“There are scholarships.”
“They don’t give scholarships on the basis of nothing! You need a portfolio. Something to show what you’ve done!”
He’d never thought of that. His own family had been in such different circumstances. They’d come from the States, both his parents with college educations. His father had been a physician. His mother had taught school. There had been enough money to see them on their way. More importantly, there had always been parental support that had encouraged him and Hugh and Molly to discover and follow their dreams.
And each in their own way, they’d done just that. They’d all found success elsewhere. And they’d all come back to Pelican Cay. But Fiona apparently hadn’t been anywhere.
“So you’re totally self-taught?” he ventured. He’d almost forgotten he was naked now, except for when the breeze touched his bare skin. Then he remembered. But really he was too busy thinking about her.
“I’m self-teaching,” Fiona corrected as she smoothed the clay of one of the legs, studied his intently, then bit her lip as she concentrated on the shape she was molding.
The figure was beginning to come together now—a man sure enough, rough but recognizable.
“And you’ve never done this before? Never worked with clay?”
“Never. No time. No opportunity. I’ve always just used what I have. Sand. Shells. Driftwood. Steel drums.”
“Trash.” Lachlan grinned.
Fiona bristled, but only for a moment. Then she shrugged, then informed him loftily, “Some scholars call it environmental sculpture. They say it’s maximizing the assets inherent in the local setting.”
“Do they?” Lachlan smiled at her pompous quotation and egged her on. “What else do they say?”
He was surprised when she told him. She’d obviously done a fair amount of reading on the subject. At first the words came slowly, and he almost had to drag them out of her. But when he persisted, she answered more fully.
She told him about books she’d read, theories she’d learned. The “king of the beach” was more than just trash, he began to realize. More than simply having a go at him, though he wasn’t ready to believe that hadn’t been part of her motive.
Still her interest in sculpture was obvious. She might be self-taught, and she might have gaps in her education, but she was clearly far more knowledgeable about the subject than he would ever have guessed.
Once he got her going, she talked at length. It seemed to relax her. It sure as hell made it easier for him. She kept right on working as she talked. He was fascinated to watch the clay she was pushing and patting and slapping become more and more recognizable as a decidedly male form.
It was hard to say which of them was more startled to hear a cell phone ring.
“Not mine,” Fiona said quickly. “I don’t have one.”
Then his, obviously. He reached for it in his pocket and realized he didn’t have a pocket. Or trousers. Cripes.
Fiona seemed to realize it, too. She flushed suddenly and looked away. “I’ll get it,” she blurted and darted out of the room, returning moments later to thrust the phone at him with a clay-encrusted hand. “Sorry.”
He punched the answer button. “McGillivray,” he barked.
“Where on earth are you?” Suzette demanded.
“What? Why? Who wants to know?”
“Lord Grantham, I expect,” Suzette said shortly. “Since you’ve kept him cooling his heels half an hour.”
“Grantham? I thought you scheduled him for nine.” He remembered her rattling on about it last night, asking if that was all right with him. He remembered saying it was fine, to do whatever she wanted. He’d been far too preoccupied with other things.
“I did schedule it for nine,” Suzette informed him. “It’s twenty past.”
“Past nine?” Lachlan started to look at his watch and realized he wasn’t wearing that either. “Hell!”
“Are you still in bed? I sent Maddie to knock on your door, but she said you didn’t answer.”
“No, I’m not still in bed! I’m…out. I’ll be right there. Give me fifteen—no, twenty minutes. Show him around.” He hung up and jumped off the platform. “I have to go.”
“Of course,” Fiona said hastily. “I didn’t realize—”
Neither had he. He hurried into the bathroom and grabbed his clothes, yanked on his trousers, hastily buttoned his shirt.
He’d intended to be casually elegant for his meeting with Grantham, who was upper-class elegance personified. He was going to be casually scruffy—as well as late—instead.
Hell. Again. He stuffed his feet into his flip-flops, opened the door, and came face-to-face with Fiona.
“When can you come back?”
“Back?”
“I’m not done,” she said, trotting after him as he ran down the stairs. “I’m just getting started.” There was an energy to her voice he hadn’t heard before.
“I didn’t say I’d keep doing this,” he protested.
“We made a deal. I take the sculpture down. You pose for me.”
“I’ve kept my part of the bargain.”
“You’ve started to keep it,” Fiona corrected. “I’m not finished.” She looked at him beseechingly.
He’d never been beseeched by Fiona Dunbar before.
“You promised,” she reminded him. “And so did I,” she went on fervently. “I’ll go over right now and start taking down The King of the Beach.”
“The hell you will!” The last thing he needed was her messing with the sculpture while he was showing Grantham around. “You can do it tonight—after dark. The way you put it up.”
“All right. I will.” Still she held his gaze, her big green eyes earnest and intent. “It was going well today,” she told him after a moment, sounding almost surprised. “It really was.”
“Yeah.” He had seen that. But still— “I have work to do. I have a life,” he told her. “You didn’t tell me it was an ongoing commitment.”
“It doesn’t have to be. I can work from photos.”
“No!” God no! “Absolutely no photos.”
“Well, then—” Was that anguish in her eyes?
Cripes, why couldn’t he say no to this woman?
“All right! Fine. Tomorrow morning. Six o’clock again. No, make it five-thirty.” If they got as absorbed as they had today, they needed to start earlier.
Fiona opened her mouth and he knew she was going to argue. But then she nodded. “Okay. Whatever you say. Just be here, please. Five-thirty.”
“WHERE ON EARTH have you been?” Suzette pounced the minute he came in the door, giving him—and his canvas trousers and loose cotton shirt—a steely disapproving glare.
“I had business.” Lachlan would have attempted to brush past her into his office, but Suzette stood between him and the door.
“Must have been exciting business,” she said sarcastically and reached out and began unbuttoning his shirt.
“What the—? What’re you doing?” Lachlan demanded, grabbing at her hands.
She batted his away. “Putting you together apparently. Next time you’re out on ‘business,’ when you get dressed again, try to get the buttons in the right holes.”
Lachlan groaned and shut his eyes.
Deftly Suzette did them up, then patted his cheek. He jammed his shirttails into his trousers, then swiped a hand through his hair, straightened his shoulders and looked at her. “Okay now?”
“Let’s just hope he thinks you’re so confident of his approval that you don’t mind appearing like you just rolled out of bed.”
“I didn’t just roll out of bed!”
“Not yours anyway,” Suzette agreed. “I gave him a tour of the inn, offered him a newspaper and a cup of coffee. But he decided to explore a bit, he said. He’s gone out to see the grounds.”
“What grounds?”
“The beach.”
“Oh, hell.”
LACHLAN HAD ENVISIONED Lord David Grantham as
a graying fiftyish chap in tweeds with a pipe. What he found when he’d made a mad dash down the stairs and out on to the sand was a blond man barely as old as himself, wearing khakis and a navy polo shirt, moving slowly around Fiona’s sculpture, staring up at it from every angle, taking it all in.
Wouldn’t you know?
Lachlan sucked in a quick sharp breath, pasted his best “charming the public” smile on his face, and strode out to do damage control.
“Sir David,” he said cheerfully, offering his hand and hoping Sir was proper address and that he shouldn’t have called the earl My Lord. “I’m Lachlan McGillivray. Sorry to have kept you waiting.”
Lord David Grantham turned his gaze reluctantly away from Fiona’s “king of the beach,” and, with a cheerful grin, took Lachlan’s proffered hand. “Very glad to meet you. And please, call me Dave.”
Dave? The director of the most prestigious custom travel group in Britain? The earl of GranSomethingOrOther? The heir, Suzette had told him, to lands five times greater than all of Pelican Cay? Lachlan adjusted his thinking.
“Right. Dave,” he agreed heartily after a long moment. “Sorry not to have been here when you arrived. I had some business to take care of in town.”
“No problem. It gave me a chance to look around on my own. I always like to get acquainted with places myself. It’s fine to have staff do the preliminary visits, winnow out the chaff, as it were. But from there, I’ve always found it best to have a firsthand look at the place, form my own impressions of the inn, the surroundings, the local cultural—” a swift flicking glance toward the “king” “—amenities.”
Oh, Christ.
“It’s not staying,” Lachlan said quickly, knowing exactly what he was referring to. “It’s leaving. Tonight. The sculptor is taking it down.”
“Taking it down?”
“Absolutely. We were discussing it this morning. It was never meant to be permanent. It was an experiment. A challenge.”
“It certainly is.” Dave nodded emphatically. “You can’t take it down. It’s exactly the sort of thing we’re looking for.”
Lachlan did a double take. “What?”
David looked surprised at his astonishment. “Oh, absolutely. The people on my tours can see all the Van Goghs and Vermeers and Rembrandts they want in Europe. They can pop over to the Louvre or to El Prado for a weekend. They cut their teeth on Tuscany. They have all done the proverbial grand tour until they’re bored to tears. They’re hungry for new experiences, new sights. They want life, vibrancy—” he jerked his head toward The King of the Beach “—this.”
Lachlan opened his mouth, and closed it again. His mind reeled. He tried to think. And then to speak. “I thought they wanted quiet elegance, the unspoiled out-island, the pristine pink sand, the sea and the silence.”
“Of course. That goes without saying. But it helps to offer something more,” Grantham nodded eagerly, blond hair flopping over his forehead. “Something challenging and new. There are any number of unspoilt, quiet, out of the way islands, you know.”
Actually Lachlan didn’t know anything of the sort. In his view unspoiled out-of-the-way islands like Pelican Cay were few and far between these days.
But you didn’t argue with a man like David Grantham. So Lachlan held his peace and counted to a hundred while David went on waxing poetic about Fiona’s damned king of the beach.
“You see, it’s not just that they want to get away from it all,” he wound down at last. “It’s that they want to come to something. They aren’t used to total silence. They want a full cultural experience.” He waved an all-encompassing arm. “The sun and the sea and the silence, yes. But Culture—with a capital C, too. This—” he gestured toward the king “—and that steel band down at that little local bar. What’s it called? The Scooper?”
“The Grouper.”
“Yes, yes. The Grouper. Amelie—she’s the scout who found Pelican Cay—says the band is wonderful, that there’s a talented composer there as well.”
Lachlan nodded. “Skip Sellers.”
“Exactly. Just what we want. I’ll have to hear the band, of course, to be sure. But Amelie says it’s brilliant. And the ambience of the island and the inn… I hear there are a couple of excellent restaurants, too.”
“Beaches. And the Sand Dollar.”
“Excellent. And she mentioned a shop that hangs local art that she liked very much, but she said she wasn’t able to talk to the owner.”
“Carin Campbell Wolfe.”
Grantham’s eyes widened. “The Carin Campbell who does those wonderful island watercolors?”
“That’s her.”
Grantham was looking almost orgasmic with delight. “But she’s wonderful! I caught a show of hers in New York last year. I thought Amelie said she was on a shooting expedition?”
“Shooting pictures,” Lachlan explained. “Her husband is a photographer. Nathan Wolfe.”
“Yes, that’s right. He had some photos in the show. Nathan Wolfe! Brilliant!” He rubbed his hands together. “Oh, this is wonderful. I wonder if they’d be interested in doing lectures for our guests.”
“You could ask.”
“Of course. We’ll have dinner. Tonight, all right? You and me, the Wolfes and the steel band leader. Oh, and the sculptor.”
“The…sculptor?” Lachlan swallowed.
Grantham nodded eagerly. “I want to talk to him. Want to learn more about his vision.”
“It’s a her.”
“A woman?”
“Why not a woman?” Lachlan scowled in annoyance.
“Well, I—” David shrugged, but he was looking at the sculpture with new eyes. He exhaled sharply. “It’s rather…large…and, um, strong…for a woman.”
“Fiona’s not exactly a shrinking violet.”
David laughed. “Obviously.” He rubbed his hands together. “Wonderful.” He was beaming now. “I do love a strong woman.”
Lachlan didn’t like the sound of that. “She’s a busy woman, too,” he said sharply.
“But not too busy to have dinner with us, I hope.”
Lachlan hesitated, then shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.”
FIONA HAD A TRAY OF BOWLS full of conch chowder in one hand and a basket of homemade rolls in the other, a full section of tables that were her responsibility behind her, and Nikki, the other waitress, muttering in her ear about what Kevin, her boyfriend, had said to her last night.
It was all a wonderful dizzy buzz which Fiona let roll right over her because she was too busy thinking about how fabulous it had been this morning working on her sculpture. And all of a sudden she turned around, and Lachlan was standing in front of her.
“I need to talk to you.”
“No!” She tried to spin away, aware that Nikki was looking at her, wide-eyed. Men like Lachlan McGillivray did not accost Fiona as a matter of course. Two tables of luncheon guests looked equally intrigued. “I’m working.”
“Just for a minute,” he persisted.
Fiona shook her head. She didn’t want to talk to him. Didn’t want to have him tell her he’d changed his mind, that he wasn’t coming back tomorrow. This morning had been incredible. It had been perfect. She’d been terrified of making a fool of herself—of falling on her face, of gawking at him.
And, well, maybe she had gawked just a little.
But somehow—just how she didn’t even know—it had quickly become more than that. She could sculpt! She could bring an image to life with her hands. It was so incredible, so empowering, she couldn’t believe it.
She’d worked for over three hours. She’d made him stand there that long—far too long, she knew. And yet she couldn’t help it. Time had just flown past. And even after he’d left, she had continued to work.
She had studied the torso, had felt it with her fingers, pushing here, shaping there, finding hints of the ridges and hollows and pads of muscle. She had closed her eyes and had seen Lachlan in her mind and she’d shaped and pushed and let he
r fingers move. Her whole body had hummed with an energy she’d never felt before.
She could hardly wait until tomorrow.
And she didn’t want to hear his second thoughts, his excuses, why he couldn’t come!
“Excuse me.” She tried to step around him. He stepped in front of her. She moved the other way. So did he. Oh, for heaven’s sake!
“I have a proposition for you,” Lachlan said firmly, not giving ground.
“A proposition?” Nikki echoed, blinking owlishly, looking from Fiona to Lachlan, all avid interest. The table of customers right next to them gave up all pretense of trying to eat.
“Lachlan! For heaven’s sakes! I’m working! Are you blind? Do you not see the tray? The food?” Fiona glanced over his shoulder, nodding at the table she’d been heading toward. “The starving patrons?”
Lachlan glanced over his shoulder, too, then turned and snatched the basket of rolls out of her hand. “Here you go.” He passed the basket to the lady at the head of the table.
Fiona tried to stop him, but he elbowed her aside and unloaded all her bowls of chowder, plopping them down one at a time in front of each diner. Then he dusted his hands briskly together.
“There now. All set. Get you anything else?” He gave them a bright smile.
Negative shakes of heads and bemused looks all around.
Lachlan beamed and winked at them. “Then I know you won’t mind if I borrow your waitress for a few minutes.” He grabbed her hand. “If you need anything, just shout.” And he dragged her out on to the street.
“Lachlan! Stop it. My boss will kill me. What do you think you’re doing?” She tried unsuccessfully to snatch her hand out of his.
“Inviting you to dinner,” he told her. “And making sure you accept.”
Inviting her to dinner? This didn’t have to do with tomorrow? “Dinner? When? Why?” she asked suspiciously.
“That meeting I had this morning, the one I was late for—” his mouth twisted “—was with Sir David Grantham, the head of—”
“Grantham Cultural Tours.”
“You know him?”
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