her and glanced back at the main building. Still no sign of the girls. Her girls. Her support crew. The ones who’d obviously sensed she was floundering just a very little even if she hadn’t uttered a word. Girls who were right now both probably still fast slept in their snug, warm beds.
‘Cads.’
She headed off; this time with slower, shorter steps in the hopes the girls would catch up. Soon. Please!
A resort staff member passed, smiling. ‘Good morning.’
‘Isn’t it just?’ she returned.
His smile faltered and he all but tripped over himself as his neck craned to watch her while he walked away.
Meg’s smile turned wry. So the cap and sunglasses and still-so-white-they-practically-glowed sneakers she’d bought from the resort’s wellstocked shop the night before might not fool everybody as she’d half hoped they just might.
It had been a long shot anyway.
Meg stood happily at the back of the morning jogging group—primarily a group of middle-aged strangers in an impressive array of jogging outfits—collected on the track that ran along the edge of the overhang of thick, lush, dank, dark rainforest.
In an apparent effort at warming up, Tabitha lifted her knees enthusiastically high while jogging on the spot. Rylie, the Pilates queen, stretched so far sideways she was practically at a right angle. Meg, on the other hand, tried not to look as dinky as she felt without her ubiquitous high heels.
‘Now that man is worth the price of admission all on his own,’ Tabitha said between her teeth.
‘Shh,’ Meg said, only listening with half an ear as she tried to make out what the preppy, bouncy ‘wellness facilitator’ at the front of the large group was saying. ‘Please tell me she didn’t just say we’re jogging four kilometres this morning!’
‘She said five.’
Meg slid her sunglasses atop her cap and gaped at Tabitha. ‘Five?’
‘Five. Now pay attention. Hot guy at six o’clock. He’s been staring at you for the past five minutes.’
‘Not news, hon,’ Rylie said, touching the ground with her palms and casually glancing between her legs before letting out a long, slow ‘I take that back. This one is big news.’
Meg rolled her eyes. ‘I’m not falling for that again.’
‘Your loss,’ Rylie said.
A husky note in her best friend’s voice caught Meg’s attention. ‘Fine. Where?’
‘Over your right shoulder,’ Tabitha said. ‘Faded T-shirt, knee-length cargo shorts, sneakers that have pounded some miles, cap he ought to have thrown away a lo-o-ong time ago…’
Rylie laughed, then gave Meg’s leg a tug so her knee collapsed, turning her whether she wanted to or not.
Meg didn’t even get the chance to ask Rylie what was so funny. She didn’t need to. There was no way any woman under the age of a hundred and twenty was going to miss the man leaning against the trunk of one of the massive ghost gums lining the resort’s elegant driveway.
He was tall. Impressively so. Broad as any man she’d ever met. His chin was unshaven, the dark curls beneath his cap overlong. With the colour of a man who’d spent half a lifetime in the sun and the muscles of a man who hadn’t done so standing still, he looked as if he’d stepped out of a Nautica ad.
She tucked a curl behind her ear and casually bent down to tug at her ankle socks, not needing to look at the guy to remember exactly what she’d seen. Her hands shook ever so slightly.
He was the very dictionary definition of rugged sex appeal. For a girl from the right side of the tracks, a girl who was a magnet for stiff, sharp, striving suits, a girl whose planner had become so full of late she had to diarise time to wash her hair much less anything more intimately enjoyable, he was a revelation.
She glanced up as she stood. He hadn’t moved an inch.
The skin beneath her skimpy clothes suddenly felt hot, and the fact that it was thirty-odd degrees and muggy had nothing to do with it. She was a Kelly, for Pete’s sake. It took something extra extraordinary to make a Kelly sweat.
Though she couldn’t see his eyes beneath the brim of his soft, worn cap, she could feel them on her. Her right shoulder tingled. The sensation moved up her neck. It finally settled in her lips. The urge to run her fingers across them was so strong she had to curl them into her palms.
Then he finally moved. He pressed away from the tree and shifted his cap into a more comfortable position on his head before crossing his arms across his chest. His strong, tanned, brawny arms. His broad chest.
She breathed in deep, releasing it on a long, slow, deliciously revitalising sigh.
What if this was what she needed more than even a holiday right now? More than granola or t’ai chi. More than early-morning jogs or internal reflection classes. A little bit of something for herself.
Could she? Should she? Considering every step and every misstep she experienced outside the walls of her family home somehow ended up being known by the whole country, it took something extra extraordinary for her to put herself out there. The lanky stranger who would not take his eyes off her was exactly that.
She took another deep breath, faced him square on and gave him an honest, inviting, unambiguous smile.
Needless to say, after all that build-up, it was more than a bit of a shock when she didn’t get one in return. Nada. Not a twitch, a nod, not any kind of acknowledgement that he was paying her any attention at all.
Her cheeks heated from the inside out, her fingernails bit into her palms, and her lungs suddenly felt very, very small.
Meg fair leapt out of her skin when Tabitha leant on her shoulder and sighed. ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘if we hadn’t kidnapped you to this place this moment never would have happened.’
‘I’m trying my very best to imagine it right now,’ Meg said on a mortified croak.
Pathetically late though the attempt at saving face was, Meg let her gaze glance off Mr Tall Dark and Silent Rugged Man, then up into the sky as if she were pondering the time and using the sun as her guide.
‘I might well be seeing things,’Rylie said, finally upright and now staring brazenly at the silent stranger, ‘but isn’t that Zach Jones?’
Meg grabbed Rylie by the hand and spun her around to face front. All the while her wits began to return and synapses connected in the back of her brain. ‘Why do I know that name?’
Rylie said, ‘He was a rower years back. Olympic level. Keeping it up too, by the looks of him. Now he’s a businessman. Big time. Owns this place, in fact, as well as a dozen-odd of its like all ’round the world. Self-starter. Self-made. Renegade. Refuses to list his company on the exchange. Not all that much known about him otherwise. He somehow manages to live under the radar.’
‘Single?’ Tabitha asked.
‘Perpetually,’
