‘I came after you.’ Wasn’t it obvious?
‘Why?’
‘You know why,’ she whispered.
She covered the few yards that remained between them until she was looking almost directly into his eyes. He was only three or four inches taller than she was so her eyes were almost on a level with his mouth.
His lips parted. She saw him run his tongue over them before he clamped them shut in a thin line. He shifted against the railing.
‘I missed you while you were gone,’ she told him softly.
‘Did you?’ He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. ‘I can’t imagine why.’
‘Can’t you?’
A harsh breath whistled out between his lips. ‘Damn it, Carly, what the hell are you trying to do?’
She probably wouldn’t have said it if it hadn’t been her birthday, if she hadn’t dreamed it so many times that she didn’t see how it couldn’t be true, if she hadn’t trusted him to love her with the same fervor with which she loved him.
But she did, and so she said quite sincerely, ‘Trying to get you to give me my birthday kiss, of course.’ And she looked up into his eyes and parted her lips expectantly.
‘For God’s sake, Carly!’
She blinked at his explosive reaction. ‘Well, your father did,’ she said defensively after a moment. ‘Even Des did. But not you.’
He muttered something indistinct under his breath. ‘You know what you’re asking for?’ he said harshly.
She nodded slowly, but deliberately. Of course she knew. She’d dreamed of it—of him—for months.
He stared at her for a long moment, then he jerked his hands out of his pockets and reached for her, hauling her hard against him and taking her mouth with his.
It wasn’t that Carly was a total innocent. Well, perhaps she was. She’d been kissed before. By Des. By that boy he’d been teasing her about. By another one or two sweaty-palmed, pimply-faced adolescents who’d pecked her lips like roosters pecking corn.
She’d never in her life been kissed like this.
She didn’t feel kissed so much as plundered. Piran seemed more angry than desperate as he locked his mouth over hers. His tongue invaded the sweet recesses of her mouth, seeking, delving, tasting.
And Carly, both shocked and aroused by the force of his possession, hesitated a second, then responded in kind, even more desperate than he was, touching her tongue to his, dueling with him, challenging him.
And while their tongues fought and tangled their bodies did the same. One of Piran’s legs slipped between hers, and she felt the soft denim of his jeans rub against the bare skin of her thighs below the hem of her shorts.
He drew her closer still and his knee rode higher, pressing against the juncture of her legs, inciting her further, making her moan and writhe against him.
His hands slipped inside the waistband of her shorts, skimming right down to cup her buttocks as he lifted her into his embrace. It was further than any boy had ever gone with her before.
But Piran wasn’t just any boy, she reminded herself. In fact he wasn’t a boy at all—he was a man. With a man’s hunger and a man’s needs.
And as his mouth and hands and knee learned her body Carly was finding a woman’s needs inside herself that night. She wanted Piran every bit as badly as he seemed to want her. Untutored though she was, somehow, instinctively, she knew what to do.
She knew how to tug his shirt out of his jeans, how to spread her hands against the heated flesh of his back. She knew how to nip and taste his lips in the same way that he nipped and tasted hers. She knew how to slide her hands round and press them against his chest, how to rub tiny circles against the sensitive nipples she found there, how to make him groan and drag his hands out of her shorts long enough to tug her T-shirt over her head.
‘God! Carly!’
‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Oh, yes.’ It felt so good, touching him, feeling the contrast between his hot skin and the cool night air that caressed her flushed body.
It wasn’t cool enough to calm her fevered blood. In fact the sudden touch of fresh air only made her ease closer to Piran, pressing her breasts against his chest, snuggling in as tight as she could.
She heard the quick intake of his breath. His hands sought the waistband of her shorts again, opening the fastener, easing down the zipper. Carly swallowed hard at the feel of his rough fingertips against her smooth skin. His touch was so possessive, so intimate.
And then it became more intimate still. One hand slipped between her legs, parted her tender flesh and touched her growing moistness, making her quiver with a need and desperation she’d never felt in all her seventeen years. She whimpered and pressed herself against his questing fingers.
Piran uttered a low sound deep in his throat, and thrust his hips against her, so that Carly could feel the taut bulge beneath his jeans. She’d never felt a man’s erection before. She’d taken the requisite sex-education classes, had tittered and snickered with her girlfriends about boys, had tried to imagine the changes that arousal would make in a man. But she’d never experienced the evidence of that arousal, had never felt the urgent press of masculine power until now.
Sometimes she’d wondered how she’d react. With wonder? With fear?
Now she knew. She felt nothing of fear, only a desire to know it—to know Piran—even more fully.
She wanted to touch him as intimately as he was touching her. Her hands went to the buttons of his jeans, fumbled, then succeeded in undoing them.
He tried to pull her hand away but she persisted, needing to touch him, wanting to caress the silken heat of his flesh.
‘God, Carly!’ he murmured again, his voice ragged as she did so.
‘Am I hurting you?’
‘No! Yes! You’re killing me! God, I need—I can’t-I don’t want—! Stop!’ He pressed against her, shuddering, his face buried against her shoulder, his hips thrusting against her.
‘Piran? Are you all right?’
He groaned. ‘No.’ He took another shuddering breath. His whole body was trembling against hers. ‘God! I’m…sorry. I…Oh, hell,’ he muttered.
‘Oh,’ Carly said faintly. ‘Oh, dear.’ She felt her cheeks burn as she realized what had happened. And yet she felt an overwhelming tenderness for him and the need to let him know that she loved him all the more.
She smiled at him. ‘I can wait,’ she told him softly.
‘You’ll have to,’ he said raggedly. ‘I can’t believe this. I’ve never—’
‘It’s OK,’ Carly assured him resting her head against his chest. ‘I don’t mind. Truly. I’m really sort of glad.’
He pulled back and stared at her. ‘Glad?’
She lifted her face and met his gaze, nodding. ‘To wait till we’re married.’
Hard hands came up and gripped her shoulders. ‘What do you mean, married?’
‘Isn’t that what you meant? Waiting until we get married?’ she repeated, looking into his eyes, which suddenly seemed large and even darker than normal.
‘Married?’ He almost choked on the word.
For the first time Carly felt a faint shiver run through her. ‘Don’t you want…?’ she ventured finally. But she didn’t even have to finish the sentence because the look on his face answered her question even before she asked it.
But just in case she couldn’t tell he spelled it out for her. ‘I never said anything about marriage. Did I? Did I?’
‘No, but—’
‘Marry you? You must be kidding!’
Carly stared at him, pulling away, hastily doing up her shorts, still never taking her eyes from his face. It was as if he was turning into a monster right before her eyes. ‘But you—I—we—’
‘We’re hot for each other. That’s all.’
‘But—’
‘I’m no sucker, Carlota,’ he said. ‘Just because my father was dumb enough to get trapped by a brazen hussy, it doesn’t mean I’m fair game too.’
It too
k Carly a moment to realize what he meant. ‘You think I—’ She couldn’t even say the words. She gaped at him. ‘My mother never—!’
‘Tell me your mother didn’t set out to snare my old man! Go on, tell me. Better yet, prove it!’
Carly opened her mouth, but no words came out. Piran stood looking at her coldly, daring her.
And she couldn’t answer him. As much as she would have loved to deny Piran’s accusation, she couldn’t.
Sue had in fact pursued Arthur. She’d taken one look at the tall, bespectacled archaeology professor and had fallen in love—at least she thought she had. And she’d made no bones about it. Carly knew it. Even Arthur knew it.
Arthur had been equally smitten. They might have seemed the oddest of couples, but their marriage worked. And, regardless of what Piran thought of her motives, Sue had never been after Arthur’s money. She’d been after him.
But Piran wouldn’t understand that.
Piran, Carly was beginning to realize, didn’t know the first thing about love.
She looked at him as though she was seeing him for the first time. She still didn’t speak.
‘That’s what I thought,’ Piran said roughly. ‘You can’t.’
He zipped up his jeans and tucked in his shirt. Then he reached down and snagged Carly’s T-shirt from the ground where it had fallen. He flipped it to her. She grabbed it and held it in front of her breasts.
They looked at each other, and Carly saw her dreams crumble right before her eyes.
‘You don’t understand,’ she said sadly at last and then she turned and walked away.
The sun was high in the sky when Carly awoke. She groaned, knowing that the minute she walked into the living room Piran would be complaining that she was late for work. Well, too bad.
She’d lain awake half the night remembering in detail all the pain of her youthful encounter with Piran. She was glad she had, no matter however painful it had been to relive it.
Now she just needed to keep that memory at the forefront of her thoughts for the next month. Then there would be no chance of her finding herself giving in to her attraction to him again.
She hauled herself out of bed, washed, dressed and padded out into the living room. As she’d predicted, Piran was already there, seated at the computer.
‘Nice of you to join me,’ he said.
‘Sorry,’ Carly muttered, shoving a hand through her hair. ‘Must be jet lag.’
‘There was no time change,’ he said without looking up from the keyboard.
‘Then perhaps being tossed around after midnight doesn’t agree with me.’
‘I’d have thought you’d be used to it.’
She gasped at the rudeness of the remark, and at the look on her face he appeared momentarily discomfitted.
But it didn’t last. He cleared his throat and said abruptly, ‘In any case, if you’re really here to work, Carlota, get yourself a cup of coffee and let’s get at this.’
He turned back to the keyboard and started pecking at it with two fingers.
Irritated, Carly got herself a cup of coffee. She took a banana too, which she nibbled at while she tried to muster a sufficient amount of indifference to work side by side with Piran for the rest of the day.
But once he’d dished out the morning’s ration of nastiness he seemed no more interested in rehashing last night’s events than she was. He handed her the material he’d finished with, pointed out the parts he’d particularly wanted Des to clean up, said that she could prove her mettle by doing it in his stead, and then went back to work.
Carly went to work as well. She picked up a stack of paper labeled CHAPTER ONE and started to read. It was fascinating. It read like an adventure story—the tale of his father’s belief in the elusive caravel, the older man’s determination to find it despite the obstacles that nature, big business and several governments had thrown in his way, and his eventual triumph.
Carly found herself cheering Arthur—and his two sons. And then she looked up and found herself contemplating one of them as he sat with his back to her, frowning at the screen and pecking at the keyboard.
It helped, she reminded herself, that he was ignoring her.
She just wished it all helped more.
For, in spite of all her good sense and all the bad memories she’d dredged up during the night, she couldn’t deny that Piran St Just was still a very attractive man.
Nor could she deny that, even against her better judgment, she still felt some perverse elemental pull between them.
Damn.
She watched him now, his head bent over the keyboard as he typed. He was wearing glasses, which gave him a scholarly air at odds with his generally roguish demeanor. Carly had never seen him in glasses before. Another man would have looked owlish and nerdy. Piran merely looked like a rogue intellectual. Avery masculine attractive rogue intellectual.
Damn again.
‘Here. What are you reading? Don’t mess with that. I’ve finished adding some material I wanted to get in. There’s lots to work with. Hurry up,’ he said now, turning and shooting her an impatient look. ‘I doubt Bixby Grissom is paying you to sleep till noon then dawdle the afternoon away.’
It was a good thing he talked, Carly thought crossly. Otherwise she might accidentally find herself in danger of liking him again. ‘Give it to me.’
He did. Carly carried it across the room and settled into the chair across the room. She started to read, stopped, flipped through the small sheaf of papers, then looked over at Piran.
‘This? This isn’t anything like what I’ve just read.’
‘You were reading the finished stuff. That’s the part Des did in August. What you’ve got to work on is what I’ve just given you now.’
Carly stared at the typescript in her hands. She tried reading it again. It boggled her mind. ‘You expect me to help you put together an entire book from this—this junk in less than a month?’
So it wasn’t tactful; she wasn’t wearing her editor’s hat at the moment, and frankly she was appalled.
‘I expected Des to,’ he replied stonily, ‘if you recall.’ Des would have had to perform a flaming miracle, Carly thought. Granted, it looked as if the facts were there, but nothing much else was.
Obviously the ‘you were there’ quality she’d enjoyed so much in their earlier books and in the first chapter of this one had been entirely Des’s doing.
She wanted to wring Des’s neck. ‘I can’t believe he did this to me,’ she muttered.
‘Neither can I,’ Piran said tightly.
Their gazes met and held, a combination of distrust, dislike and dismay—and a faint, fleeting hint of camaraderie.
Immediately Piran’s slid away and he scowled out the window. Carly scowled at him. Eventually he stretched his arms over his head and his shirt pulled up so that Carly caught a glimpse of several inches of hard, tanned midriff. Less than she’d seen of him last night, to be sure, but—Quickly she averted her gaze, not wanting even a glimmer of attractive male to distract her dislike of the present situation.
‘We can’t do it, can we?’ he said after a moment. He dropped his hands into his lap and shifted moodily in his chair. ‘It’s too much.’ He turned his gaze on her. ‘Go home and tell Diana you can’t do it. We’ll return the advance and that’ll be that.’
Carly considered the possibility seriously. ‘I’d love to,’ she said finally. ‘Unfortunately I can’t.’
‘Your job? If money’s a problem, Carlota—’
‘Money is not a problem, Piran,’ Carly said flatly. And she took great pleasure in telling him so. Even though she wasn’t making anywhere near the money he was, she was surviving and paying the bills. ‘I’m speaking professionally. I take pride in my work. I agreed to do this—’ she flicked the manuscript a distasteful glance ‘—and I keep my word.’
Piran frowned and raked a hand through his hair. ‘Yeah, but how? Obviously you’re not thrilled.’
‘No, I’m not thril
led,’ Carly confirmed. ‘I’m appalled. But I can’t do anything else. And I do have Des’s first chapter to work with. I can match his style.’
‘You can?’
She met his gaze. ‘I can.’ She dared him to challenge her, but he didn’t.
‘So what do I do?’
‘Just keep spewing out the facts, I guess,’ she said grimly. ‘And I’ll make a book out of them.’
Piran looked doubtful, but he didn’t contradict her. Carly felt doubtful, but she didn’t see what else she could do.
‘Is this the whole thing? Do you have an outline? A workable one, I mean. Not the one you sent to Diana when you sold her the book.’
Piran shuffled through the files on his desk and thrust a handful of dog-eared pages at her. ‘This. Des and I put this much together in August when he came by the site. The last time he deigned to show his face as a matter of fact.’
Carly took it and slumped into the chair again. ‘Get back to work,’ she said.
They settled into a routine. Using the outline, Piran’s rough draft and Des’s first chapter, Carly did get a notion of where the book intended to go. She already knew from what Sloan had told her that once the adventure part was done this book would discuss life aboard a Spanish ship, a caravel, that had capsized in a storm off one of the smaller Bahamian islands over three hundred and fifty years before.
It was the ship that Arthur St Just had discovered shortly before he died.
Most experts in the field had doubted that Arthur would find it, but Carly, with the faith of the young, had believed in him. She’d desperately wanted to be a part of the search, and she’d always regretted that after Arthur’s death she hadn’t felt welcome. She’d never expected for a moment to be a part of writing the book about it.
Now, as she pored over the outline and Piran’s draft, she felt some of that old excitement returning.
Maybe, just maybe, if they worked flat out they could get it done. And she could prove to Piran that she wasn’t just a money-hungry parasite in the process. She would so love to make him choke on his words. She worked all afternoon, sorting pages and scribbling notes, making stacks of paper here and there on the living-room floor, muttering to herself as she did so.
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