‘Far enough to deal with men like you, Simon,’ she told him coolly. ‘Please stop baiting me and go and find someone else to work for you?’
‘Sure you’re indifferent to me?’ he mocked, grasping her wrist, his thumb on her racing pulse. ‘If so, prove it and come and work for me.’
‘I don’t have to prove it.’ She gave him a tight smile.
‘Come with me, and I promise I won’t put your indifference to the test.’
His arrogance infuriated her. It flashed darkly in her eyes, her mouth tightening with temper. ‘Why me?’ she demanded bitterly. ‘God, you could have your pick.’
His mouth twisted. ‘Very flattering, but I’m not prepared to pay the price. You, on the other hand, I know I’m safe with.’
‘Get a male assistant if you’re that scared.’
‘A man probably wouldn’t be prepared to cook and clean,’ he told her arrogantly. ‘I want to keep what I’m doing as secret as possible. I can manage the boat we’ll be using single-handed, and I want as few people as possible involved. You fit the bill on every count.’
‘Right down to not wanting to share your bed,’ Christy seethed.
‘Oh, it’s not sharing my bed that worries me, it’s the price I might be expected to pay for the privilege of enjoying my female companion’s favours,’ he returned cynically.
‘Still the same old Simon.’
‘But of course. Now will you come with me?’
‘If I refuse?’
‘Then perhaps I’ll just stay around and see just how deep your indifference goes, gipsy.’ He laughed at her expression. ‘Come with me, you know in your heart-of-hearts you want to. How can staying here compare with a summer spent in the Caribbean?’
‘Extremely favourably,’ Christy flung at him tartly, ‘especially when the Caribbean includes you.’
‘But you’ll come?’
His thumb was caressing her wrist and it was taking all her willpower not to respond to his insidious caress. She didn’t love him; she didn’t even like him very much, but her body was aware of him. He had been right, she realised with a certain wry amusement. Lust was all it had ever been. Why shouldn’t she go? It would be good to show him just how much she had changed.
She shrugged carelessly, ‘Why not…? On the strict understanding, of course, that I am simply your assistant.’
It was his turn to shrug. ‘If that’s the way you want it. Was that all you were to Miles? Simply an assistant?’
His question caught her off-guard. On the point of replying truthfully she checked, and then said smoothly. ‘Really Simon, I don’t think my relationship with Miles is any concern of yours.’
‘Not in the ordinary sense,’ he agreed calmly, ‘but he’s in the Bahamas at the moment and it’s quite conceivable that we might run into him. I ought to warn you that at the moment he’s heavily involved with someone else.’
‘Petra Finnegan,’ Christy responded coolly. ‘Yes, I do read the papers, Simon.’
‘Umm. You’re obviously not jealous.’ His eyes searched hers with cool intent, ‘but then I don’t suppose he was your first lover.’
His analytical regard angered her, her voice tense as she bit out. ‘What’s the matter, Simon, regretting that you weren’t?’
He laughed and released her. ‘Hell, no. Timid little virgins weren’t, and still aren’t, my style, Christy. You should know that.’
She almost recoiled from the cruelty of it, but then her sense of humour came to her rescue. ‘Oh I do,’ she agreed softly. ‘Luckily for me it’s not an aversion all men share.’
There was a tense little silence that made her stomach curl in instinctive and unexpected alarm, and then Simon drawled mockingly, ‘Okay, Christy, game, set and match. Now can we get down to business? I don’t have much time.’
‘In that case you took rather a chance, didn’t you?’ she responded coolly. ‘What if I had refused to come with you?’
‘I could have found someone else, it wouldn’t have been an impossibility, but you’re the assistant I want.’
‘And you always get what you want, is that it?’
‘I try to,’ he agreed suavely. ‘Now are you going to take that tray up to Georgina and break the glad tidings?’
Her mother was awake when Christy went up.
‘Simon’s here,’ she told her crisply as she walked in. ‘You did tell him I wouldn’t want the job, didn’t you?’
‘Of course I did, darling.’ Her mother looked away.
‘You told me that Jeremy had suggested me for the job,’ Christy pressed. ‘Simon on the other hand intimated that it was his idea.’
‘He must have already discussed it with Jeremy,’ Georgina suggested. ‘I promise you I told Jeremy you wouldn’t be keen. I couldn’t say too much though, darling, not without reminding him what happened six years ago, and I didn’t think you’d want that.’
No, her mother was right in that. Jeremy was something of a gossip and she didn’t want it put around that she was still suffering from a teenage crush on Simon.
‘Well I’ve agreed to go.’ Christy’s full mouth compressed when she saw her mother’s expression. ‘Let’s just say he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,’ she said with grim humour in answer to her unspoken question. ‘A case of rather unsubtle bribery … besides I’ve nothing else on.’
Anxiety shadowed her mother’s blue eyes. ‘Darling are you sure? You aren’t doing this simply through bravado are you?’
‘Bravely concealing my broken heart you mean?’ Christy mocked. ‘No Mum, I got over Simon years ago. It’s just that my pride still smarts from time to time. As he told me himself at the time all I was really suffering from was infatuation plus lust … he was, as you aptly said, an extremely sexy man.’
‘And still is,’ her mother warned her shrewdly, ‘possibly more so.’
‘Forget it. I’m immune … innoculated for life. I’d better go down and find out if he intends to stay for lunch. From what he was saying it seems there’s some degree of urgency,’
‘Umm, he mentioned to Jeremy that his yacht is moored in St Lucia, I expect he’ll want to fly out there as soon as he can. Darling, before you go down,’ Georgina murmured suddenly, ‘can you see if you can find my notes. I suddenly got this idea last night…’
They had fallen off the bedside table and it took Christy five minutes to uncover them. Leaving her mother to mull over her new ‘idea’ she went back downstairs, wondering a little wryly just what she had committed herself
