lifted a foot and stretched her…whatever the muscle that ran down the front of your thigh was called. ‘Two of my closest mates gave me this holiday as a present. Rylie Madigan and Tabitha Cooper.’
At the last second she threw out their full names on a gamble, for Tabitha, with her ex-Prime Minister dad, and Rylie, with her job on TV, were almost as recognisable as she was.
Her fishing paid off. He breathed deep, his fists bunched at his sides, and the sexy hollows in his cheeks grew their own hollows.
‘So you go home…?’ he said.
‘In a few days.’
He nodded, breathed out deeply, apparently most satisfied that she’d be out of his sight as soon as that.
Whoa. That was harsh.
Even though beneath the bright smiles and fancy clothes she was a tough cookie—she had to be in order to survive being a Kelly—it turned out she was still just a girl whose pride could be hurt like anyone else.
Okay, so there had been a time before she’d toughened up. A time when she’d been in danger of imploding under the relentless pressure. A long time ago, a lifetime really, in some perverse effort to get her father’s attention she’d let things go far too far. It had scared her enough to buck up and take control over her image, her life. To figure out how to use the process that used her.
Any naivety she might have had was lost for ever, making a certain amount of cynicism unavoidable. On the upside she was no longer easily fazed. By anything.
Yet somehow this guy was getting to her.
Frustration finally won out, bringing with it a desire to share the pain. She lifted her chin and breathed deep of the tropical air. ‘I have to say you picked a gorgeous spot here. I could really get used to it. Who knows? We may stay longer yet.’
His eyes slid back to hers; dark, gleaming, shrewd.
She raised both eyebrows. Now what are you going to do about that?
What he did was smile.
Naturally it was everything she’d imagined it might be and so much more. The latent vitality his physique hinted at shone from his eyes when he smiled. It made him appear playful, warm, engaging. Her knees turned to jelly. Her resolve turned to mush.
She opened her mouth, ready to ask him outright what the hell was going on when he placed his bare hand in the small of her back and gave her a light shove. She was so surprised she gave a little yelp.
Through the thin cotton of her T-shirt his fingers were hot. Insistent. Touching her without fear or favour.
Only when she looked up to see a small tree in the middle of the path did she realise he was merely stopping her from thwacking into the thing.
And even after his hand moved all too easily away, and even while he was making her feel more and more out of step with every step in his presence, she could still feel the hot, hard press of Zach Jones’s hand against her skin.
Now why did he have to go and touch her?
A simple, ‘Watch out for the tree,’ would have sufficed. Instead, constant glimpses of that tattoo peeking out from the rise of her shorts had been like a magnet.
Now he had to do this thing with the sensation of that soft warm skin imprinted on the tips of his fingers.
Zach curled said fingers into his palm and took a small step to the left to add a little more physical distance between himself and the woman at his side. The woman whose very proximity could expose everything he’d worked so hard to keep preserved. Protected. Pure.
He stretched out his shoulders and shot her a sideways glance. He had to concede that for a woman who appeared to bloom under the spotlight like an orchid in a hothouse, in person she was smaller, more low-key, and more approachable than he’d expected her to be. Funny, mischievous, switched on…
He actually had to remind himself her father was Quinn Kelly, one of the most patronising men he’d ever had the displeasure of dealing with in the early stages of his business career. No doubt there would be a good dash of spice beneath the sweet. That kind of bite had to be genetic.
As for the rest of her?
His gaze lingered on her mouth before skimming over her pale bare shoulder, down her slim arm, over her Betty Boop hip, before being drawn back to that mouth.
Surely lips that lush could not be the real deal. Soft, pink, curving up at the corners even when she frowned as she was doing right then. Those lips alone were enough to make sure half the men of Brisbane thought themselves in lust with her. The other half simply didn’t read the right papers. And as it turned out his body didn’t give a hoot if they were genuine. Saliva gathered beneath his tongue. He swallowed it with such force his throat ached in protest.
His gaze moved north only to be reminded of those infamous blue eyes. The colour was mentioned every time her name was spoken aloud. The second she’d turned them his way he’d known why. They were startling—glinting, bright, sapphire blue. The kind of blue that looked as if it could cut glass. The kind of blue that could make even the most disinterested man dive right in and not care if he drowned.
Luckily for him the fact that his hormones had so spectacularly tuned into Meg Kelly’s siren song was not going to be a problem to add to the reasons why he needed her as far away from there as possible. He’d long since been wise to the barb of wanting someone that would never be his to have. He had the relentless dislocation of his childhood to thank for that vital life lesson if for nothing else.
There was no getting away from the fact that she was trouble. Add friends who were of all people a TV reporter and an ex-Prime Minister’s wild child to the mix and his day had just got a whole lot worse.
It was time to turn things around.
‘Ms Kelly,’ he said, making sure she knew without a doubt he knew who she was, ‘I need you to tell me what you and your friends are really doing here.’
Her hands clenched so tight at her sides her knuckles turned white. Whatever else she was, Meg Kelly was smart. She had clued onto the fact that he wasn’t about to roll out the red carpet.
‘Whatever do you mean?’ she asked, her spicy core all too evident in her tone.
‘Wouldn’t you all prefer somewhere more…rousing in which to spend your vacation?’
She afforded him a glance. There was nothing he could pinpoint to say it wasn’t a perfectly amiable glance. Yet he felt the smack of it like an arrow between the eyes.
‘I’d say a five-thirty wake-up call is about as rousing as I like things to get when on holidays,’ she said.
His cheek twitched. He corralled it back into line. ‘Perhaps. Yet neither you nor your friends fit into our usual demographic of guests looking to shed a few pounds, get back to nature or affect a mid-life change of life.’
He turned to find she had come to a halt. Hands on hips. She said, ‘Now why would you think that we aren’t here to replenish our emotional wells just as it suggests on the brochure? Is my jogging prowess really that atrocious?’
Her
