wrong? What is it?’ He sat on the side of the bed where Mari had her knee drawn up to her chest in an awkward tangle of limbs and sheet, and was clutching her calf.
Her lower lip was clamped between her teeth; she was as white as paper. ‘Cramp!’ she managed through clenched teeth.
‘Is that all?’ His relief was mingled with sympathy. He knew from experience how incapacitating a cramp could be, especially if you were a mile off shore when it hit; fate in the shape of an off-course kayaker had been on his side that day.
‘All?’ she choked. If she could have thrown something at him, she would have.
The pain that had earlier been limited to her calf now involved her foot, as well. Her toes had been pulled upwards by the strength of the muscle contractions and she had grabbed them in an attempt to ease the agony.
‘Maybe I’ve got a pathetically low pain threshold but it hurts!’ she wailed, ashamed of the weak tears that were leaking from her eyes.
‘I know, believe me I do. Let me.’
‘I can’t.’ She shook her head, refusing to release her grip on her foot.
‘You can.’ He calmly pulled her leg across his knees and began to work on the knots of muscle; the action of his long fingers immediately lowered the level of pain.
‘Let go, Mari.’
He’d said that last night and it had worked out okay then; also his air of cool competence was reassuring. Still tensing at every fresh wave of pain, she fell back against the pillows, arms crossed on her forehead, eyes squeezed shut.
His hands on the smooth skin of her calf, he watched the sheet drawn across her chest rise and fall, thinking about what was underneath... He had apparently been taken over by a teenager.
Her eyes opened wide in protest, and she gave a little grunt of pain. ‘Hey, that hurt!’
‘Just relax.’ It was advice he struggled to follow. What the hell had he been thinking of last night...and what was he meant to do today? Pretend it never happened? The memory of his reaction when he had thought that was what she was suggesting was still fresh in his mind.
Relax. Easy for him to say, she thought, closing her eyes again as he pressed harder on a knotted muscle, smoothing the kinks.
She complained again with a mumbled, ‘Ouch!’ But she kept her eyes shut. The compulsion to tense was lessening as his clever fingers worked up and down her calf and into the arch of her foot until her calf was relaxed and the spasms in her toes had stopped.
‘That’s good,’ she breathed. A cupped hand above her eyes, the other now unfurled on the pillow above her head, she forced her eyelids apart and looked at him through glittering blue slits. ‘You can stop now.’
He didn’t, though. He carried on massaging her legs, his hands running up the silky soft insides in a slow advance-retreat pattern.
Feeling the sigh that rippled through her body, he raised her feet to his lips and pressed a soft kiss to the blue-veined arch of her narrow foot. Who knew that a foot could be sexy?
Who knew, she thought, feeling herself sink into the mattress as delicious tingles zigzagged across her skin, that you had erogenous zones there?
‘So how come you’ve never had a lover?’
She looked at him through her lashes. ‘I have trust issues after a really terrible experience when I was being seduced. Actually, I was quite looking forward to it when this man appeared out of nowhere and called me a slut in front of the entire hotel.’ She opened one eye to look at him in time to see a look of astonished comprehension flash across his face.
‘I suppose he did me a favour, but I found it hard to think of it that way. It’s bad enough discovering that the man you had spun romantic fantasy around was actually a sad serial seducer, but to have everyone there think I was some sort of slut who slept with married men...’
Seb closed his eyes and grimaced, seeing her face as it had been, no longer seeing the seductress mankind needed saving from but an innocent victim.
‘He sounds a bit of a bastard,’ he husked back throatily, as the things he had said came back in painful detail.
‘Oh, they both were.’
‘But six years, Mari...’ he clenched out with a groan.
‘Did I not say? I’ve a low sex drive.’
At her initial explanation his fingers had stilled. They moved again now, and the sound of his deep throaty laugh filled the silence, making the muscles low in her belly quiver.
‘Oh, when you put it like that it’s kind of obvious.’
She struggled to free her foot...but actually not so very hard, just a feeble kick, because his fingers were sliding higher now up the soft pale skin of her inner thigh, stroke then retreat, each time getting higher, but not high enough to satisfy the throbbing ache between her thighs. Her head turned on the pillow and she released a long, slow, sibilant sigh; the mixture of pleasure and frustration was exhausting.
‘What the hell did you see in that creep?’
‘I was eighteen, Seb. He singled me out from day one, encouraged me, took a real interest. A man had never done that before and I was flattered,’ she admitted. ‘And then one day I could see something was wrong. I waited after my tutorial and asked...’ She lifted a hand to her head and groaned. ‘I asked what I could do to help. It was then he admitted that he’d fallen for me. He’d been fighting it because he was my tutor and so much older. I was totally sucked in, and all the creeping around and secrecy seemed romantic.
‘It turned out that everyone else but me knew that at the start of an academic year he had an affair with a new student. It was a big standing joke—I was the joke.’ The look she flashed him was rueful.
‘You mean he groomed them.’ At his sides Seb’s hands clenched into fists. If the guy had been there at that moment he would have... He took a deep breath. He wasn’t here but Mari was.
He’d taken a virgin bride. What have you done, Seb?
‘We were all consenting adults, there was nothing illegal and I was pretty stupid.’
‘He used his position of authority and trust,’ Seb condemned. ‘It is appalling that the college authorities allowed it to happen.’
‘Well, I don’t expect they knew,’ she observed fairly. ‘And they don’t allow it, not now. There was a massive scandal the next year as the girl he singled out for special attention after me attempted suicide. Luckily she didn’t succeed, but he resigned shortly after that and I think his wife divorced him. Don’t stop...’ she pleaded, lifting herself up on her elbows as he swore his contempt bilingually.
His eyes followed the flow of her hair as it settled over her shoulders, but he couldn’t push back the hard knot of ice-cold anger that her matter-of-fact retelling of the story had created.
‘I’m sorry about the things I said that night. I had just come from a run-in with my mother, who was...well, being herself, and she
