan had. Between the demands of goalkeeping and his frenetic social life—even without the red panties collection it was pretty hectic—there was rarely a dull moment. That Christmas he’d gone to Monaco to live it up day and night with a girl called Lisette. Or was it Claudine? Suzanne?
Or all of the above. The fact was, there had been plenty—more than plenty—of willing women.
Two days before New Year’s, though, exhausted from a season of hard work and a holiday of hard play, he thought that spending a week or so of solitary celibate days on a deserted pink sand beach sounded like heaven.
He’d said as much to Joaquin Santiago and Lars Erik Lindquist, two of his equally hard-driving, hard-living teammates. And twenty-four hours later, the three of them had arrived on Pelican Cay.
Still hung over when Hugh met them in Nassau, Lachlan had sworn, “No booze. No babes. Just sand and sun and sleep.” And at his brother’s disbelieving look, he’d yawned and nodded as firmly as his aching head would permit. “My New Year’s resolutions.”
Bad news, then, that the first person he saw later that day was a Titian-haired beauty in a bikini sashaying past Hugh’s tiny house, heading toward the beach.
“Who the hell is that?”
“Fiona,” Hugh said offhandedly. “Dunbar,” he’d added at Lachlan’s blank look. “You remember—Molly’s friend.”
“Fiona?” Lachlan’s voice had cracked with disbelief. “That’s Fiona Dunbar?” That total knockout?
Hugh grinned. “Doesn’t much look like Fiona the ferret these days, does she?” That was what they had dubbed her at age ten, when she and Molly the mole had been sneaking around after them every day.
Lachlan sucked air. No, she didn’t look much like Fiona the ferret. She looked drop-dead gorgeous. Delectable. Beddable.
His “no babes” resolution began to crack. He kept an eye out for her after that. But while he saw her frequently over the next few days, she never came near.
She was taking care of her father, Hugh told him. A former fisherman, Tom Dunbar had had a stroke some years back, not long after Fiona had graduated from high school. She’d spent the next ten years taking care of him.
“And working,” Hugh said. “She works at Carin Campbell’s gift shop. And she sculpts.”
“Sculpts?” Lachlan had looked doubtful.
“Oh yeah. Sand sculptures. Shells. Even metal. Cuts them and bends them into shape—like paper dolls.”
Lachlan couldn’t imagine. But he wandered down to Carin’s shop later that day to buy some postcards, and he found quite a few of Fiona’s pieces. He had to admit they were pretty impressive—pelicans and other shore birds, palm trees and hammocks and fishermen. She was selling sketches there, too. And caricatures.
Then he realized that the witty sculpture Hugh had hanging in his house—one of him looping the loop in his seaplane—was a Fiona Dunbar piece, as was the caricature of Maurice at the custom’s house taxi stand, and the one of Miss Saffron the straw lady which he spotted hanging on her porch.
She drew caricatures of tourists and sold them the sketches on the beach. She even drew Lars Erik and Joaquin as they’d ogled the bikini-clad women on the beach. He knew that because Lars Erik had bought it from her.
She drew everybody and their dog. But she never drew him.
It rankled. Lachlan didn’t like being ignored—particularly when he hadn’t managed to ignore her.
Finally, when a week had gone by and she hadn’t even said hello to him, he’d had enough, especially since he’d just told Joaquin and Lars Erik that he’d known her for years.
“I don’t believe it,” Lars Erik said.
They were sitting in the Grouper, drinking beer, and Fiona had just come in, carrying a folder with some sketches in it, which she’d hugged against her breasts as she scanned the room. She’d spared Lars Erik a brief smile, but had skipped right over Lachlan as if he were invisible.
“She’s just miffed because a long time ago I didn’t like her precious island,” he explained.
“Oh, right,” Lars Erik said, nodding his head.
“Probably doesn’t even know her,” Joaquin speculated with a sly grin.
“Of course I know her. She’s a friend of my sister’s. Her name is Fiona Dunbar. Isn’t it?” he said to the bartender.
The bartender, Maurice’s son Michael, grinned broadly. “That be Fiona, all right.”
“So you know her name,” Lars Erik said. “So what? Invite her over to have a drink with us.”
“He doesn’t know her,” Joaquin said.
So he had to prove it. With Joaquin and Lars Erik egging him on, he’d strode over to where Fiona had just handed a pair of sketches to a tourist couple. He smiled his best charm-the-ladies smile and invited her to have a drink with him.
She blinked, then shook her head. “With you? I don’t think so.”
He stared at her, astonished at her refusal. “What do you mean, you don’t think so?” He was annoyed that she’d said no, more annoyed that she didn’t seem to recognize him, and most annoyed by the fact that the closer he got to her the more gorgeous she became.
He wanted to see flaws. There weren’t any.
“Maybe you don’t remember me.” It was possible, he supposed. He didn’t think he’d changed that much, but she sure as hell didn’t look the way she used to!
“Oh, I remember you,” she said, and gave him a blinding smile as she slipped between him and the barstool. “That’s why I don’t want to.”
And leaving him standing there staring after her, Fiona sashayed out the door, letting it swing shut after her.
Behind him, over the sounds of the steel drum band playing “Yellow Bird,” Lachlan heard Joaquin and Lars Erik hooting.
“Well, helloooo, darlin’,” a sultry voice sounded in his ear, and Lachlan turned to see a busty blonde sitting on the barstool behind him.
“Hello, yourself,” he said, teeth still clenched, but managing a smile to meet her own.
She put a hand on his arm and slid off the stool to stand next to him, almost pressed against him. “You’re Lachlan, aren’t you? The one they call ‘the gorgeous goalie’?”
“Some people have said that.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“Some people are very perceptive,” the blonde purred. She smiled. “I was just heading out for a little walk on the beach. Want to go for a swim?”
“Why not?” It sounded a hell of a lot more appealing than listening to Joaquin and Lars Erik snickering into their beers. He looped an arm around the blonde’s shoulders and steered her out the door.
Fiona, after her grand exit, hadn’t gone far. He spotted her standing on the porch of the gift shop talking to Carin. She didn’t look his way.
Lachlan looked hers—and gave her a long slow smug smile as he and the blonde walked past.
“I knew I’d get lucky,” the blonde was giggling. “I’ve got my red panties on tonight.”
Deliberately Lachlan nibbled the blonde’s ear. “Not for long,” he promised her.
He didn’t remember whether she’d been wearing red panties or not. He didn’t remember anything about her. He’d gone back to England two days later—and the only thing he remembered from the holiday was blasted annoying Fiona!
“The fish that got away,” Joaquin called her.
“Like letting in a goal,” Lars Erik said, “when you’ve kept a clean sheet.”
“We’ll see about that,” Lachlan muttered.
He hadn’t had time then. But when he came back this past winter, sailing over on the boat he’d bought in Nassau, making plans to move to the island permanently that spring, he’d taken another shot.
Hugh had been going out with a model he’d met who was doing a honeymoon photo shoot, so Lachlan had suggested a double date—a blind double date.
“Why not?” He’d made the suggestion casually. “Just ask Fiona Whatshername along.”
Hugh had raised his eyebrows. “She’s busy with h
er dad.”
“I’ll get someone to stay with her dad,” Lachlan had said. “It will be good for her.” He arranged for Maurice to go by and play dominos with Tom Dunbar and Hugh did the asking.
To say that Fiona had been surprised when Lachlan had been the one to pick her up would have been putting it mildly. She looked stricken when he turned up on the doorstep. Then she said, relieved, “Oh, you must have come to see my dad—”
“No. I’m here for you.”
“But—”
She looked like she might protest. But in the end, she’d let herself be drawn out on to the porch and down the steps. “We’re meeting Hugh and his girl at Beaches.”
“Beaches?” Fiona’s eyes widened.
Beaches was the nicest place on the island. Not a place Hugh could afford.
“I’ll pay,” Lachlan had told him. “You want to impress this girl, don’t you?”
“Yeah. But…” Hugh had shaken his head. “Do you want to impress Fiona Dunbar?”
Lachlan hadn’t known what he wanted to do with Fiona Dunbar. Then. Later that night he’d known exactly what he wanted—
He hadn’t got it.
She’d damned near drowned him instead.
These days he wasn’t touching Fiona Dunbar with a ten-foot pole!
Other than the sympathy note he’d sent when Hugh had told him of her father’s death in March, he’d had no communication with her at all. In fact, ever since he’d moved into the Moonstone a month ago, he’d done his best to avoid her.
Of course he still noticed her. Hard not to when the island wasn’t that big and she was still the most gorgeous woman around. But he didn’t have to have anything to do with her. Pelican Cay was big enough for both of them.
Try telling Fiona Dunbar that.
Less than a week after he’d opened the Moonstone, a letter to the editor had appeared in the local paper decrying the “standard branding” of the island. Fiona Dunbar, signing herself “a concerned citizen” made it sound like he was singlehandedly trying to undermine local culture.
For God’s sake, he was trying to salvage an abandoned architectural treasure and turn it into something tasteful and profitable before time and the weather reduced it to kindling—out of which the artistic Ms. Dunbar would doubtless construct one of her bloody sculptures!
Tactfully as possible, he had attempted a letter to the editor of his own in reply.
A week later there had been another letter, this time about the local youth soccer team.
“People who are going to take advantage of local amenities,” the perennially concerned Ms. Dunbar had written, “should be willing to contribute their skills—however meager—to the betterment of the island’s children.”
Him, she meant. Teach them soccer, she meant.
“Well, it is how you made your millions,” Hugh pointed out.
“It would be such a great thing for the kids,” Carin Campbell agreed.
So did Maurice and Estelle. Their grandsons would love a soccer team with a real coach for a change.
“Or don’t you think you can?” Molly had said in that baiting little-sisterly way she could still dredge up in a pinch.
Of course he damned well could.
And so he had. For the past month Lachlan had spent hours with a rag-tag bunch of ten- to fifteen-year-old kids who called themselves the Pelicans. The Pelicans were never going to win the World Cup, but they were a lot more capable now than they had been when he’d started working with them. Marcus Cash was turning into a pretty decent striker, Tom Dunbar, Fiona’s nephew, was a good defender, and Maurice’s grandson, Lorenzo, had the makings of a born goalkeeper.
Lachlan was proud of them. He was proud of himself as their coach. He was a damned good teacher, and he’d have liked Fiona the ferret to see that—but she’d never once come to watch them play.
She never said a word to him.
She didn’t have to. Her sculpture said it all.
Lachlan shoved himself up from his chair and stalked across the room to glare once again at her message.
And as the full morning sun illuminated Fiona Dunbar’s trash masterpiece, he saw what he’d been unable to make out before—the pair of red women’s panties that flapped—like a red flag in front of a bull—from the sculpture’s outstretched arm.
THE POUNDING ON HER DOOR woke her.
Fiona groaned, then pried open an eyelid and peered at the clock: 7:22.
7:22? Who in God’s name could possibly want to talk to her at 7:22 in the morning? No one who knew her, that was for sure.
Never an early riser, Fiona preferred to start her day when the sun was high in the sky.
It was why she was a sculptor not a painter, she’d told her friend Carin Campbell more than once.
Painters needed to worry about light. Sculptors could work any old time.
Obviously whoever was banging on the door wasn’t aware that she’d been working all night long.
She’d labored until well past midnight on the pieces she sold in Carin’s shop—the metal cutouts and seashell miniatures that were her bread and butter. The paper doll silhouettes she cut and bent and the tiny exquisite sculptures made out of coquina shells, sea glass, bits of driftwood and pebbles were tourist favorites. Easy to transport and immediately evocative of Pelican Cay, they paid the bills and allowed her to keep the old story-and-a-half pink house on the quay that overlooked the harbor.
Normally she finished about two. But last night after she’d done two pelicans, a fisherman, a surfer and a week’s worth of miniature pelicans and dolphins and flying fish and the odd coconut palm or two, she had just begun.
Of course she could have gone to bed, but instead she’d gathered up the treasures she’d found on the shoreline after high tide—the driftwood spar, the sun lotion bottle, the kelp and flipflop and…other things…and set off to add them to her sculpture on the beach.
She hadn’t got home until four.
“All right, already,” she muttered as the pounding continued. She stretched and flexed aching shoulders, then hauled herself up, pulled on a pair of shorts to go with the T-shirt she slept in and padded downstairs to the door. “Hold your horses.”
If it was some befuddled tourist, hung over from a late night at the Grouper and still looking for the house he’d rented for the week, she was going to be hard-pressed to be civil.
Yanking open the door, she began frostily, “Are you aware—?”
And stopped as her words dried up and she found herself staring up into the furious face of Lachlan McGillivray.
He didn’t speak, just thrust something at her. Something small and wadded up and bright red.
Fiona bit back the sudden smile that threatened to touch her lips.
“Yours, I presume?” he drawled.
Fiona snatched them and started to shut the door, but Lachlan pushed past her into the room.
“What do you think you’re doing? I didn’t invite you in.”
“Didn’t you? Seems to me you’ve been inviting me a lot.” He was smiling but it was one of those smiles that sharks had before they ate people.
“I never—!”
A dark brow lifted. “No? Then why put that monstrosity in front of the Moonstone?”
“It’s not a monstrosity!”
“That’s a matter of opinion. Why there?”
“It’s a public beach.”
“There are three miles of public beach.”
“I can put it anywhere I want.”
“Exactly. And you wanted to put it in front of the Moonstone.”
“So?” Fiona lifted her chin. “You should be glad,” she told him. “I’m raising the artistic consciousness of your guests.”
He snorted. “Right. You’re saving them from standard brands, aren’t you?” He made it sound like she was an idiot.
Fiona wrapped her arms across her chest. “That’s one way of putting it,” she said loftily.
“Another way is saying you’re drainin
g away the life blood of the island economy,” Lachlan told her.
“I am not! I would never hurt the island!” Trust a jerk like Lachlan McGillivray to completely misunderstand the whole reason behind her efforts. “This is my home,” she told him. “I was the one who was born here! I’m the one who’s never left!”
“And that makes you better than everyone else?”
“Of course not.”
“Just better than me.”
“You hate it here,” she reminded him.
“Hated it,” he corrected her. “Hell’s bells, Fiona. I was fifteen years old. I’d been dragged away from my home to some godforsaken island in the middle of the ocean. I missed my friends. I missed playing soccer. I didn’t want to be here!”
She pressed her lips together, resisting his words. Of course they made sense now, as they hadn’t back then. Back then she’d taken them personally, as she’d taken everything Lachlan McGillivray had done personally.
“Even so,” she said stubbornly. “You didn’t have to come back.”
“I wanted to come back.”
But she didn’t want him back! She was over Lachlan McGillivray! At least she’d thought she was—until that night he’d taken her to Beaches.
“And I’m staying,” he went on inexorably. “Whether you like it or not, I’m here and the Moonstone’s here, and we’re going to stay.”
“I don’t care if the Moonstone is here. I’m glad it’s here!” At least she would have been if Lachlan weren’t the one running it. And as for Lachlan staying, she doubted that.
Lachlan was glitz-and-glamour personified. He’d lived in England, in Italy, in Spain. He’d dined with kings and dated supermodels. He was not the sort of man to settle down on a tiny out-of-the-way Caribbean island.
She just wished he would hurry up and leave!
And he could obviously read her mind. Slowly Lachlan shook his head. “I’m not going anywhere, babe. But that sculpture is.”
Fiona’s jaw tightened. Her chin thrust out. “No.”
“Look, Fiona, I can take a joke as well as the next guy, but…”
“It’s not a joke!”
Lachlan rolled his eyes, then looked pointedly at the pair of red bikini panties in her hand.
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