she wasn’t seeing the white-crested waves and the indigo blue water. She was hiding emotion—nothing more—because she was embarrassed by it.
‘So you lost your fiancé on top of losing a grandmother?’ he commented, with a depth of feeling he wasn’t used to. ‘That’s rough.’
She shrugged. ‘At least I had Lorna,’ she told him with a ruminative smile. ‘On both counts she was there for me. She helped me through.’
‘Tell me about her,’ he said somewhat distractedly Kayla thought as she started walking casually a step or two ahead of him, because he was busy scribbling in a notebook.
But she told him anyway, about the friend she had known from her first day at school who had come to mean as much as a sister to her. About the interior design work that Lorna and her husband were involved in, and how brilliant they were at what they did, but how, with the state of the market and then losing their biggest customer, things had become extremely difficult for them recently. She even went on to tell him how she might find herself looking for another job if things didn’t improve.
He wasn’t really listening, she decided, relieved, feeling that she had gabbled on too much.
‘What are you writing?’ She stopped on the shingle, turning to him with her chin almost resting on the hat she was still clutching to her beneath her folded arms.
‘Just jotting down a few things I don’t want to forget.’ He had snapped the notebook closed and was stuffing it into his back pocket.
‘You were sketching.’ Suddenly it dawned. ‘You were sketching me.’
‘Leave it, Kayla.’ His words were laced with a warning not to pursue it.
‘You were sketching me. Oh, no!’ Kayla hid her face in the wide brim of her hat. How could he? With the ends of her hair all lank and dripping, and she wasn’t even wearing any mascara, let alone a bra! ‘I look like a drowned and lashless rat!’
‘You look like an angel,’ Leonidas told her, voicing his earlier thoughts.
‘You can’t be serious!’ Kayla protested, bringing her head up, clinging to her crushed hat as her only defence against those shaded yet all-seeing eyes.
‘I never joke about beauty. Particularly the beauty of a woman,’ he said, in a voice that seemed to trickle with pure honey.
And you would have known scores of those! Known just what to say to make them feel like you’re making me feel now, Kayla thought hectically. Weak-kneed and breathless and wanting so much to believe that all he was saying was true!
She pulled a face, and in spite of everything managed to say with a tremulous little laugh, ‘Does that line usually work?’
The firm masculine mouth compressed, and she couldn’t seem to drag her gaze from it as he prompted, ‘Does it work in what way?’ Now that mouth took on a mocking curve. ‘In getting you into my bed?’
Kayla felt heated colour steal into her cheeks. Which was ridiculous, she thought. She was hardly a novice to male attention. She’d been planning a wedding, for heaven’s sake! Yet there was something about this man that was more exciting and more dangerous to her than any other man she had ever met.
‘Isn’t it customary?’ she returned somewhat breathlessly in answer to his reference to getting her into bed.
‘Possibly,’ he acceded, ‘but not in this case. And not with someone who has been made to feel so unsure of herself that she blushes at the mere mention of a man and woman finding pleasure in each other. Or a man taking any interest in her. There’s really no need to hide from me, Kayla.’
Perhaps there wasn’t. But when he took the hat she was clutching to her like a shield and his hand accidentally brushed the sensitised flesh above her modest neckline she realised that it was herself that she was afraid of. Of feelings that were too reckless and wild to think about. Purely physical feelings that had surfaced the moment she had first seen him standing on that other beach a few days ago.
Now, with her wet top doing nothing to protect her from his gaze, she could feel her blood starting to surge and the peaks of her breasts tightening in response to his hot regard, so that all she could think about was that hard masculine body locked in torrid sensual pleasure on some bed. And not just any bed. On hers!
‘Are you saying that your interest is purely aesthetic?’ she queried, her voice croaking from her shaming thoughts and the knowledge of how her rapidly rising breasts were betraying her to him.
‘No.’ He had removed his sunglasses and was hooking them onto the waistband of his trousers. Now she could see his eyes clearly.
They were dark and heavy-lidded beneath the thick swathe of his lashes, and glittering with such intensity of purpose that her every nerve went into red alert as he closed the screaming distance between them.
HIS MOUTH OVER hers was like an Olympic torch blazing into life, setting her insides on fire and sending molten sensations of light searing through her blood.
His kiss was passionate, yet tender. Dominant, yet testing. And the mind-blowing expertise with which he lured her mouth to widen for him was the technique of a man who had studied and understood women—a far cry from a man who had such a laid-back attitude to life. A wanderer. A drifter. Without purpose or design.
He smelled of the earth and of the pines that clad the higher slopes of the hillsides. He was burning with everything wild and unfettered, unrestrained. And yet she felt his restraint—a purposeful holding back—as he held her loosely within the exciting circle of his arms.
That was until the hands that were still clutching her camera and the sunscreen bottle against his wide, cushioning shoulders suddenly slid around his neck. Then, with a groan of defeat, his restraint fell away, leaving only raw passion in its wake as he tossed her hat aside and pulled her hard against him.
Kayla heard a gushing in her ears and wasn’t sure whether it was the heavy pounding of her blood or whether she was being captured and submerged beneath the relentless power of the sea.
She could feel the whole hard length of his body—every last inch of it—and she could feel her own responding to the drugging hunger of his mouth.
His back was firm and muscled, and she wished she wasn’t encumbered by her possessions so that she could slide her eager hands across it. There was no such encumbrance though in the way her body locked with his. His chest was a wall of thunder, crushing her aching breasts, while the potent evidence of his hard virility was making her pulse with need.
When he put her from him, holding her at arm’s length, she uttered a strangled murmur of breathless shock and disappointment.
‘Why did you do that?’ she quavered. Why had he kissed her when he had just claimed he had no intention of trying to get her into bed?
He was breathing as heavily as she was, and a deep flush was staining the olive skin across the strong, hard structure of his cheeks.
‘Because you were wondering what it would be like if I did.’
Still trembling, and perturbed by how easily he could
