into hard eyes, then down at a shadowed but all too evident masculine nakedness, and finally, desperately, away into the jungle brush.
Snakes seemed suddenly far preferable.
‘What the hell are you doing out here?’ he demanded.
‘G-going for a walk.’
‘In the middle of the night?’
‘I couldn’t sleep.’ She tried twisting away from him. ‘Let me go.’ Finally she managed to pry his fingers off her arms. Then she wrapped her arms against her chest, keeping her eyes firmly averted the whole time. ‘I certainly wasn’t looking for you, if that’s what you think!’
Piran made a sound that could have been a snort of disgust or disbelief. ‘You shouldn’t be out walking now. It’s almost two. It’s dangerous.’
‘You’re out,’ she said. Of course maybe that was why it was dangerous, she thought a little wildly.
‘It’s not dangerous for me.’
‘How’s that for the double standard?’ Carly said bitterly.
‘I don’t make the rules, Carlota. But I can tell you what they are.’
‘I’m sure you can,’ she said. ‘It’s not fair,’ she complained after a moment.
‘Tell me about it,’ Piran muttered under his breath. Then he said, ‘No one ever promised that life would be fair.’
‘Save me the time-worn platitudes.’
He reached for her arm. ‘Come on, Carly. Let’s go.’ She tried to shake him off. ‘I said, I’m going for a walk.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Yes, I am.’ It was sheer stubbornness on her part and she knew it. But she was determined not to let him have the last word, not to allow him to tell her what to do.
She wrenched away from him and started down the path toward the beach at a run.
She’d got perhaps five steps when he caught her. With one hand he spun her round, then grasped her around the waist with both hands and flung her over his shoulder.
‘Piran!’ she shrieked as she pitched head-first, then stopped abruptly as her midriff lodged against his shoulder and she hung flailing upside down. ‘Piran! Damn you! Put me down!’
But Piran only turned and strode back up the path with Carly slung over his shoulder like some bag of old clothes.
‘Piran!’
She twisted and smacked him, her fists coming into contact with hard wet flesh. She opened her eyes and found herself staring down at a pair of lean, hair-roughened thighs and bare, muscular buttocks. She hit them. Hard.
‘Damn!’ He twisted and tried to catch her hands.
Carly kicked her feet, kneed him in the chest, then slapped him again, hoping the blows stung his wet skin.
‘Stop it! Damn it, Carly!’ He made it to the veranda, but he stumbled on the steps, and they both went down, a tangle of arms and legs, cool droplets of water and heated flesh. Carly landed face down between the backs of his thighs. It took only an instant’s exposure to the hard warmth of his body to have her scrambling to her feet.
‘I can’t believe you did that!’ she railed at him. ‘Talk about cavemen!’
He was slower getting up. He winced as he pulled himself up and Carly noticed for the first time the angry scar on his leg. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.
‘What do you care?’ He snapped a towel off one of the lounges and knotted it around his waist, but not before she’d had a chance to glimpse definite signs of masculine arousal.
She swallowed and averted her eyes. ‘I—I don’t, actually.’
‘I’m not surprised.’
They stared at each other. Piran’s gaze was hard and angry, and any arousal that he might feel, Carly knew all too well, was unwanted.
So what else was new? He’d wanted her nine years ago, and he’d hated himself for it.
She glanced back at him and saw a muscle in his jaw tick in the moonlight. She thought he looked very pale. She felt a fleeting stab of guilt, then squelched it immediately. He hadn’t had to carry her! He hadn’t had to interfere at all.
She said as much.
‘Just my chivalric nature, I guess,’ he said through his teeth.
Carly remembered when he really had been chivalrous. That memory, sweet as it was, somehow hurt more than all the other painful memories did.
‘Don’t bother,’ she said shortly.
Their eyes met and clashed once more. Piran ran his tongue over his lips.
‘Fine,’ he said harshly after a long moment. ‘Go for a bloody walk if you want. Drown yourself if you want. I don’t care what you do. I don’t know why I bothered.’
TO SAY that she slept badly was no exaggeration. It was close to dawn before Carly did more than toss and turn fitfully in her bed, her mind still playing with the image of Piran’s naked body and the press of his flesh against hers. When at last she did sleep, her dreams were no less alluring and no more restful.
She was reminded all too much of the night of her eighteenth birthday—the last time she’d been held in Piran St Just’s arms—the time she’d found out what he really thought of her.
For years she’d turned away from that memory every time it surfaced. She’d blotted it out as soon as she could because it had hurt so much.
But now she forced herself to remember. She had no choice. She needed to remember if only to protect herself from being drawn once more into the fanciful dreams that once upon a time had brought her down.
She’d certainly had her share of dreams about Piran in the days just before her birthday. She’d been living with her mother and Arthur in his home in the hills above
Santa Barbara—the low, Spanish-style house she’d pointed out to Piran the day she’d first met him.
It was indeed a lovely house, built to blend in with the surrounding hillside, its gardens half wild. The latter weren’t as wonderful as the wild areas surrounding Blue Moon on Conch Cay, but Carly had loved to ramble through them just the same. She’d loved to sit on the bench beside the bougainvillaea and look out over the city lights and the boats in the harbor at night.
Every night she would go there and sit, dreaming of Piran sitting next to her, of Piran touching her, holding her, kissing her.
She’d never really stopped dreaming of him
