She could have explained that she wanted to be alone, she absolutely needed to be alone; she doubted he would have understood. She didn’t really understand herself how women whose company she enjoyed at home could try her patience so totally on holiday. How she had ever imagined they had a lot in common was an even greater mystery!
The fact was if she didn’t escape her friends, she might end up telling them what she thought of them, which, although tempting, was out of the question.
They were nice people at home. It was only on holiday they turned into monsters who talked incessantly about their tans and looked at her as though she were insane when she suggested taking a picnic and hiking to the next village.
However, being alone lost its appeal pretty quickly when you found yourself lost with a flat tyre, a burnt nose and aches in muscles you hadn’t known you had.
Panic was there just under the surface. A stray thought like, I’ll be a government statistic of tourists who disappeared without trace, and it would come rushing to the surface.
Well, she wasn’t alone anymore.
Erin lifted her hand to shade her eyes from the glare of the strong evening sun. With the sun behind him the figure in the saddle appeared as a dark silhouette outlined by a corona of golden light.
The man saw her and slowed his mount as they approached. The wild-eyed animal, nostrils flared, pawed the ground. Erin, with a mental image of those hooves coming crashing down on her unprotected head, took several hasty steps backwards.
The precaution proved unnecessary as without any apparent effort the rider controlled his animal with nothing more than a soft murmur in fluid Italian and brought it to an abrupt halt.
The horse stood there quivering and the rider sat astride him for what seemed like an age just staring down at Erin until she became frustrated by her inability to see his expression.
Dry-mouthed, she watched warily as he finally kicked his booted feet free of the stirrups and slid off the back of the horse. He patted the creature’s quivering flank, sending up a puff of dust, and casually relinquished the reins. The animal pawed the ground restlessly but did not take the opportunity to escape.
Erin, her feet seemingly nailed to the ground and her body reacting at a basic and humiliating level to the undiluted raw sex this stranger exuded from every dusty pore, wondered if the horse, too, was held in thrall as she was.
As he straightened up to his full height it immediately became clear that what she had imagined was an illusion of height created by his vantage point on top of the towering animal was in fact reality!
This man was seriously tall. Tall she could deal with, but the rest was more of a problem! The animal and its master had a lot in common—namely they were both magnificent and indisputably dangerous.
The danger should have repelled her but instead it made her heart beat faster, releasing a flood of adrenaline into her bloodstream. She sucked in a shaky sigh, too awed in that moment to be sensibly wary of this large stranger who exuded a predatory, seductive quality that would normally have had her running for the hills.
She studied him covertly through the screen of her halflowered lashes. Tall and lean with broad shoulders and narrow hips, he carried himself with the natural grace of an athlete and the casual arrogance of someone who knew that he was one of the beautiful people whose presence alone stopped conversations.
This was the sort of man that she was on principle unimpressed by.
Too good-looking, too sure of himself, he would have been treated from the moment of his birth as if the universe revolved around him.
Strangely as she watched the beautiful stranger peel the leather gloves off his hands she could summon none of the amused contempt she could normally tap into on these occasions.
Maybe it was the leather boots that ended midcalf that were distracting her.
For some reason Erin couldn’t tear her eyes off the dusty leather. When she did her gaze travelled up bleached, torn denim and long, long legs. She watched, conscious of the sound of her own shallow breathing, as he banged the dust off his thighs. Below the rolled-up sleeves of the shirt he wore open the skin of his strong, sinewed forearms was a deep gold meshed by a dusting of fine dark hair.
He stood there, feet slightly apart, and hooked the leather gloves into the waistband of jeans that were fitted enough to reveal the taut musculature of his powerful thighs and give Erin a hot flush. The black T-shirt he wore beneath his unbuttoned shirt was also snug enough to draw attention to his washboard-flat belly.
Her attention was riveted!
Erin knew she was staring but she couldn’t stop. She wanted to move, but her body seemed strangely disconnected from her brain. Her limbs seemed not to belong to her, and inside her chest her heart crashed against her ribcage, almost drowning out the sound of his boots on the cobbles as he walked towards her.
CHAPTER TWO
ERIN swallowed, knowing that this was one of those scenes that would be etched into her mind for ever.
He stopped a few feet away from her but close enough for her to see the dust ingrained in the fine lines radiating from his eyes, extraordinary eyes, incredibly dark and fringed with equally dark curling lashes.
His expression was inscrutable though the groove above his aquiline nose deepened as he looked down at her. Erin felt a shudder chase its way down her spine. There was something almost cruel about the curve of his sensually moulded lips.
He fired a question at her in a deep voice that had an almost tactile quality.
Erin swallowed and lifted her shoulders helplessly to indicate she had no idea what he was talking about.
She saw something that could have been irritation flicker in his dark eyes as he dragged a hand through his hair, which was pitch-black and sheared off at collar level. It was riverstraight and she imagined that under the dust it was silky.
Erin could feel her fingertips literally tingling, a disturbing sensation, as she imagined touching … smoothing those dusky strands.
Appalled by the direction of her out-of-control imagination, she concluded that she must have been out in the sun too long. She was probably suffering from dehydration, too, having drained her water bottle an hour earlier.
Rubbing a finger across the bridge of her nose, she was relieved to find evidence to back up her theory. Despite the factor thirty she had plastered on earlier, her skin felt tight and tingly.
Well, it stood to reason that it had to be something like that. She was simply not the sort of woman who went around fantasising about running her fingers through strange men’s hair.
Sucking in a deep breath, she adopted an expression that suggested—hopefully—that she was totally immune to tall, romantic-looking figures riding black horses.
‘Do you speak English?’
He wasn’t the sort of man she would have turned to for help, but she was in no position to be picky.
Actually he was the sort of man that any women with half a brain would cross the street to avoid, though they probably wouldn’t, she conceded, recognising the weakness of her own sex when it came to men like this one.
‘Eng-lish?’ she said, enunciating each syllable slowly in the vain hope of seeing some spark of recognition in his spectacular eyes.
There was none; he just stood there looking as though he’d stepped out of a western.
‘I’m lost,’ she said, stabbing a finger at her chest. His eyes followed the action.
‘Do you … I need to get to … I’m looking for … damn.!’ she muttered, dropping down on her knees and removing the stones she had used to pin the map to the cobbles while she studied it. Anchoring a hank of wayward hair off her face with one arm, she stood up wielding the creased map in the other.
‘Map …’ she said, waving it at him.
When he looked back at her and shrugged all Erin’s frustration bubbled to the surface. The stress of the last few hours manifested itself in tears that spilled down her cheeks. With an angry curse of self-disgust she brushed the
m away with the back of her hand.
She took a deep breath and told herself to calm down; if this man couldn’t help her he might be able to direct her to someone who could.
She smiled encouragingly, then tapped a spot she had ringed in red on the map. ‘I need.’ she began, lifting her voice to a bellow.
Then she saw the total lack of comprehension in his face and sighed. ‘I don’t know why I’m shouting. You don’t have the faintest idea what I’m talking about, do you?’
He looked from her face to the map in her hands and back again, then gave another magnificent shrug.
Erin’s own shoulders sagged. ‘Why did you have to be beautiful and stupid? I know several women who would give a lot for your eyelashes. I know several who would give even more for you; there’s a very high demand for handsome hunks. I prefer the sensitive types myself, but they tend to be gay.’
His expression didn’t alter, though his lips did quiver faintly. Erin gave a guilty sigh.
‘Sorry, about this, but while I’m talking I can’t panic and if I stop you might go away and I’ll be alone again. And the not speaking English, I wasn’t serious, it doesn’t make you stupid. It would just have been a lot more convenient.
‘This is all my fault anyway. I don’t know why I thought I liked cycling.’ She cast a look of loathing in the direction of the discarded bike. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if I was saddle sore for a month,’ she observed, rubbing a hand over her behind and wincing. ‘But the thing is I had to get away from the people I’m on holiday with. I’ve saved all year for this holiday, but they count carb units at meal times and think local colour is spending the night in a smoke-filled nightclub.’ She gave a laugh.
‘When you say it like that it doesn’t sound so awful, does it? You know, I think the problem is that I’m not very tolerant.’ She laughed again and began to fold the map into a more manageable size. ‘I know you couldn’t care less even if you could understand a word I was saying, but thank you for listening.’
‘Any time.’
Her gaze flew upwards and the map fell from her lax grasp. Like the natural fault in a smooth raw silk his deep, cultured voice held an intriguing husk and only the lightest trace of an accent.
‘You speak English!’ Her initial relief almost immediately morphed into anger. It washed over her in waves as she glared at the impossibly handsome stranger. Her cheeks flamed in mortified horror as she recalled what she had said to him.
He tilted his dark head in acknowledgement and she paled.
God, I called him beautiful!
‘Why didn’t you say so in the first place instead of letting me babble on?’ And make a total and absolute idiot of myself.
‘I didn’t think it was polite to interrupt and once you were in full flow it would have been difficult.’
Erin chose to rise above the provocation, she fixed him with a glare that would have made lesser men wilt and said icily. ‘I won’t keep you.’
He grinned, displaying a set of even white teeth, and Erin decided the cowboy analogy had been wrong—he was a pirate.
‘Don’t you think under the circumstances it might be wiser to just suck it in?’
‘Suck it in?’ she echoed, looking at him in astonishment.
‘I’m sure you’re entirely self-sufficient in your own neck of the woods.’ He looked at her eyes narrowed, and speculated. ‘London?’
‘No.’
‘Well, wherever it is. This isn’t it, cara,’ he drawled.
The casual endearment caused a spark of anger to flare in her eyes but, more worryingly and fortunately less visible, a quivering liquid heat to unfurl low in her abdomen.
‘This is my home territory. You need help and I,’ he revealed with an eloquent shrug, ‘am it, if you are prepared to put up with my lack of sensitivity.’
‘I’m used to insensitive men,’ she promised. ‘Though none who are quite as sneaky and low as you. And I don’t need the cavalry.’ She angled a glance towards the horse who stood waiting for his master. ‘But if you wouldn’t mind telling me exactly where I am I’d be grateful,’ she conceded.
One darkly delineated brow lifted to a satirical angle, mockery shone in his expressive eyes.
‘If I did would you be any the wiser?’
‘Spare me the display of male superiority,’ she begged, rolling her eyes. ‘In my experience men who go down the “poor little woman couldn’t find her way out of a paper bag” route have issues with self-esteem. I am not a female stereotype.’
He lifted a hand to shade his eyes as he looked at her. ‘Oh, no, you’re not that,’ he agreed cryptically.
Erin supposed this was her cue to ask exactly what he thought she was, but she had no intention of playing his game. Besides, she wasn’t sure that she would like the answer.
She watched as he bent forward to pick up the map. He then smoothed it between his long brown fingers.
His hands, elegant and capable with long, tapering fingers, held a strange fascination for her, and the recognition disturbed her.
He disturbed her.
‘That is where you are meant to be?’ he said, stabbing the red circle with his finger and slinging her an amused look that oozed the sort of male superiority that made Erin’s hackles rise once more.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever taken a wrong turn,’ she snarled sarcastically.
His eyes lifted from the map. ‘We’re not talking one wrong turn here.’ His dry comment confirmed her worst suspicions. ‘You’re meant to be here,’ he said, tapping his finger against the spot ringed red.
‘I know where I’m meant to be—it’s where I am I want to know,’ she retorted waspishly.
‘Where you are is not on this map.’
‘You mean it’s too small?’ She had considered the map quite detailed, as far as she could tell marking every tuft of grass.
‘I mean you’re ten miles outside the area it covers, and that is a conservative estimate.’
Her face fell in dismay. ‘You’re joking,’ she said, not actually believing it. This man wouldn’t know a joke if he fell over it.
‘I—’
‘Will you just shut up for a sec and let me think?’
From his expression she suspected that he didn’t get told to shut up too often—if ever. Still, she had more important things to worry about than his wounded male Latin pride.
Eyes half closed, her face scrunched in concentration as she considered her options. It didn’t take long because she didn’t see that she had many. Less if you omitted walking.
‘I don’t suppose there is such a thing as a taxi around here?’
He looked amused and dug his hand into his pockets, causing the worn fabric to pull taut against his thighs. ‘You suppose right.’
She heaved a sigh and tried not to stare too obviously at the muscular thighs. ‘Then could you direct me to the nearest phone? I’m sure the hotel will send someone to pick me up.’ It would make serious inroads into the money she had set aside for her stay, but what option did she have?
‘Where are you staying?’
She mentioned the name of the hotel and his brows rose. ‘They pride themselves on being exclusive.’
‘And I’m not—?’ She could not honestly blame him for coming to this conclusion. By no stretch of the imagination did she look like most people’s idea of a well-heeled tourist. ‘Actually, you’re right. The hotel we were meant to stay in closed because of an outbreak of food poisoning—the tour company upgraded us for free.’
‘I’ll take you back.’
The abrupt offer made her stare. ‘You?’ she said, struggling with an intrusive mental image of herself slung over his saddle riding into the lobby of the exclusive and rather stuffy hotel.
‘Do you have a problem with that?’
She had several. ‘I really don’t think your horse would like it.’
‘You’re not wrong,’ he said, bunching the reins in one hand and patting the animal’s flank with the other. �
��Actually I know someone who has transport. He only lives a mile or so up the road.’
‘That’s very kind of you, but—’
‘I don’t do kind, cara.’ He smiled and her stomach took an unscheduled dive.
‘Are you coming?’ He paused, clearly expecting her to fall in step with him.
‘I really don’t … that is … how?’
He interrupted her with a bored-sounding, ‘Is that a yes or a no?’
‘No … yes …’
‘Are you always this indecisive?’ ‘I’m sure someone will come if I wait.’ Her doubtful tone invited him to disagree. But he didn’t.
Erin watched with mingled astonishment and indignation as he slid a booted foot into a stirrup, and spoke a couple of soothing words to his horse before vaulting with lithe grace into the saddle.
‘Well, this is goodbye, then.’
It was only stubborn pride that stopped her begging him not to go. Stubborn pride she had plenty of time to regret during the next twenty minutes.
It took her that long to wheel her bicycle a quarter of a mile up the road where a big rusty truck drew up in a flurry of dust.
CHAPTER THREE
‘YOU!’ Erin ejaculated in a voice of loathing as the driver got out.
She would have walked back barefoot before admitting even to herself that she was relieved to see him. She supposed her relief stemmed from the fact it really was better the devil you knew even vaguely than any old devil who happened along in a rusty truck.
‘So no one came along, then?’
She lifted her chin in response to the mockery in his voice. ‘If you traded your horse for that,’ she said, nodding with disdain towards the truck, ‘you were robbed. The only thing stopping that thing falling apart is rust and dirt.’
There was an amused glint in his dark eyes as they swept the length of her dishevelled figure. ‘You’re no oil painting yourself, cara.’
Erin’s lips tightened as the dull colour ran up under her fair skin. It was always ego-enhancing to have an incrediblelooking man tell you that you looked a wreck.
Happy Mother's Day! Page 16