by Jessica Hart
Ever since then he had been building a wall around his emotions. It would take a lot to bring it down. A very special woman might do it.
But it wouldn’t be her.
Clara fiddled with her cutlery, unaccountably dispirited. It was stupid to feel so low. What had she expected? That one kiss would change Simon’s view of love?
And, even if it had, what then? They were different in almost every way. Simon might be wrong about love and romance, but he was probably right about the kind of woman he needed. Clara was too noisy, too muddled, too much of a failure. She wouldn’t fit into his ruthlessly ordered life any more than he would fit into her somewhat less ordered one. He was no easy-going Matt.
Simon needed Astrid, who was calm and controlled except when she was being swept off her feet by Paolo. Clara suspected Simon was right when he thought Astrid would get tired of the pretty Italian. A toyboy might be fun for a while, but Paolo could never compare to Simon.
No, Astrid would go back to Simon sooner or later. Clara just hoped she recognized just how much love and reassurance Simon needed. Did Astrid understand the desolate boy who was buried deep inside the austere economist?
Clara pulled herself up. What was she thinking? That she understood Simon? She had known him for barely twenty-four hours and kissed him once, as a joke. What made her such an expert all of a sudden?
Perhaps she had moved on from Matt after all? That she could even be thinking about Simon this way was a good sign, Clara told herself, but she wasn’t going to get carried away. She wanted what she had told Simon: someone special who would love her as she loved him. Someone who would need her and want her, not a substitute or second best, but her, Clara.
And that someone wasn’t going to be Simon any more than it had been Matt.
So she should stop thinking about his mouth and his hands, and start remembering everything she had said to herself about concentrating on her job.
While she still had one.
* * *
‘Welcome to Paradise!’
Clara was waiting for Simon when he arrived at St Bonaventure’s tiny airport. He walked off the plane looking as crisp and cool as if he was heading into the office instead of stepping into the soupy heat of the tropics.
No board shorts or Hawaiian shirts for Simon Valentine. Instead he wore pale chinos and, in a concession to the heat, a short-sleeved shirt, although he looked as if he would much rather be in a suit.
Clara, who had given herself a stern talking to while she waited for the plane to land, was annoyed to find that her heart gave a great bounce the moment she saw him, momentarily depriving her of breath.
He threw up a hand before she could speak. ‘Please, no singalongs from South Pacific!’
She was ridiculously glad to see him, grouchy as he was. Forcing her heart back into place, she asked him about his flight. ‘I asked them to give you a good seat,’ she said, dismayed to find that her voice came out thin and reedy as if there wasn’t enough air in her lungs.
Fortunately Simon didn’t appear to notice. ‘Extremely comfortable,’ he said. ‘It was very extravagant to send me out first class, though.’
‘Don’t worry, we didn’t pay for first class. Our budget won’t stretch that far!’
Disturbingly aware of a dangerous fluttery feeling inside her, Clara shifted her sunglasses to her bad hand and pulled the straps of her brightly striped basket back onto her shoulder with her good one. She wasn’t supposed to be feeling fluttery. She was supposed to be cool and professional.
‘I managed to get you a free upgrade,’ she told Simon, horribly afraid that she was babbling. ‘We’ll just make sure the airline’s logo is in the final programme. Ted’s outside getting some shots of planes landing now, in fact.’
She stopped, inhaled, made herself slow down. ‘Is that all you’ve brought with you?’ she asked, nodding at the neat cabin bag which was all he carried.
‘I’m only here for three nights,’ Simon pointed out. ‘You do realise that it’s economic madness for four of us to come all this way just to talk about romance? We could have done that in London!’
‘The whole point is that this is another super-romantic place,’ said Clara as they headed for the exit. ‘You may have resisted the appeal of Paris, but that’s a big city, and I’ll admit the rain didn’t help. But not even you will be able to say that St Bonaventure isn’t romantic,’ she said. ‘Wait till you see where we’re staying! It’s perfect.’
If only her heart would settle down and her lungs start working properly! It had been two weeks since that trip to Paris, and since then Clara had hardly thought about him at all. Not more than five or six times a day, anyway.
Perhaps she had caught the news once or twice—or maybe a bit more than that, if she was truthful—on the off-chance that Simon would be on, giving one of his concise assessments of the current economic situation, but that was purely for research purposes, Clara reassured herself.
It wasn’t because her stomach jerked itself into a knot every time she remembered that kiss they had shared under the umbrella in Paris, or how it had felt to be held firmly against him in the club while everyone else danced around them.
Not at all.
And if she had been absurdly jittery when she emailed him with details of the trip to St Bonaventure, that was just because it was her job, and she was anxious about getting everything right. She’d never had to organise shooting in so many different locations. Naturally she was nervous!
Simon’s reply to her email had been uninformative. Fine, was all he had said.
Fine! What was she supposed to make of that?
Well, that was fine by her too. Clara arranged to fly out with Ted and Peter. There was no need to accompany Simon, who was more than capable of getting on a plane by himself and, anyway, they only had one upgrade, so she would have had to sit on her own in cattle class. So it made perfect sense. It was the professional thing to do.
Clara had it all worked out. The moment she laid eyes on Simon again, she would wonder what on earth all the jittering had been about. Why, she would think, had she wasted even a minute thinking about him? Her stomach would promptly disentangle itself, that odd fluttery feeling would fade, and she would see the man she had seen at first: uptight, cold, dull.
But it hadn’t worked like that. Clara glanced at Simon as he walked easily through the airport terminal with her and saw a self-contained man with a tautly muscled body and a lean, intelligent face. A man with a stern mouth and eyes that seemed to reach right inside her to snare the breath in her lungs. A man with warm hands and a caustic turn of phrase.
He was restrained, not uptight. Guarded, not cold. And when she looked at the hard, exciting angles of his face and remembered the touch of his mouth, dull was the very last word that came to mind.
And he was a man who didn’t believe in love and who was looking for an equal. Remember that, Clara?
Outside the air-conditioned terminal, the heat hit them like a blast and they had to screw up their eyes against the glare. Clara put on her sunglasses, glad of the excuse to shield her expression.
She had loved the island as soon as she had arrived the previous day but now, with Simon beside her, all her senses had intensified and she was acutel
y aware of the warm breeze lifting her hair and making the palms sway. It carried the scent of the ocean and dried coconut husks from the beach, battling with the airport smell of kerosene and taxi fumes. The sun was warm on her back and the bougainvillaea scrambling over a fence was so intensely pink it hurt the eyes.
And then there was Simon himself, pulling a pair of sunglasses from his shirt pocket but otherwise apparently impervious to the heat. He had nice arms, Clara couldn’t help noticing. They were strong with broad wrists and flat, dark hairs on his forearms, and when she found her gaze lingering on his hands, she had to jerk her eyes away.
Ted was waiting for them at the taxi rank. They climbed into a rattling old cab with cracked plastic seats that burnt the back of Clara’s legs. She wished she hadn’t worn shorts now. She’d picked them because she thought they would be cool.
And flattering, an uncomfortable little voice at the back of her mind reminded her. Her legs were her best feature, and she had wanted to look nice when she met Simon again, admit it.
But if Simon had noticed her legs, he was giving no sign of it.
And that was fine, Clara told herself fiercely. She was here as a professional, not to flaunt her legs in front of the talent.
She cleared her throat. ‘It’s not far,’ she told Simon. ‘Once we get to the port, we’ll get a sea plane out to the island… Given that we don’t have much time, we thought we’d get there as quickly as possible.’
‘It would have been even quicker if you’d booked somewhere on the mainland.’ Simon was clearly in an astringent mood. ‘The sea is the sea, after all.’ He was holding onto the roof through the taxi’s open window and he looked out at the coconut palms lining the road, making the sunlight flicker as they sped past. Every now and then they got a glimpse of the ocean, a harsh glitter in the midday sun. ‘You can’t tell me there aren’t beautiful beaches here.’
Ted turned round from the passenger seat by the driver. ‘Not like Paradise Island,’ he promised Simon.
‘It’s the ultimate romantic hideaway,’ said Clara. ‘It’s gorgeous, isn’t it, Ted?’
‘I’m sure it’s very nice. I’m just questioning the economic justification for travelling quite so far to make a short segment of the programme.’
Clara rolled her eyes, but she was glad he was being crabby. It made it easier to pretend she wasn’t noticing the line of his throat where his open collar lifted in the breeze through the window, that she wasn’t burningly conscious of his hand on the seat between them.
The hand she absolutely mustn’t lift to see if it felt as warm and firm as she remembered. Clara could feel her fingers twitching with the need to curl around his, and she looped the straps of her basket firmly around them to keep them in place.
‘Wait and see,’ she promised.
Paradise Island lay in the outskirts of the archipelago that was flung like carelessly discarded jewels in the Indian Ocean west of St Bonaventure itself. Never had an island been better named, in Clara’s opinion. It was tiny, set in the middle of a pale, pale green lagoon, with the dark blue ocean surging against the reef beyond. The water was so clear they could see the reflection of the sea plane on the sandy bottom as they flew over the lagoon.
There was a central area with a bar and restaurant, but the guests stayed in individual wooden huts, simply but luxuriously decorated, each opening out onto the beach. Simon and the MediaOchre crew all had a hut to themselves in the same part of the beach.
‘We’re all the same,’ Clara told him. ‘There’s no need to swap rooms this time.’
By the time Simon had washed and changed into shorts and a loose shirt, the glare had gone from the sky, and he went out to find Clara.
She was sitting at the end of a long wooden dock that speared out into the lagoon, etched against the horizon in blocks of vibrant colour. Green shorts, a turquoise-blue sleeveless top. The neon-green cast on her arm that clashed horribly with both. It was so much part of Clara now that Simon had almost stopped noticing it. Her hair hung loose to her shoulders, pulled back by the sunglasses perched on top of her head, and her legs dangled in the water.
At the sound of his footsteps, she looked over her shoulder and smiled.
‘Go on,’ she said as he sat down next to her and let his own feet hang in the translucent water. It was very quiet, with just the gentle slap of the lagoon against the dock and the faint boom of the ocean beyond the reef. ‘Admit it,’ she said. ‘This is paradise.’
‘It’s very attractive,’ he conceded.
‘Attractive?’ Clara threw up her hands in disbelief. ‘It’s more than just attractive. It’s incredibly, amazingly, stunningly beautiful!’
Simon had been watching the way the sunlight threw wavering reflections over their legs, but he turned his head to look at her then.
He liked the fact that Clara was tall. Their eyes were almost at the same level. Hers were brown and indignant, with the tilting lashes he had remembered, and her skin had already picked up a glow from the sun.
His gaze dropped to the warm, curving mouth that he had been unable to banish from his mind. If he were a more fanciful man, Simon would have said that mouth had haunted him since their return from Paris, but how could it do that? It was just a mouth after all, and that was just a throat, just a chin, just a cheek with a sweet curve to it. Taken one by one, there was nothing special about any of them.
But, put together, they made Clara. Warm, humorous Clara, forever on the point of breaking into a song or a smile.
Simon examined her face. It reminded him of a picture his mother had showed him when he was a small boy. If you looked at it one way, you saw a profile of an old woman, but when you looked again, you could see an elegant young one instead. Clara was like that. Sometimes she was a perfectly ordinary young woman, but if you blinked and looked again, suddenly she was gorgeous.
His gaze came back to hers. ‘All right,’ he said, without looking at the view. ‘It’s beautiful.’
Too late, he realised that he had made a mistake. Why was he looking into her eyes? Now he was pinioned, trapped, unable to look away, while the silence stretched around them and time seemed to stop and there was nothing but that moment. Nothing but the hard wooden dock beneath his thighs, nothing but the silky warmth of the water against his skin.
And Clara’s gaze tangled with his, the indignation fading to an expression Simon couldn’t identify but that made his throat tighten painfully all the same.
Deep inside him, Simon felt something inside him unlock, so clearly that he could almost hear it click, and the sensation was so vivid it jerked him back to reality.
Because unlocking was a bad idea. A bad, bad idea. Unlocking was the first step to opening up, to letting go, and letting go meant losing control. Simon’s heart was actually thumping in alarm at the prospect, and he dragged his eyes away from Clara’s with an effort.
He found himself staring at her legs instead, but that wasn’t any better. She had great legs, long and bare and smooth. Simon calculated that he would only have to shift an inch or so for his left thigh to be touching her right one, for their shoulders to touch. And, if that happened, it would be so easy to slide a hand under her hair and pull her towards him…
The impulse was so strong that it seemed to
Simon that Clara was a powerful magnet, tugging him towards her. The effort of resistance had his heart going like a steam engine, and it was only by sheer force of will that he managed to wrench his gaze away from her legs. He stared out to where a cat’s paw of wind ruffled the surface of the lagoon, sending shivers across the pure green water, until he felt his pulse settle and whatever it was that had unlocked had clicked firmly back in place.
They sat on the end of the dock, carefully watching the horizon, carefully not touching, while the silence yawned around them.
Simon cleared his throat. ‘How’s the wrist?’ he managed to ask at last, but his tongue felt thick and unwieldy in his mouth, and he was excruciatingly aware of how close Clara was. An inch, two, that was all it would take. He swallowed hard. ‘I thought you’d be out of the cast by now.’
‘Another couple of weeks.’ The words came out oddly squeezed as she lifted the cast to show him. ‘It’s fine, though. I hardly notice I’ve got it on most of the time.
‘It’s a pain here, though,’ she said, sounding more like herself, as if she had shifted her voice down a gear. ‘I can’t swim or snorkel, and I have to wear a plastic bag on the beach to stop sand getting down my cast. I tried sitting in the water with my arm in the air, but I look a complete idiot,’ she said glumly.
‘It’s the mark of a heroine, remember?’ said Simon and her mouth pulled down at the corners.
‘Frankly, I’d rather be a coward and be able to swim.’
‘But then you wouldn’t have been able to blackmail me into being here.’
‘True.’ Clara sat up a bit straighter and swung her legs in the water, making the reflections rock wildly. ‘So, tell me, what have you been doing since Paris?’
‘Working.’
‘Have you seen Astrid?’