‘Why are we here?’
He wasn’t really sure. Except it had something to do with not wanting to return to the battle ground of the office just yet. He was in no hurry to resume where they’d left off this morning.
And, damn it, being with her again just one short morning had been enough to tell him he wasn’t finished with her yet. There was no way he wanted to do battle with her, unless it involved tearing off her clothes and getting horizontal.
Which, come to think of it, was one of the best ideas he’d had all morning…
‘I thought we could do with some fresh air,’ he told her. ‘Care for a walk along the beach?’
She looked at him like he was mad. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Come on,’ he urged, slinging his jacket in the back seat and rolling up his sleeves. ‘It will do us both good.’
Ten minutes later she had sand between her stockinged toes and salt spray in her hair. It was utter madness, strolling along the beach dressed for the office, but today she didn’t care. The sun was shining; the breeze carried with it the clean, fresh tang of the ocean and the rhythm of the waves swooshing up the beach was like a balm to her soul.
She stole a glance at the man walking alongside her. Like her, he held his shoes in one hand, the legs of his trousers rolled up and his naked feet leaving impressions on the sand. My God, she thought, even his feet were sexy.
But then it wasn’t anything that she hadn’t learned on Friday night, just one of a whole host of discoveries she’d made that evening: what his skin felt like and where, the difference between rough and smooth, of satiny skin dusted with springy hair, of what he liked her to do to him and what he was so good and so generous at giving.
Heat welled up inside her at the memories, deliciously different from the sun’s warming rays from the outside; this was a compelling heat that set her flesh alive with the echoes of how he’d made her feel that night.
He looked across at her, and their eyes snagged and locked, his meeting her turmoil-filled gaze with a deeply contemplative one, before she stopped and broke contact, afraid of revealing too much. She turned her eyes out to sea, gulping in air like someone who’d been under one too many times.
Which is exactly how she felt. She was drowning in the complexities of a lie she could see no way out of. And meanwhile she was drowning in physical sensations she had no right to experience.
Life couldn’t get any crazier.
He came to a halt alongside her as she watched the waves come in. She was fascinated by the smooth slide of water over sand, wishing her own life could move so seemingly effortlessly.
‘You agreed to join Rogerson’s dream team today.’
At last, she thought, at last we get to the point of this expedition.
‘So it seems.’
‘In which case you’ve obviously abandoned the idea of leaving.’
Her shoes jostled nervously together against her hip. It was nothing she didn’t know already, but hearing him say the words made it infinitely more real. How could she leave now? It was no longer just her sister who had expectations of her. It wasn’t only Maverick. The net was now cast wider. Phil Rogerson had tied her to the project for the duration.
She gritted her teeth together as seagulls circled and cawed overhead, and the endless waves rolled in and slipped back out. This was no longer just a case of coming clean and cutting her losses and worrying about whether Morgan had a job to come back to. There would be serious fallout now. There would be consequences.
And maybe all she could do was try to minimise them. Which meant she had to keep up the pretence, to hold on to this job until Morgan returned. And to try to hold on to her sanity in the process.
She sighed. ‘It looks like it.’
He said nothing for a while, and she thought she’d made a mistake, that there had never been a point to his questions and that he’d just been making conversation to cover the yawning vacuum between them.
Until he stepped between her, and the view and her vision was filled by a man whose dark looks were so heavy with savage intent that one look put her brain on high alert and left her senses smouldering. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I have a proposition for you.’
She looked up at him, already drowning in his eyes, already feeling the pull of his body on hers, already anticipating the slide of skin against skin—while her brain screamed warnings, warnings that made a whole lot of sense right now.
She shook her head, and made a move to step out of range of his intense eyes and back along the beach. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so.’
He grabbed her wrist, and she jerked with the shock, spilling her shoes to the sand.