The Millionaire's Virgin (Mills & Boon By Request)

by Susan Stephens

  When they weren’t walking, sailing, swimming or fishing they puttered around his house, they read, they listened to music, they watched DVDs. Her current choice of reading material amused him.

  ‘Don’t laugh—I like Harry Potter! And the kids next door are fanatical fans so I have to keep up with the books and we always watch the movies together!’

  ‘Did I say anything?’

  ‘You looked—’ She paused. She was snuggled into a corner of one of his settees wearing a long cotton shift, a charcoal background patterned with creamy frangipani flowers. ‘You looked askance. But I read all sorts of books—crime, romance, adventure, although not science fiction generally.’

  ‘Good.’ He returned her gaze with a perfectly straight face.

  ‘Is your taste in literature particularly highbrow?’ she queried.

  He held up his book cover.

  ‘Master and Commander,’ she read. ‘Surprise, surprise!’

  He grinned. ‘I like sea stories.’

  ‘That’s an understatement. I’d say you have a passion for all things maritime!’

  ‘I do have a couple of other passions,’ he objected, and eyed the twisted grace of the way she was sitting with her feet tucked under her.

  ‘Women in general or me in particular?’ she asked gravely.

  ‘That’s a leading question.’ His grey eyes glinted. ‘Put it this way, I am enjoying getting to know you better.’

  ‘Same here,’ she said. ‘I just have this feeling that women may come second in your life.’

  He shrugged. ‘A lot of my design work takes women very much into account,’ he said.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I’ll show you.’

  First of all he showed her the designs of his catamarans, then he showed her some of his house designs, and she was struck by certain similarities.

  ‘There’s absolutely no wasted space,’ she said slowly as she studied the floorplan of two admittedly small, compact homes that even had nautical names, The Islander and Greenwich. ‘It’s all rather shipshape.’

  He looked rueful. ‘My main ambition was always to design boats.’

  ‘But some of these space-saving ideas are really good. That, plus the fact that they are not shonky…’ she paused, then glinted him a wicked little smile ‘… do take your houses out of the realm of little boxes.’

  His lips twitched. ‘Thanks, but they still don’t fall into the category of your house.’

  ‘For my sins I inherited my house from my grandmother. Where do you live when you’re at home?’

  ‘In an apartment at Runaway Bay.’

  ‘A penthouse?’ she suggested.

  ‘No.’ He grimaced. ‘A sub-penthouse.’

  ‘Could we be as bad as each other in the matter of our living arrangements, Mr McKinnon?’ she said impishly. ‘Incidentally, I don’t have a marvellous hideaway on Cape Gloucester.’

  ‘On the other hand, you’re likely to inherit a cattle station and more very desirable Gold Coast property, amongst other things.’

  Maggie blinked. ‘How do you know all that?’

  He paused. ‘It’s fairly common knowledge.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ But she frowned, then shrugged. ‘I get the very strong feeling my father would dearly love to have a son to bequeath it all to rather than me. He’s petrified I’m going to be taken for a ride by a man on the make or I’m going to fritter it all away somehow.’

  Jack McKinnon gazed at her so intently, she said, with a comically alarmed expression, ‘What have I done now?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He rolled up the house plan. As he did so he dislodged a book from the pile on the coffee- table and a photo fell out of it.

  Maggie picked it up. ‘Who is this?’ she asked as she studied the fair, tall woman on board, by the look of it, The Shiralee.

  ‘My sister Sylvia,’ he said after what seemed to be an unusually long hesitation.

  Maggie’s eyes widened. ‘Your real—’

  ‘No. We’re no relation. We were both adopted by the same family as babies. She’s a couple of years older but we grew up together as brother and sister. She still lives with our adoptive mother in Sydney, who has motor-neuron disease now. Our adoptive father died a few years ago.’

  ‘That must be why she looks sad,’ Maggie commented. ‘Lovely but sad. Has she never married?’

  ‘No.’ He picked up the ship in a bottle. ‘Ever wondered how this is done?’

  Maggie blinked at the rather abrupt change of subject, but she said, ‘Yes! Don’t tell me you did that?’

  ‘I did. I’ll show you.’

  Cape Gloucester wasn’t entirely reserved for relaxation, Maggie found over those days. He kept in touch with his office by phone and twice a day he spent some time on his laptop checking out all sorts of markets: stock, commodity, futures and the like. At these times he was oblivious to anything that went on around him.

  He was also rather surprised, when she let fall an idle remark on the subject, to find that she knew her way around the stock market.

  ‘I’m not just a pretty face, Mr McKinnon,’ she assured him with mock gravity, then went on quite seriously to tell him about the portfolio of shares she was building on her own.

  ‘So it’s not only property you dabble—correct that—you’re interested in?’ he said.

  She directed a cool little glance at him and told him exactly how much she’d earned in commission over the past twelve months. ‘I do seem to have a flair for it,’ she said with simple honesty.

  ‘You do.’ He frowned. ‘You also seem to know your way around these rather well.’ He gestured to the house and boat blueprints he’d shown her.

  She told him about the courses she’d done at university.

  ‘All of which,’ he said, and smiled suddenly, ‘leaves me with egg on my face, I guess.’

  Maggie gazed at him, then she said, ‘I told you it was a good idea to get to know me better.’

  He laughed. ‘You were right.’

  She thought, after this conversation, that there was a subtle shift in their relationship, as if the playing field had been levelled a little between them, intellectually.

  She caught him watching her thoughtfully sometimes, then he invited her to participate when he checked the stock market and some of their discussions on all sorts of things—life, politics, religion— became quite deep.

  ‘Where did you learn to cook like this?’ she asked once, halfway through an absolutely delicious seafood crêpe they were having for lunch.

  ‘I grew up in a household where food was important.’

  ‘Your adoptive family?’ she queried.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you… have you… do you know anything about your own family?’ she asked tentatively.

  ‘No.’ He helped himself to salad and held the salad servers poised above the bowl for a moment. ‘I decided—’ he lowered the servers gently ‘—to take the road they took.’

  ‘Which was?’ she queried, feeling a little chilled, but not sure why.

  ‘If I wasn’t good enough for them, the same applied in reverse.’

  He said it quite casually, but she thought she detected a glint of steel in his eyes.

  ‘But,’ she heard herself object even although she had the feeling she was trampling on dangerous ground, ‘there could have been any number of reasons… I mean, maybe your mother had to give you up, for example. I don’t think it was as easy to be a single parent thirty-two years ago as it is now. I don’t think it’s easy now, come to that, but there is a lot more support and social security available.’

  He sat back with his food untouched and something about him reminded her of the man she’d first met at a jazz concert on a marina boardwalk, very sure of himself, controlled and contained and—as he’d proved then—lethal.

  ‘What would you know about it, Maggie?’

  ‘I—well, nothing, I guess. Look, I’m sorry.’ She took a sip of her wine in a bid to hide her discomfort, her
discomfort on two fronts. The feeling she’d rushed in where angels feared to tread and her concern for him, she realized with a little rush of amazement. ‘I shouldn’t pry.’ She half smiled. ‘Or give gratuitous advice. But—’

  ‘Listen—’ he ruffled his hair and pulled his plate towards him ‘—it’s all water under the bridge. It was water under the bridge when I was far too young to understand anything other than the presence of a loving family in my life even if they weren’t my own. And that’s all that counts really.’

  The smile he cast her as he cut into his crêpe was completely serene, and she would have believed him if she hadn’t seen that steely, scary glint in his eyes.

  He was also quite a handyman, she discovered, and that he set himself an improvement project every time he visited Cape Gloucester.

  His current project fitted in with one of Maggie’s enthusiasms—gardening. His garden was quite wild and in need of taming, he said. There wasn’t much more he could do for it since water was a problem. There was only tank water or extremely salty bore water.

  But Maggie was more than happy to pitch in and help him prune and clear away the worst of the tangled overgrowth.

  He had a book on the local flora and she also took it upon herself to identify as many of the shrubs as she could. To her delight, she found, amongst the native elms and Burdekin plums, some small trees she identified as Guettarda Speciosa that produced sweet- smelling night flowers.

  ‘Listen to this,’ she said to him one evening. They were relaxing on the veranda after a divine swim in the high-tide waters only a stone’s throw away. The sun had set and he’d lit a candle in a glass and poured them each a gin and tonic in long frosted glasses garnished with slices of bush lemon harvested from a tree in his garden.

  ‘‘‘In India Guettarda Speciosa is used for perfume,’’’ she read from the book.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Amazingly simply! You throw a muslin cloth over the bush at night so it comes into contact with the flowers. The dew dampens the cloth and it absorbs the perfume from the flowers, then it’s wrung out of the muslin in the morning and bingo! You’ve captured the essence of the perfume.’

  ‘Bingo,’ he repeated and watched her idly. She wore a pink bikini beneath a gauzy sarong tied between her breasts. Her golden skin was glowing and her green eyes were sparkling with enthusiasm. ‘Let’s see if I can anticipate your next question—no, I don’t have any muslin cloths.’

  Maggie dissolved into laughter. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You’re that kind of girl. You like to get out and do things and, the more exotic they are, the better you like it. But despite the absence of muslin…’ he leant over the veranda railing and plucked a creamy flower just starting to open ‘… you could wear a Guettarda Speciosa in your hair.’ He leant forward and handed her the flower.

  Maggie smelt it. ‘Lovely,’ she pronounced. ‘Thank you.’ And she threaded the stem into the damp mass of her hair. ‘They do also use it for garlands and hair ornaments in India.’

  He smiled and sipped his drink.

  ‘You’ve read this book, haven’t you?’ she accused. ‘I wasn’t telling you anything you didn’t know!’

  ‘No. But I’ve never had a girl to do the honours for before. You look very fetching,’ he added.

  She studied him. He was sprawled out in a canvas director’s chair wearing only a pair of colourful board shorts, and his body was brown, sleek and strong. Coupled with how he was watching her, lazily yet in a curiously heavy-lidded way, the impact on her was one she was becoming very familiar with.

  It was as if he could light a spark in her that caused her heart to race, her skin to break out in goose-bumps and a sensual flame to flicker within her just by looking at her. It was also a prelude, she knew, to an intimate moment between them.

  Trying to fight it was useless, she’d discovered, although she didn’t really understand why she would want to. He’d been as good as his word. He’d taken her to the brink several times, then brought her back, as if he knew she wasn’t quite ready to cross that Rubicon. So it had been five days of loving every minute of his company and the things they did, five days of growing intimacy between them—and now this, she thought.

  The sudden knowledge that the time was right?

  She took a sip of her drink and saw that her hand wasn’t quite steady as it hit her. He hadn’t moved at all. How, though, to transmit that knowledge to him?

  ‘I know you think I’m impetuous,’ she said huskily, ‘and maybe I am, but not over this. I also take full responsibility for my actions. There won’t ever be any recriminations.’

  He stirred, but said nothing as his gaze played over her.

  ‘Only if you want it, of course,’ she added, and stumbled up suddenly in a fever of embarrassment— what if he had no idea what she was talking about?

  ‘Maggie…’ he got up swiftly and caught her in his arms ‘…of course I want it,’ he said roughly, ‘but—’

  ‘Oh, thank heavens,’ she breathed. ‘I’ve never propositioned a man before—do you mind?’ she asked anxiously.

  A smile chased through his eyes, but it left them.. bleak? she wondered. Why would that be?

  ‘It’s just that some things can never be reversed.’ He circled her mouth with his thumb as her lips parted.

  ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t seem to make the slightest difference to how I feel. And if you’re trying to say you may not be a marrying man, I may do my darndest to change that, knowing me, but that’s… in the future, and what will be will be. Just don’t turn your back on me now; I couldn’t bear it.’

  He stared down into her eyes. They were glimmering with unshed tears like drowned emeralds, but her gaze was very direct and very honest. All the same he held back for some moments longer.

  Moments where he thought back over the past days and how he’d had to rein in a growing desire for this girl. Days during which he’d questioned his motives time and again. Times when he’d told himself firmly that she was just another girl, rather touchingly innocent at times, yes, then exceedingly determined at others, but all the same, he could take her or leave her…

  He had to doubt that now, in the face of her.. what was the word for it? Gallantry? Yes, and honesty. And what his body most ardently desired. The truth of the matter was, he reflected with a streak of self-directed irony, he could no longer keep his hands off Maggie Trent, or any longer deny himself the final satisfaction of taking her.

  ‘Turn my back on you,’ he repeated and released her to cup her face in his hands. ‘I couldn’t bear it either.’ He lowered his head and kissed her.

  Maggie clung to him and kissed him back in a fever of relief this time. Then he untied the knot of her sarong and it floated away. Her bikini top suffered the same fate shortly afterwards.

  ‘The perfect gymnast’s body,’ he murmured as he cupped her high, small breasts peaked with velvety little nipples.

  ‘Thank you.’ She drew her hands down his chest and trembled because it felt like a rock wall. Then he was kissing her breasts and sliding his hands beneath her bikini briefs to cup her hips and cradle them against him.

  Maggie shivered with delight and she stood on her toes and slid her arms around his neck. ‘You do the most amazing things to me,’ she said against the corner of his mouth.

  He lifted her off her feet and she curled her legs around him. ‘If we’re not careful this could be over in a matter of seconds,’ he replied with a wry little smile and walked inside with her, ‘on account of what you do to me.’ He nuzzled her neck, then lowered her to the bed.

  He turned away and opened a drawer of the bedside table.

  ‘If that’s what I think it is,’ she said softly, ‘you don’t need to worry. I’m on the pill—to correct a slight gynaecological problem I have but, according to my doctor, I’m protected against—as he put it— all eventualities.’

  Jack looked down at her. ‘Is that what you were going to the doctor for t
he day after we got locked in the shed?’

  ‘Mmm… It’s not serious, just a bit debilitating sometimes.’

  He lay down beside her and said no more or, she thought dreamily, he let his hands and lips do the talking. He held her and caressed her until she became aware that areas of her body she’d never given much thought to before could become seriously erotic zones beneath his hands and mouth. The nape of her neck, the soft, supple flesh of the inside of her arms, the base of her throat and that pathway that led down to her breasts, her thighs…

  She became aware that she could make him catch his breath by moulding herself to him and sliding one leg between his. She discovered that his touch on her nipples sent a thrilling, tantalizing message to the very core of her femininity.

  She marvelled at his clean, strong lines and the feel of sleek, hard muscles, and she buried her face in his shoulder with a gasp as he parted her thighs and a rush of warmth and rapture claimed her.

  ‘I just hope you’re experiencing what I am,’ she breathed as she started to move against him in a rhythm that seemed to come naturally to her. ‘It’s gorgeous.’

  He laughed softly, then kissed her hard. ‘To put it mildly, I’m about to die. Ready?’

  ‘Yes, please!’

  He claimed her and they rode the waves of their mutual desire to a peak of ecstasy.

  They came down from the peak slowly. Their bodies were dewed with sweat and Maggie clung to him as if she were drowning and he was her rock.

  ‘That was… that was…’ she said hoarsely, but couldn’t go on.

  ‘You’re right,’ he agreed and kissed her eyelids. ‘That was something else. No…’ he pushed himself up on his elbow ‘… pain?’

  Her lips trembled into a smile. ‘Only the opposite, thanks to you.’

  He considered. ‘Well, maybe the gymnastics had something to do with it. It’s very active.’

  ‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘it was—always you, like the song.’