by Lucy Gordon;Sarah Morgan;Robyn Donald;Lucy Monroe;Lee Wilkinson;Kate Walker
Surely if she got Keir out of her system she’d be able to fall in love? She wanted a man who’d laugh with her and talk with her, have the same values—someone she could respect, someone who respected her.
A man without a dominant bone in his body.
She stopped to look in the window of an art gallery. Her eyes roamed fretfully over portraits of brilliant reef fish, skilfully composed—but once you’d seen one Scarlet Trumpeter in pellucid blue water with the sun’s rays dazzling limpidly through it, you’d seen them all.
The oldest instinct of all shouted a silent warning; in the window glass she saw a dark shape moving behind her. With swift confidence she swivelled, automatically assuming a ready position.
‘Relax, you’re not in danger.’ Keir spoke with cool assurance as he noted her hands, prepared to deliver a stunning blow, and her stance—poised, alert, watchful.
Adrenalin drove the blood through her veins, banishing both her tiredness and the slight melancholy that had gripped her. Although she straightened up, she didn’t move towards him.
‘Were you trying to frighten me?’ she asked curtly.
‘No. I saw you from the taxi.’
Her eyes slid past him to note the cab at the kerb. ‘So?’ she challenged.
‘So I wondered why you were walking down the street by yourself.’
Hope quenched a treacherous flame deep inside her. ‘It’s perfectly safe.’
‘No place is perfectly safe for a woman at this time of night. Your employer could at least have sent you home in a taxi.’
‘Markus knows I can look after myself.’
There was an electric second’s pause before he asked, ‘Because you’ve had to show him? Is that why you learned self-defence?’
‘Markus?’ She managed a laugh, short and unamused. ‘No, he’s not a harasser—he’s very happily married.’
Keir’s frown didn’t lessen. ‘I’m almost at my hotel—I’ll walk the rest of the way. Get into the taxi. The driver can take you home.’ When she didn’t answer he added, ‘Unless you want me to walk home with you—or just behind you.’
Anger and a simmering frustration boiled into resentment. ‘That’s harassment, which happens to be illegal in Australia.’
‘In New Zealand, too, but I doubt whether anyone would consider it harassment if I told the cab-driver to stay with you all the way.’ His tone made it obvious that this was as far as he was prepared to compromise.
Knowing it was surrender, Hope said aloofly, ‘Then I’ll go in the cab, but I’ll pay my way.’
‘If you must,’ Keir said, no softness warming the harsh strength of his features.
After Hope had given the driver her address, the woman set the cab in motion and observed in a voice filled with purely female interest, ‘Your boyfriend didn’t like seeing you on the street.’
‘He most definitely isn’t my boyfriend.’ It felt as though she’d been saying that all night. Anyway, the word was wrong; Keir was far too much man to qualify as a boyfriend. A lover, oh, yes…
Hastily she broke into that train of thought. ‘I don’t really know him.’
Because the Keir she’d adored with all the fervour of her innocent heart had not been the man who’d said to her father, ‘All right, let’s deal.’
‘You might not know him, but he certainly knows you,’ the driver said, smiling.
‘A little,’ Hope admitted reluctantly, repressing the desire to ask the driver where she’d picked Keir up. Where he’d spent the two hours since he’d left the reception was none of her business.
The cab swung through a roundabout and headed towards Noosa Junction. ‘Take my advice,’ the driver said, ‘and let him win now and then.’
‘Men who have to win became unfashionable when my mother was young.’
‘Think so, love? There’ll always be masterful men, and it doesn’t mean you have to knuckle under, you know. Most of ‘em like a strong woman to match them. He’s got an interesting face, that one, and he’s pleasant with the hired help.’
Trenchantly Hope said, ‘I should hope so.’
The driver laughed, a comfortable middle-aged, experienced sound. ‘And sexy,’ she said, drawling the word. ‘It helps. He was made to be king of the heap, your non-boyfriend. They’re not easy to live with, men like that, but they make great husbands and lovers.’
‘You sound as though you know.’
‘I married one. We had fifteen fantastic years together until he got killed five years ago.’ At Hope’s small distressed sound she shrugged. ‘I survived, even though I still miss him every day. We used to fight—man, did we fight!—but he was always there for me and I was there for him, and we laughed a lot more than we fought. A mate like that keeps your heart in good shape.’
The taxi drew into the kerb. As the woman accepted the fare she said, ‘Ever studied body language?’
‘Well—no.’
‘A dollar change.’ She handed the coin over. ‘Taxi-drivers learn a lot from their fares. You can take it from me. He’s after you and he’s pretty sure you’re not going to tell him to go to hell. If you don’t want anything to come of it, you’d better ride out of Noosa as soon as you can.’
She gave another rich chuckle and the car drew away, leaving Hope looking after it with a primitive shiver of apprehension.
‘Oh, rubbish,’ she muttered, almost running up the narrow path to unlock her door. Sniffing distastefully at the warm, slightly musty air inside, she switched on the fan and pushed back the windows behind their security grilles before going into the bathroom to clean off the elaborate, masterfully applied make-up. Her fingertip traced a small scar, white and thin, scarcely visible after all these years.
She’d been five when her mother’s diamond ring had snicked from her mouth to her chin, a shallow cut that had healed into this fine line.
That was when she’d learned, once and for all, that dominant men were not safe.
Early the next morning Hope woke with a stuffy head and eyes so gritty they felt as though someone else had over-used them the previous night. The memories that had haunted her sleep—of loving Keir with mindless intensity and praying that he might love her, of betrayal and bitter disillusion—hung like shrouds over her mood.
Muttering, she flung back the duvet and stretched, listening to the loud calls of those other early risers the birds. A run through the cool grey dawn followed by a swim at Main Beach would banish the stale leftovers of a past love affair.
She pulled shorts and a misty green and gold shirt over her swimming suit, grabbed up a towel and locked the door behind her.
‘Hey, Hope!’
Two faces, belonging to a boy of ten and his eight-year-old sister, peered through the bare stems of the frangipani tree on the boundary. Her landlady, who lived on the upper floor of the house, had planted that tree forty years before; its surreal grey branches were waiting for the warmer touch of spring to coax forth big clusters of leaves and satin-smooth flowers, cream and gold, and sweetly, intensely perfumed.
‘Hope,’ Jaedan said urgently, ‘can we come with you?’
‘Ask your parents.’
He pulled a hideous face. ‘They said that unless it was bleeding or broken or there were flames involved we weren’t to wake them up.’
Sympathetically Hope shook her head. ‘Sorry.’
They sighed in concert. ‘OK,’ Abby said cheerfully. ‘We’ll watch the cartoons, or I might make pancakes. That usually wakes them up.’
“Specially when you burn them,’ her brother retorted smartly.
Hope grinned as she waved to them and swung down the road. During the time she’d spent in Noosa she’d become close friends with the Petrie family. She’d miss them.
With a shock she realised that the decision to move on had been simmering beneath her conscious thoughts ever since she’d seen Keir again.
‘You’re running scared,’ she said out loud, startling a family of crimson and ultramarine rosellas that were squab
bling over the scarlet flowers of a bottlebrush.
The taxi-driver’s voice popped into her mind. If you don’t want anything to come of it, you’d better ride out of Noosa as soon as you can.
A hot little shiver slithered the length of her spine. Four years ago Keir might have seen her only as a means to an end, but that wasn’t how he looked at her now. No longer naïve and stupefied by love, she recognised the glitter of sexual awareness in his eyes.
Three sedate, dowagerish black and white pelicans flew towards the river. Pushing Keir from her mind, Hope eased into a smooth run, concentrating on the crisp scent of eucalyptus trees and the cool, fresh air.
She’d expended enough useless emotional energy and angst on the imperious—and, for a frozen moment when Harry Forsayth had let his hands wander, lethal—Keir Carmichael. She had no intention of wasting a moment of this glorious morning by obsessing any further over him!
The beach stretched before her, slicked by the tide, a curved pale crescent almost empty of people. Even the volleyball jocks hadn’t arrived yet, although a few family groups were picking out the best spots.
As Hope looked around for a suitable place to dump her bag, an elderly matriarch called out from beneath her sun umbrella, ‘Leave it with us, love. We’ll make sure no one steals it.’
‘Thanks very much.’
Hope stuffed her shorts and shoes into the bag, handed it over, and ran down to the sea.
Gasping at the bracing slickness of the water against her heated skin, she dived into the waves in one neat movement and struck out for the horizon, driven by a restless compulsion.
Although she was fit and an excellent swimmer, her legs were shaking with over-use when at last she staggered out of the water. Scared by her stupidity, she stood breathing heavily, painfully, with the sun beating down on her unprotected shoulders.
‘What the hell were you doing? Trying to drown yourself?’ a furious male voice enquired as Keir strode across the sand.
Struggling to control her panting, she said, ‘Of course not.’
‘You’re exhausted.’ He hooked his arm around her heaving shoulders and urged her further up the beach.
‘And good morning to you, too,’ Hope replied on a harsh intake of breath, trying to ignore the ragged thunder of her heart in her ears. ‘I swam a bit too far, but I’m fine.’ When he didn’t immediately let her go she jerked away. ‘Thank you.’
He stood back a step, anger glittering in the ice-grey depths of his eyes. ‘You damned near drowned yourself. I saw you from my window and got down here so fast I probably scorched a furrow in the floor.’
‘I didn’t realise how far out I’d gone. It’s all right; I don’t make a practice of it.’ Her breasts lifted and fell as she dragged more air into her straining lungs. ‘I won’t do it again.’
‘I thought every beach in Australia had bronzed lifesavers watching out for those stupid enough to swim outside the flags.’ His caustic tone burned her ears. ‘Where are they?’
Hope rubbed her hands down her arms, noting with feverish, unbidden satisfaction that his eyes followed the betraying movement. ‘They’ll be here in a fortnight, when the season starts.’
Emotion ran in a turbulent rip beneath the banal words. Forcing her weighted legs to move, she set off up the beach.
‘You need a keeper,’ Keir said, barely reining in his aggression as he kept pace. ‘Look at you—you can barely put one leg in front of the other. Where are your clothes?’
Nodding at the family party, she told him.
‘Stay here while I get them.’
Women of the cab-driver’s generation, Hope thought sourly, might call him a masterful man. She called him uncompromising and dictatorial.
It wasn’t fair that he was also sinfully, dangerously attractive. Her eyes followed the sun-summoned blue flames in his black hair, lingered on a cotton shirt in shades of ice-blue and grey, picked out well-muscled thighs concealed by trousers in a darker shade of grey. Hot sensation clenched her stomach at his lithe, unhurried ease, all masculine grace and the latent promise of great strength and endurance.
Smiling, he stopped and spoke to the family spread out on their rugs. They all sat up, interested, alert. After he’d spoken, the older woman looked past him; Hope lifted her hand and waved, although she knew her gesture wasn’t necessary. Keir’s personal sorcery—that compelling, powerful presence—had had its usual effect.
Without demur the family surrendered her bag. Hope shivered as a slight breeze plucked at her, chilling her flesh. Beneath the thin material of her bathing suit her nipples puckered embarrassingly.
The flare of sensuality in Keir’s eyes was safely controlled by the time he reached her, but the raw note in his voice when he said, ‘Put something on,’ set a treacherous need preening.
Her hands shook as she accepted the bag and dragged out her floaty shirt.
When the last button was in place Keir asked without expression, ‘Have you had anything to eat?’
‘No. I—’
‘Then you’d better have breakfast before you go home. Or before you lie out on the beach toasting that honey-coloured skin.’
‘I don’t lie on the beach,’ she retorted. ‘I burn too easily.’
He smiled at her, his mouth suddenly relaxing into charm, pale eyes almost hypnotic in his dark face. ‘Have breakfast with me, Hope,’ he said softly.
That smile had always knocked the breath out of her, sent her pulse-rate into the stratosphere. ‘All right,’ she said before she had time to think.
Groping in her bag for a length of fine, dark green cotton gave her an excuse to avert her face in case he discerned the painful mixture of triumph and anticipatory alarm roiling in the pit of her stomach.
Keir didn’t pretend not to watch as she tied the swathe of cotton over her hips, partly covering her long, bare legs. Excitement free-fell the length of her spine, dropping like a roller-coaster to explode in the pit of her stomach in a burst of fire. She took out a comb, ruthlessly slicking the wet amber mass of her hair back off her face; every cell in her body jumped, newborn and eager.
With a flick of her fingers she dropped the comb into her bag and concentrated on controlling her unruly responses.
‘Now you look less likely to give the waiter a heart attack,’ Keir said with a sardonic inflection that brought her head up sharply.
‘This is Noosa,’ she returned flippantly. ‘The waiters are bullet-proof.’
‘Like the shop assistants?’
‘Most of us,’ she said on a dry undernote of humour.
‘How long have you been here?’ he asked as she walked beside him along the beach. The rapidly rising sun heated her skin, cast an aureole of golden light around Keir’s angular features.
‘Six months or so.’
‘Do you plan to stay?’
She shrugged, caution hedging her answer. ‘Noosa has a lot going for it.’
Keir’s brows drew together, but he asked, ‘Why Australia, Hope?’
‘Why not? I like it, and the people are lovely.’
‘So you’re just bumming along, working at jobs that don’t take any of your considerable intelligence, rootless and drifting. Why are you so afraid to settle down?’
Yes, that was Keir, blunt, to the point—and high-handedly judging her. Hope thought of the travel articles that were slowly winning her a reputation, the friends she’d made—and those still waiting for her.
Cat-like, she smiled. ‘What have you got against just bumming around?’ she echoed, her voice deliberately lazy and amused. ‘Don’t knock it, Keir, if you haven’t tried it.’
‘I can’t think of anything I’d like less. How old are you now?’ His tone matched hers, its indolence somehow both sexy and intimidating, perhaps because what he said was tinged with derision.
‘Don’t you remember? I’m disappointed—I thought that awesomely efficient brain would have everything filed away in neat little folders. I’m twenty-three.’
‘Seven years younger than I am.’
When she said nothing he glanced down at her. ‘A suitable difference,’ he said ambiguously.
‘For what?’ Hope tried to speak with matching assurance, but it was a struggle because slow anticipation burned through her, undermining the persona she’d built with such care, threatening to expose the foolish, love-sick eighteen-year-old she’d thought long buried—the girl this man had destroyed so casually, so cruelly.
Smiling, he scanned her face with deliberate, goading mockery. ‘For anything,’ he said. ‘Would you like to eat here?’
Few people sat as yet beneath the large cream market umbrellas of the beach-front café. In an hour or so it would be buzzing.
‘It has an excellent reputation,’ Hope answered, clipping the words.
When a waitress tried to steer them towards a table beneath the canvas roof, Keir said, ‘We’d prefer to sit over there, thank you,’ nodding at one almost hidden from the rest of the patrons by potted palms.
Naturally Keir Carmichael, world-recognised billionaire, would prefer to feed shop assistants where as few people as possible could see him…
Chapter Four
STIFF-SHOULDERED, Hope sat down and pretended to read the menu. The words shimmered crazily in front of her; after a few moments she realised she was watching sunlight dance across Keir’s arm, picking out a stray drop of seawater that dazzled in transparent perfection. She must have flicked it onto him.
A dark enchantment—powerful, shameless—muddied logic and reason, purring temptation through Hope’s body, whispering of forbidden ecstasy. Heat coalesced in the pleasure points of her body.
Like mother, like daughter, she thought with a pang of fear; this forbidden attraction for dominant men had to be bred in the blood.
But she’d learned from her mother’s tragedy. Not for her the imprisonment of love; she cherished her independence far too much to surrender it to a man who saw people as pawns. No, she’d have a liberating affair with Keir and then wave him goodbye, free at last.
She looked up into eyes of searing clarity, her breath rasping in her lungs as Keir probed her armour, searching for weak points. It took every particle of self-possession to parry that lancing, searching gaze with mildly raised eyebrows and a quizzical half-smile.