Michael didn't have any such inhibitions. With one last glance at the makeshift kitchen he'd set up, complete with propane cookstove, he turned and walked to the edge of the lagoon, stripping off his shirt as he went and sending it sailing. She almost looked away as he reached for his belt, wondering for a moment just how immodest he was, and then she realized he must be wearing his bathing suit, too. She couldn't keep from watching as he stripped off the water-stained trousers and dumped them beside the lagoon.
She laughed then, in a kind of nervous relief, and he turned to look at her. "I warned you I was pale and skinny," he said. "I didn't think I was that amusing, however."
"I was afraid you weren't wearing a bathing suit," she confessed. "And I wouldn't have expected you to wear something quite so baggy," The bathing suit was a huge pair of trunks that ballooned around his body. But he was wrong; he wasn't pale and skinny at all. He couldn't match her own darker tan, acquired after several weeks beneath the Caribbean sun, but he was a lovely sort of golden shade. And he wasn't skinny. Lean, possibly leaner than he usually was. But there was no disguising the corded musculature of his chest, his shoulders and arms, even his legs. And, oh, my God, his legs.
The limp hadn't been faked. None of his injuries had been. As she looked more closely, past the momentary distraction of sheer masculine beauty, she saw the vicious red scar on his thigh, the jagged tear in his side, and older, paler scars scattered across his golden skin.
All amusement fled in shocked horror at the pain he must have been through. "Michael," she said in an anguished voice. "What did they do to you?"
A shadow crossed his face, a hint of such strong emotion that she couldn't even begin to decipher it. And then it was gone again, and he'd crossed the clearing to her, his hands warm and hard on her shoulders. "Doctors can be butchers," he said easily. "But they put me back together after the accident, and I have to be grateful to them."
She wanted to say something about the other scars, the older ones. The kind of scars she'd never seen before, not ones that had come from a surgeon's knife, but something rougher, cruder. "Yes," she said vaguely.
"Now take off your dress so I can laugh at your bathing suit," he said gently.
It was an unfortunate fact that when he was so close, touching her, looking at her with unexpected tenderness, she could deny him nothing. She reached for the tiny row of buttons between her breasts, and then jerked back in sudden pain.
His face darkened. "What's wrong?"
"I must have hurt my wrist. Sprained it, perhaps…" And suddenly she remembered those brief, paralyzing moments in the sports car, when he'd taken her wrist.
His face showed no expression at all. The very blankness of it told her more than obvious guilt or regret would have. "You must have hurt it when you fell," he said flatly, his hands leaving her shoulders. Moving to the buttons between her breasts, unfastening them, his strong, clever hands brushing against her.
She held herself very still, afraid to breathe. Not afraid of the pain he'd inflicted on her in a moment of desperation, but afraid of her reaction to the feel of his hands on her breasts, the warmth of his body so close to her.
He had freckles on his shoulders, she saw. A faint tracery of golden hair on his chest. And for a man as deft as he was, it was taking him too long to undo the buttons.
She stepped back, away from him, tearing at the dress with sudden anger. He let her go, watching with faintly hooded eyes as she stripped off the dress and dived into the lagoon, slicing beneath its cool depths in one graceful arc.
By the time she surfaced he was in the water at the opposite end of the pool, and that odd, breathless moment might never have existed. "Well, I'll say one thing," he drawled in the gathering twilight. "You couldn't call your bathing suit baggy."
She wasn't going to blush. The two scraps of black cloth had been the best she could manage in the small, trendy boutiques on St. Anne. She'd tried to get a larger size to cover more of her, but it simply fell off her body. In the end she'd settled for this, knowing that no one else would see it.
But it hadn't worked out that way. Still, she had every intention of staying in the water until it was fully dark, rather than let Michael see her with those unsettling eyes of his.
"There're some soap and shampoo in one of those boxes," Michael added, treading water. "You want me to get them for you?"
It was the one thing he could say that would make her lower her guard. At that point she would have accepted soap from the ghost of Caitlin Dugan herself. "Yes, please," she said.
He levered himself out of the pool, and she watched him, watched with interest as she saw a strip of dark material beneath the flamboyant swim trunks. If he could embarrass her, she could return the favor. "Are you wearing underwear beneath those trunks?" she called out.