by Susan Napier
‘No!’
She tried to jerk away but his fingers tightened around the bone as he lifted her foot for inspection.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you,’ he murmured, brushing the grains of sand gently off her sole with the thumb of his free hand.
‘I told you, it was nothing,’ she said breathlessly as he frowned, bending closer to the site, his damp hair fanning forward around the widow’s peak, his thumb moving in another probing caress. His nail scraped lightly across her skin and her toes curled involuntarily towards the ball of her foot, a husky sound of protest issuing from her throat. He paused, his lids flicking up in instant enquiry.
‘I’m ticklish.’ Unbelievably she could feel her face pinken at the husky lie. She, the mistress of the mask, whose whole professional training had been aimed at the weaving of believable lies. She never blushed...except when it was written in the stage directions!
‘I’ll be careful.’ His lids sank down again and Rosalind braced herself to have her silly deception exposed. ‘I don’t see—Ah, wait a moment, what’s this...?’ His short thumbnail dug into the soft, resilient pad of flesh. ‘It looks like...it could be a shell splinter, or some sort of spine...’
‘Could it?’ Rosalind hadn’t really looked closely at her foot, knowing there was nothing there to see. ‘Uh...it’s not hurting now—’
‘Did you feel a stinging or burning sensation when it happened?’
‘Neither,’ she said truthfully. But she could certainly feel something now! She wished he would stop rubbing his thumb back and forth like that; it was sending tingles of sensation shooting up the insides of her calves and thighs.
A heat that had nothing to do with the sun pooled in her stomach. Her fingers dug into the sand at her sides and her free leg shifted restlessly, drawing up slightly to hide the vulnerable triangle at the apex of her thighs. She could feel her nipples begin to firm and knew they would soon be evident through the thin, shiny fabric of her hot-pink bikini.
‘Whatever it is I don’t think we should leave it in there, do you?’ he said gravely. ‘In this climate infections can set in very quickly if you ignore a wound...’
‘Unfortunately I don’t happen to have a needle on me,’ joked Rosalind weakly, patting her bare sides. She regretted her mistake immediately as his eyes accepted the licence to rove. A quick glance down confirmed that he couldn’t fail to notice the explicit outline of her breasts, the smooth swells, gathered and lifted by the halter-neck of her bikini, projecting the stiff little crowns forward into stark prominence. And she couldn’t even blame it on the chill of the water!
His gaze took on a familiar blank, unfocused intensity as it rose to her face, his fingers tightening on her ankle as she instinctively tried again to twist it free.
‘We’ll just have to improvise, then...’ he murmured. And, still holding her gaze, he bent his head, shifting his grip to cup her heel, tilting her foot delicately aslant with his other hand as he placed it against his open mouth. Rosalind gasped as she felt his teeth sink deep into the tender pad of her sole and a hot, wet suction begin a rhythmic tugging at her flesh.
‘Luke!’ Her exclamation of shocked protest was undermined by the insidious weakness that flooded through her body. Her elbows collapsed and her shoulderblades hit the sand, her hat rolling off her bright head, leaving her dazzled by the sun. The second protest was even feebler than the first. ‘Luke...’
He sucked more strongly, his teeth grating against her skin, creating tiny needles of pain that were instantly soothed by the moist movements of his mouth. And she lay there and submitted, watching him watching her over the top of her toes. His gaze was intense with a dark concentration. She had never thought of her feet as erogenous zones before, but the delicious sensation of bone-melting pleasure she was experiencing made her reevaluate her thinking. No wonder people developed foot fetishes!
Suddenly she felt his tongue join the suckling, swirling and rasping against her wet skin. One of his hands slid lightly down the top of her foot and around behind her ankle, to drift up the back of her supple calf, his spreading fingers offering caressing support to the tautly extended muscle. The long, slow French kissing continued until Rosalind squirmed, a brief groan escaping her lips.
He lifted his mouth fractionally. ‘Am I hurting you? Do you want me to stop?’ His lips brushed against her sole as they formed the gruff words and she gave another little shivery moan. He was kneeling like a supplicant yet his eyes seemed to smoulder with the triumphant recognition of his own power. He knew exactly what he was doing to her...
Alarm bells started to ring in her distracted senses. The audacity of his action had been so out of character that it had caught her completely off guard, but she mustn’t allow him to think that he could control and manipulate her through her passions.
‘You’re not hurting me...but I still think you’d better stop,’ she asserted regretfully.
He lowered her foot onto his knee, holding her heel against the sun-warmed hardness of bone and muscle.
‘I think whatever it was has come out anyway,’ he said. His tongue appeared between his lips and he dabbed at it and then inspected his fingertip. ‘Ah, yes, I’m sure it did...’
Rosalind suddenly remembered that her injury had supposedly been imaginary. ‘Can I see?’ She propped herself up on her hands but even as she spoke he was casually flicking whatever was on his fingertip into the breeze.
‘Sorry, but it was hardly worth looking at. Such a tiny thing to cause you so much discomfort,’ he said, so blandly that Rosalind’s suspicions were reawakened.
But no, that was silly! Luke would never have summoned the nerve to make such an outrageously seductive move on purpose.
Would he?
‘What made you want to try to get it out like that anyway?’ she asked, thinking that tax avoidance was actually a fairly devious field requiring a certain amount of risk-taking by its practitioners. And Luke was a self-declared specialist.
‘I saw it once...in a Bond movie,’ he admitted.
Rosalind recalled the scene...and the way the woman’s gratitude had been expressed afterwards, in typical Bond-girl fashion. She delivered him a tart warning. ‘You should know that things you see done in the movies don’t always work out the same in real life!’
‘No, only sometimes,’ he agreed meekly, his gaze briefly brushing her treacherously firm breasts. Rosalind shifted her foot hastily back onto the sand and as she did so the slight bristliness of his leg struck a familiar chord.
Her green eyes narrowed, squinting for a better look as she blurted out, ‘For goodness’ sake, Luke, do you shave your legs?’
‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ he said coolly, moving around beside her. ‘I cycle, and shaving your legs makes treating the scrapes much less painful if you fall on the tarmac, not to mention reducing drag and chafing of the Lycra kit...’
‘Oh.’ Rosalind had discovered something else equally intriguing. ‘You shave your chest too, don’t you?’
She couldn’t resist reaching over and touching it. His skin was like hot satin, slipping against her fingers, smooth but with a faint catch in a broad area from collar-to breast-bone. She guessed that in his natural state he would be quite furry.
His voice also had a slight, uneven catch. ‘We wear Lycra body-shirts as well.’
Rosalind drew back, her fingers drifting absently to her parted lips, and the clean, salty tang of him suddenly filled her nostrils, creating an unexpected hunger. Her tongue crept out to touch her fingertips and now the taste of him was inside her too, lush and tempting...
Through a veil of lashes she watched Luke’s eyes glaze at her action and then sink down her half-reclining body, drifting into intimate territory before faltering and returning to find the flaw in the otherwise pearly perfection of her skin.
His lips parted, his brows darting upwards in a slight frown. He bent over to trace the faint silvery line low down on her abdomen with his finger.
�
��What’s this? Appendix?’
It was like being delicately brushed with a live wire. Rosalind’s skin quivered and she could feel the downy-fine hair on her belly spring erect. His finger jerked away, only to return almost immediately to explore the tiny ridge. He was getting bolder by the minute.
‘No!’
She had thought she had herself under control but suddenly she was fighting a fierce, almost overwhelming urge to plunge her fingers into the fine, silky hair that had slid across his temples, twine them amongst the sun-warmed strands and force his mouth slowly, slowly down to her body...to feel him move his open lips against that small, inoffensive, earth-shattering scar. And then, and then...
She put a flat hand just below his shoulder, hesitating when she felt his heart pumping as violently as hers, then she pushed him away—a hard shove that sent him sprawling on the sand.
He blinked up at her. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. I just think it’s time we made a move!’ she said, leaping up, her jerky movements revealing her inner agitation.
‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to dredge up bad memories for you,’ he said, rolling lithely to his feet beside her, brushing the sand off his side.
‘You didn’t. It’s just an operation scar—from years ago...when I was living in London.’
She could probably tell him the exact day if she wanted to dwell on it. But she had long ago decided that she wouldn’t because that would mean dwelling on Justin—wonderful, laughing, handsome Justin—the first and last great love of her life, the shining knight of her dreams who had turned out to be utterly without honour or conscience.
Rosalind—young, passionately in love and blinded by her own romantic idealism—had been a willing victim of his forceful charm. Because her trust had been as absolute as her love she had ignored the most elementary precautions with the man she had expected to marry, only to find out that he had been unfaithful with a string of one-night stands.
She had been lucky. She could have faced a death sentence for her naivety. As it was, the consequences of her liaison with Justin had sent her recklessly off the rails for a while, but she had quickly realised the self-destructive futility of her actions. Yes, something precious had been taken away from her, but she had since found other things, other blessings to put in its place...
‘Were you involved in an accident?’
‘No. Pelvic inflammatory disease.’
Her bluntness didn’t embarrass him into silence. He frowned. ‘It must have been serious for them to operate.’
‘It was. And no, before you ask, I didn’t get it by being promiscuous,’ she bit out. Many people associated PID with sexual profligacy, but until Justin had charmed his way into her heart Rosalind had been remarkably chaste. Ironically her innocence had probably been her downfall. If she had been more sexually experienced she might have been less submissive to Justin’s seductive wiles.
‘What made it so serious?’
‘There were complications...’
‘What kind of complications?’
She looked at him incredulously. He seemed utterly in earnest. For a shy man he was showing a hell of a nerve! She began to laugh. ‘Do you just want the highlights or should I get my doctor to send you a complete gynaecological history?’
He flushed, reverting to type, and she was reassured sufficiently to tease, ‘Don’t worry Luke, the only thing you’ve risked with me so far is foot-and-mouth disease.’
His flush deepened and she took advantage of his confusion to tell him that, since he had suddenly turned out to be such a hotshot windsurfer, he could sail the board back, while she strolled leisurely back to the hotel for some much needed R and R.
The School for Flirts was out for the day!
CHAPTER SEVEN
FROM her vantage point beside a pillar in the glass wall Rosalind watched the man in shorts and singlet sweating on one of the ferocious torture machines inside the air-conditioned hotel gym.
‘Crazy guy, huh?’
She jumped as someone came up beside her—a bouncy young Australian woman who had been taking an early-morning dip in the pool when Rosalind had passed it on her way to the reception desk to pick up some more of her money from her safety-deposit box.
‘He looks in pain,’ said Rosalind, wincing as Luke moved over to a free-weight bench-press and began another set of punishing exercises.
‘Nah, I don’t think those guys know what pain is—push a button and they just keep going and going. Most of them look as if you could knock them over with a feather...but their strength is in their incredible stamina—’
‘What guys?’ interrupted Rosalind, bewildered.
‘Triathletes.’
‘Did he tell you he was a triathlete?’ she asked, hiding her amusement. If Luke had been practising some creative self-aggrandisement she didn’t want to ruin it for him by blowing his cover.
‘No, but I was in Hawaii last year when my father was doing PR work for one of the sponsors of the Ironman... I remember him—’ she jerked her bleached-blonde head towards the gym ‘—because he was staying at the same hotel, scarfing up mountains of pasta and cake at the carbo-loading the day before the race. I actually saw him finish, too, quite well up in the field...’
Her words took a few moments to sink in properly. ‘Luke was in the Ironman?’ Rosalind repeated feebly.
Her Luke? The man she had privately voted the most likely to have sand kicked in his face...taking part in the most gruelling athletic event in the world?
Rosalind stormed through the glass doors into the gym and marched across to loom over Luke’s supine figure on the padded bench-press.
‘So this is why we have to have a late breakfast—so you can hang out with the rest of the jocks!’ she flung at him accusingly, ignoring the fact that except for Luke the gym was deserted.
His hands almost slipped on the bar he was holding at the full extension of his arms. ‘Roz! What are you doing here?’ He lowered the weights on straining arms until the bar rested across his chest, his expression glazing protectively as he took in her glittering fury. ‘Uh, you know the only reason I suggested breakfasting a bit later was to give you time to get over your nausea—’
‘Oh, really?’ She produced an exquisite sneer, unappeased. ‘Not because you wanted to sneak out and pump some iron on the sly?’
His hair had flopped sweatily over his eyebrows and Rosalind was infuriated by a strong urge to comb it back. Even lying there clutching a set of massive weights, he still managed to project an air of defencelessness. ‘Well, no, I—’
‘Not because you’re feeling deprived of your daily dose of self-flagellation?’ she said, reminding herself that he was a hardened athlete. Physically, he was about as defenceless as a tank!
‘Huh?’
‘You know...those things you mild-mannered tax accountants do for a bit of relaxation...swimming, cycling, running? Hawaii Ironman?’ she crunched out. ‘Am I ringing any bells here yet, Mr Aw-gee-shucks-I’m-so-helpless James?’
Luke’s chest contracted under his sweat-soaked singlet, his arms cording as he lifted the weight back onto the rack above him with only a faint grunt of effort. He sat up and swung his legs off the bench, using the small towel around his neck to blot his damp face and throat. ‘That was your opinion. I never claimed to be helpless.’
Rosalind slapped her hands onto the hips of her ribbed cotton shorts. ‘Oh, right,’ she agreed with acid disbelief. ‘And I suppose you’d never windsurfed before yesterday either!’
He had the grace to look guilty. ‘Only once or twice, although I did quite a bit of board-surfing when I was young. We lived near a beach and I was a member of the local surf club. That’s where I first got interested in triathlons...’
An ex-surfie! Rosalind ground her teeth, thinking of all the time she had spent trying to get him to balance upright on the board.
‘I suppose in triathletes’ parlance “once or twice” means you did a return crossing of the
Pacific!’ she said, sarcasm dripping from every word as her suspicions were confirmed. ‘So you were deliberately having me on yesterday.’
‘Well, maybe just a little,’ he admitted, carrying out a few discreet warm-down stretches against the bench as she stood glowering at him, her lemon-yellow shorts and vest-top shimmering with her heaving outrage. When Rosalind’s temper was sparking she didn’t hold anything back.
‘Fair’s fair, Rosalind—you’ve been having plenty of fun at my expense ever since we met,’ he pointed out. ‘And you never asked me if I played any sport. I told you I had a full life but all you seemed interested in was my lack of cultural and social pursuits.’
She hated it when he used logic to make her feel in the wrong. ‘Triathletes don’t play at what they do,’ she countered. ‘I’ve read all about it. It’s not a sport, it’s an obsession.’
‘Not for me. I just do it as a hobby—for fun.’
‘Fun?’ She stared at him, her anger eclipsed by her horror. If his idea of fun was to try to push himself beyond the limits of human endurance then he was even more socially deprived than she had thought! Maybe this new perspective of him wasn’t so different from the old one. How typical of Luke to choose a solo sport. The tightness inside her loosened further as she contemplated all the solitary hours he must spend in training. No wonder he didn’t have time for any other activities.
‘You needn’t look as though I’ve admitted to some gross depravity.’ His eyebrows quirked in amusement. ‘You ought to try it some time, Roz—the running part, I mean. There’s no drug that can match the natural high it gives you.’
She smothered an unwilling grin. ‘Since I don’t do drugs I wouldn’t know,’ she said, exploding another colourful media myth. ‘As a matter of fact I have my own version of a natural high...I get it from performing in front of a live audience.’
‘You must be suffering a few withdrawal symptoms by now, then,’ he said, with more accuracy than he could know. He glanced down at the trendy white designer sports shoes she was wearing. ‘Look, since you’ve cut short my programme, why don’t you come on a little run with me now, along the track at the back of the beach?’