In McGillivray's Bed

by Anne McAllister

  So it was primarily Belle he had come back for, damn it, and not Sydney St. John!

  But if the first words out of his mouth when he ran up the dock and saw Lachlan jumping out of his Jeep by his house on the quay were, “Where is she?” he supposed Lachlan could be forgiven for thinking he meant Syd and not his dog.

  “She won’t leave your bloody house!” Lachlan had bellowed, outraged, over the rising wind. “She said she told you she was staying there!”

  Hugh knew Lachlan wasn’t talking about Belle and he couldn’t deny the exhilaration that shot through him at his brother’s words. At the same time, though, he’d been frantic, desperate to get to her.

  “She’s a bloody lunatic!” he’d shouted over the rain sheeting down. “Lemme take your Jeep.”

  Lachlan tossed him the keys. “Get going. Get home!” At least he didn’t argue with where Hugh needed to be. “She would have been fine here with us. But she wasn’t going to come. Not as long as she thought you were coming back.”

  Hugh knew how that felt.

  If he had stayed in Florida, he would have been worried sick. He’d have imagined the worst. As it was, his heart was in his throat the whole flight home—and not because he was taking his life in his hands. He was worried about her, convinced that Syd would be scared, that—if she was even still there—she wouldn’t know what to do.

  But she hadn’t been scared. She’d been fine. She’d been capable. She’d coped. Exactly like everyone said she would.

  He was the one who’d been frantic. Panicked. Desperate.

  He was still desperate, Hugh thought grimly. And no better off than when he had left three days ago. Worse, if possible. Wanting her still.

  Gritting his teeth, he deliberately shut off the hot water tap and cursed as pure cold water engulfed him.

  Still, it was a hell of a lot safer than letting Sydney St. John wash his back!

  “THE roof leaks.” Syd announced.

  “Uh-huh.” It had been leaking for the past three hours. Longer probably. The house needed a new roof. Not exactly news.

  Hugh went back to his magazine and pretended to read. It was a six-month-old issue of Charter Captain and he had read every word of it at least three times before he’d picked it up this evening.

  But it was better than the alternative, which was further contact with Sydney St. John.

  His body still hadn’t forgiven him for the cold shower. It didn’t want anything to do with any further occasions for possible icy drenchings. So ever since he’d emerged from the bathroom, he’d been careful to keep his distance.

  It hadn’t been easy.

  While he was in the shower, she’d heated up some conch chowder and had a loaf of crusty bread cut into chunks to go with it.

  “Sit down and eat,” she’d said.

  He had because it would have been churlish not to—and besides he was starving.

  While they ate, Syd had asked about his trip to Florida, to which he answered briefly and vaguely. If she was miffed by his stonewalling, she didn’t give any indication. She simply shifted topics and began talking about her meeting with the artists’ cooperative.

  “I met Carin and Nathan,” she told him. “I liked them both.”

  “They’re likeable people.”

  “She’s very nice.”

  He lifted his gaze and stared at her. And was gratified to see a flush rise above her collar. “I’m glad you think so,” he said politely.

  “I thought they all were,” she told him. “Very interesting, too.”

  If he wondered how she would do with some of the more eccentric and crotchety members of the Pelican Cay community, he had his answer pretty quick.

  She told him all about her conversation with the Cash brothers and Turk Sawyer.

  “I didn’t know they had conversations,” Hugh said before he could stop himself. The only “conversations” he’d ever had with Turk and the Cashes in the past twenty years had consisted of his observations and their grunted responses or his asking a question and their saying, yeah, no or dunno.

  But Syd had apparently tapped their conversational well-spring.

  They told her all about how they knew a storm was coming, about what they expected to find on the beach after, how they would use it in their work and how they got started in the first place.

  “They told you all that? Hell, they must have talked your leg off!”

  “I was just interested,” she said, “and they knew it. I’m sure they won’t want to discuss their work with large groups,” she added. “But given the right facilitator, I think they could be persuaded to talk with a few interested people.”

  “You could probably persuade pigs to fly, too,” Hugh muttered.

  Syd simply laughed. “Thank you.”

  It hadn’t been intended as a compliment. Not exactly. Though he was reluctantly impressed by her ability to deal with virtually everyone. What it meant, as far as he could see, was that she would soon be looking around for greater challenges—challenges she would never find on Pelican Cay.

  “Then you can leave all that much sooner.”

  She recoiled as if he’d slapped her.

  Damn it all, anyway. He shoved his chair away from the table and carried his dishes to the sink.

  “Leave them. I’ll wash them,” Syd said.

  He didn’t volunteer to dry them. He just said, “Go for it,” and retreated to the far end of the room.

  It was where he still was two hours later, even though Syd had long since finished the dishes and was prowling around the house, straightening some things and rearranging other things, moving bowls and pots and such, and passing through his line of vision, distracting him so often that he was having to read the same sentence ten and fifteen times—and even then his brain was more interested in watching her.

  “We’re running out of pans and pots and bowls,” she complained now.

  Hugh grunted and tried to focus again on the article on new customs regulations. It might as well have been in Greek.

  Syd emptied the frying pan from under the leak by the door and replaced it noisily. “I would think,” she said after a moment, her tone one of consummate politeness, “that as you take such good care of your equipment, you would pay equal attention to your home.”

  Goaded finally to at least look up, Hugh saw her with her head cocked, watching him. There was a spark in her eyes that nearly had him looking away again.

  Somehow he couldn’t quite manage it.

  “You would think that,” he agreed casually, determined not to be drawn further into whatever was sparking to life between them. An almost tangible electricity crackled in the air, like the storm but personal. Very personal.

  Hugh dropped his gaze to the magazine again.

  HE FELT it, Syd was sure.

  It was there in his gaze.

  Every time his eyes connected with hers, however briefly, the electricity was stronger than any lightning storm. And yet he resisted it. Because he didn’t want to feel it? Because he didn’t want to acknowledge how good they could be together?

  It was, she reflected, a lot like the merger that had just taken place between St. John’s and Butler Instruments. It had made good economic sense. They were complementary companies. They didn’t compete, and together they would have greater advantages than either had alone.

  But Carl Teasdale, the managing director of Butler Instruments, hadn’t seen that at first.

  “Why would we want to get tied into a stateside firm?” he’d demanded. “We have our autonomy, our financial independence. We don’t need you.”

  “You don’t,” Syd had agreed. “But we’d be better together. You’d have larger markets. More options. Better connections. And we’d have an international base. Let’s take a look at a couple of scenarios, shall we?”

  So while Roland had taken the CEO out sport fishing, Syd had shown Carl why in one scenario after another a merger between St. John’s and Butler would be a good idea.

&
nbsp; She’d done her homework. She knew what Carl thought was important, what he would respond to. What would Hugh McGillivray respond to?.

  The rain still drummed on the roof—or leaked through—and the wind still rattled the windows and banged the shutters. The lights flickered.

  “Let’s play cards,” she suggested

  Hugh looked up slowly from the magazine he hadn’t turned a page in for the last twenty minutes. “What sort of cards?”

  She lifted a brow. “Strip poker?”

  His jaw dropped, then almost immediately snapped shut again. His whole body tensed and his fingers crumpled the magazine in their grasp.

  “Right,” he said, his voice strained. “Sure.” And with careful deliberation he smoothed out the pages of the magazine and stared at them again.

  “So, okay. We won’t play strip poker,” Syd said lightly. Obviously she’d moved a bit too fast. So now she’d have to back up, soothe his ruffled feathers, calm him down. And try again. “Gin?”

  He didn’t even look up. “No.”

  “Twenty-one?”

  “No.”

  “Five-card stud?” She could see a muscle tick in his temple.

  “I don’t want to play cards, Sydney,” he said through his teeth. He kept his gaze firmly on the page.

  “Fine.” Syd got up and went over to where the stack of magazines were in front of his chair. “If you’re going to read, I will, too.” She bent down to pick through them.

  It wasn’t her fault her hair tumbled forward and brushed against his bare knee, was it? Of course not. It was gravity, pure and simple. And when he lifted his gaze to glare at her and found himself staring down the neck of her scoop-necked T-shirt, that was his fault not hers.

  All the same, it was gratifying to hear him suck in a sharp breath. And even more so to see that his knuckles were white. Interestingly, even his bare toes seemed to be clenched.

  “Something wrong?” Syd lifted her head to inquire solicitously. Her face was barely a foot from his.

  He was absolutely rigid, not even breathing. But she was near enough that she could see the pulse tick at the base of his throat. Then he swallowed. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said, his tone strangled.

  “Good.” She smiled again, took her time picking out one of the magazines, finally chose one at random and retreated to the chair a few feet away. She settled in and began to leaf through it. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Hugh flex his fingers, crack his knuckles, take one, and then another, deep careful breath.

  The lights dimmed briefly and one of the shutters began to tremble. Belle got up off the rug and came to rest her head on Syd’s knee. Syd soothed her, twining her fingers in the dog’s thick soft hair, kneading and stroking and murmuring soothing words to her, then bending down to kiss the top of Belle’s head. Outside the storm raged and inside Hugh twitched and fidgeted in his chair, turned one page and ten minutes later another.

  He might have read all night if the lights hadn’t gone out.

  “Well, so much for reading,” Syd said cheerfully, lighting the candles she’d gotten from Lachlan. “How about a game of chess?”

  There had been a chess set gathering dust on one of the high shelves in the living room when she’d cleaned and sorted things out. She’d never seen Hugh touch it, but he must know the rules. “Or is it just artful clutter?”

  Hugh’s eyes narrowed in the candlelight. “No,” he said slowly. He hesitated for a second. “I play.”

  “Play me.”

  Again he hesitated, as if he were weighing serious considerations.

  Syd raised one brow and smiled slightly. “Or maybe you know you wouldn’t win.”

  He went for the bait, like a trout for a fly. “Fine. We’ll play.”

  “For stakes?’

  “We’re not playing strip chess.”

  “Of course not. I just thought we could have some stakes to make it more interesting.” She smiled again.

  Hugh gave her a steely, sceptical look, but he went and got the board and the pieces and carried them to the kitchen table. Syd set out two candles to light the game.

  “Interesting like what?” he asked, arranging the chess-men on the board.

  She shrugged lightly. “Up to you. If you win, you get to choose. What do you want?”

  “What do you mean, what do I want?”

  “It’s hardly a trick question, McGillivray. It’s very straightforward. If you beat me, you get what you want. If I beat you, I get what I want.”

  “Anything I want?”

  “Anything,” she said promptly, because it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to win. She hadn’t been a tournament chess champion for nothing. “Anything you want. As long as it’s legal.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “If I win, you put my stuff back the way you found it.”

  “Turn it back into a disaster area, you mean?”

  “I mean give me my life back.”

  Syd gave a long-suffering sigh. “All right. Yes.”

  Hugh nodded, satisfied, and sat down at the table and waited until Syd sat opposite him. “And on the slim chance that you win, Ms. St. John,” he said, a grin quirking the corner of his mouth, “what is your heart’s desire?”

  “I want you to make love with me.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  HE STARED at her. “Very funny.”

  “I mean it. If I win, I want you to—”

  “I heard what you said, Syd. Don’t be a tease.”

  “I’m not teasing. I’m perfectly serious.”

  “Well, forget it. It’s not going to happen.”

  “Not if you beat me,” she agreed blithely.

  Hugh glared. His fingers drummed on the tabletop.

  Syd only shrugged, knowing she could afford to be magnanimous. “You can open,” she offered.

  He raised a brow. “No ladies first?” he asked snidely.

  “I don’t intend to play like a lady,” Syd informed him.

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  She grinned. “You could concede now. Save time.”

  His teeth came together, and she saw a muscle tick in his jaw. “Fine, I’ll open,” he said, and reaching for his knight, he set it in front of his row of pawns.

  Syd stared at it, then at him. “Are you sure you’ve played chess before?”

  He met her gaze. His eyes glittered in the candlelight. “I said I had.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Having second thoughts? Worried now? Afraid?” White teeth flashed in a grin.

  “Of course not!” she said haughtily. “I just don’t want to demoralize you.”

  Hugh smiled slightly and lounged back in his chair. His shoulders lifted in a negligent shrug. “Your move, St. John.”

  Outside the wind continued to howl. The shutters shuddered and banged. The roof leaked.

  Syd studied the board. Studied his knight. Narrowed her gaze. Thought. And thought some more.

  Finally she moved.

  SYDNEY St. John played chess exactly the way Hugh figured she would. Carefully. Competently. Always assessing her moves. Strategizing. Anticipating. Considering consequences. Planning ahead.

  Exactly the same way Lachlan did.

  Syd was another goalkeeper, just like his brother. Always defending her interests. Moving deliberately, anticipating. Responding.

  In soccer and in chess—and in life—Hugh had always been a striker himself.

  He moved boldly, looked for openings, wasn’t above a little creativity when it was called for. He played fast and seemingly without thought, only instinct.

  Seemingly was the operative word. He thought—but not like Syd and Lachlan did.

  The game progressed in stalls and starts. Every move Hugh made was swift, almost instantaneous. And a good thing, too, as Syd took time enough for both of them.

  Whenever it was her turn, she contemplated the board, studied the pieces, frowned, reflected, lifted her hand, then put it back in her lap.

  “Aren
’t you ready yet?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “Still?”

  “Hush!”

  Hugh sighed.

  Syd pondered.

  He hummed.

  She glared.

  He sprawled and popped the top on a beer then took a long swallow. “Want one?” He raised it so she could see it.

  She scowled and ground her teeth at him.

  He sighed again and tapped his fingers on his knee.

  She bit her lip and finally—glory hallelujah—moved.

  Hugh leaned forward, considered what she’d done, nodded, and moved, too.

  “Just like that?” she demanded.

  “You’d rather I spent an hour staring at the board?”

  “I’d like to think you’re paying attention!”

  “I’m not the one wasting time,” he pointed out.

  She bared her teeth at him. And then started—or stalled—all over again.

  An hour passed. Then two. He got up and wandered around, checking the shutters, emptying pots, cracking his knuckles, while Sydney sat at the table contemplating the board, considering her move. Finally he went and lay on the couch.

  “Wake me when you’ve done something.”

  “Shut up.” She was frowning at the board, lifting her hand, letting it waver over the pieces indecisively, then putting it back in her lap again.

  Hugh began to whistle.

  “Stop that,” she snapped.

  He closed his eyes. “Whatever you say, Syd.”

  He could hear the hiss between her teeth as she went back to the board. He scratched Belle’s ears and smiled.

  When she finally did make a move, he came back and stood looking down at the board. Yep. Exactly what he thought she’d do. Without even sitting down, he reached out and moved his castle.

  Syd couldn’t quite stop the grin from touching her lips. Hugh picked up a magazine and sat on the sofa leafing through it, waiting. But this time she spent only a few minutes looking things over before she took a deep slow breath and let it out as she reached out to move her bishop to block his castle.