she had to hurry. She couldn’t wait for her shape to get any curvier or her breasts to get any bigger. She wasn’t quite stick-straight anymore, but voluptuous certainly wasn’t her.
Still, the next time her father went to Nassau, she begged to go along, and while he was buying supplies, she’d gone to Bitsy’s Bikinis and bought a suit she would never have dared buy on Pelican Cay. It was bright blue—what there was of it—and the fabric shimmered when it was wet.
“Like the sunlight sparkle on the sea,” the saleslady told her. “You be smashing. Everybody notice you.”
Not everybody.
The day she finally got up the guts to wear it, Fiona had lain on her towel on the sand right in front of where she knew he would come down to the beach even though there was a family of tourists camped right in front of her.
She’d gone early so she wouldn’t miss him. And she’d slathered on sunscreen because she was cursed with her redhead’s complexion. Then she’d arranged herself as enticingly and voluptuously as she could, and opened her book and pretended to read.
She’d waited. And waited.
The tourist family splashed in and out of the water and ran up and down the beach, and stayed cool. There were parents and two boys and a college-age girl. They started an impromptu volleyball game and invited her to join them.
But Fiona had shaken her head. There was no way she was going to jump up and down and jiggle in Bitsy’s blue bikini. “No, thanks,” she said politely and sweated and sweltered and waited.
Hugh came down with several of his friends. They ogled her and made comments. Hugh had whistled admiringly, and that teasing pain-in-the-butt Carson Sawyer had winked and suggested she go with him to the old shed behind the water tower.
Fiona flushed. “As if,” she’d dismissed them. “Scram.”
But she was glad the boys had noticed—even if their comments were completely immature. It gave her confidence.
So when Lachlan finally appeared on the rise overlooking the beach a little while later, she rolled oh-so-casually over on to her side and waited for him to see her.
He scanned the beach briefly, as if he were looking for someone. He shook his head at Hugh who had shouted something to him.
Then, as she’d known it would, his gaze came to rest on her.
“Hey!” he called eagerly.
Fiona smiled her best come-hither smile. She hadn’t had a lot of practice in real life, but she’d worked on it in the mirror for weeks. And it must have worked, because Lachlan grinned broadly, then came sprinting down the trail.
Fiona sat up, a welcoming grin lighting her face.
And Lachlan hurtled right over her! “Stacie! Hey, Stace! I got my dorm assignment at UVA!”
The blonde girl looked over from the volleyball game with her brothers. “Oooh, cool, Lachlan! Which one? Maybe we’ll see each other there.”
And as Fiona watched, he showed her the letter. They looked at it together, their heads bent over it, so close her hair brushed his cheek. He touched her hand. She touched his arm.
Fiona sat there, stunned. He’d never even noticed her.
She should have left. Perversely, she couldn’t seem to. Not yet.
Maybe she was a glutton for punishment. Maybe she just needed her teeth kicked in. But instead of running home, she lay back down on her towel, swallowing against the ache in her throat, and watched as Lachlan and the girl walked hand in hand down to the water. She watched them swim and splash each other.
She blinked back tears when, a while later, they came out of the water together and flopped down on the sand just yards from her, still talking and laughing and touching.
She really would be an excellent secret agent, she thought bitterly. She was absolutely invisible.
He never would have seen her at all if she hadn’t heard him say how glad he was to be going, how much he longed to leave Pelican Cay.
It was the last straw. It didn’t matter so much that he ignored her, but he was so wrong about the island! He was so wrong about everything!
Quite without thinking, Fiona jumped up and blurted, “So leave, then! Just get on a boat and get out of here!” She glared at him furiously.
Lachlan looked up, stunned. Stacie frowned. They both looked as startled as if a seashell had begun to speak!
“Go to hell, Lachlan McGillivray,” she muttered under her breath, grabbing her towel and running away up the beach.
She’d had two more encounters with Lachlan since.
The New Year’s before last he’d come to Pelican Cay to visit his brother. Fiona, who had heard through the island grapevine that he’d arrived with a couple of his teammates, had determinedly stayed out of his way.
It hadn’t been hard. At that time she was spending most of her days and nights at home taking care of her father. She didn’t go to the beach or frequent tourist spots except to do quick caricatures to sell to the tourists. She certainly wouldn’t do one of him—though she’d done more than a few for her own enjoyment over the years.
She might have managed to avoid him altogether that time—if he’d been equally willing to avoid her.
She was surprised he hadn’t been. And more astonished still when he’d come up to her in the Grouper that evening and invited her for a drink. She’d felt an odd, crazy desire to let bygones be bygones, to dare to say yes.
But then she’d seen his mates sitting at the bar, grinning and watching the two of them, and she understood that it was a joke. Why would a hunk like Lachlan bother with a woman like her—except as a joke?
“No,” she’d said. It had hurt—but it had saved her worse pain down the road.
She didn’t see him again for over a year. She didn’t even know he’d come back last winter. But one afternoon she’d come in from taking some sculptures up to Carin’s and her father had said Hugh needed her to go on a double date with him.
“With Hugh? Why?” She and Hugh were friends, but they’d never dated at all.
“Didn’t say,” her father told her. “Just said he wanted you. And I said you’d go.”
“Dad!”
“Why not? You need a night out,” he’d told her gruffly.
Which might have been true.
But not with Lachlan McGillivray!
She’d been expecting Hugh. She’d been slack-jawed with disbelief—and panic—when she’d opened the door to find Lachlan standing there. “What are you doing here?” she began. Then she understood. “Oh, you must have come to see my dad—”
“No, I’m here for you.”
“But—”
