their laughter grew louder and more uncontrolled, Sam looked up, aware of being caught up in the dazzle of a hauntingly bright stare, as blindingly mesmerising as the headlights of a car on a pitch-black night. There was a renewed wail of affected laughter from Charlotte and her conquests, and an unmistakably derisive twist appeared on the hard, cold mouth of Declan Hunt—before he turned away, bending his head to listen to the beautiful redhead who was whispering into his ear with an amused smile. And it wouldn’t take three guesses to imagine what she was saying to him, thought Sam gloomily.
Her torment ended only when Bob, Charlotte’s husband, appeared at the door of the restaurant, with Flora, their daughter. And while Charlotte went off to repair her lipstick in the powder-room, Sam hurried over to her niece to sweep her up in a bear-hug, and have lots of wet kisses pressed enthusiastically into her neck.
‘You’re so good with kids, Sam,’ said Bob, a touch wistfully, when the small hairs on the back of her neck started prickling as she became instinctively aware that she was being stared at, and, once again, she raised her head to look in the direction of the man who stared, frozen in time as he surveyed her with a pair of puzzled blue eyes.
Sam came back to the present to find that the eyes which studied her now were not puzzled; anything but. They were faintly disapproving.
‘So you’re Charlotte Gilbert’s sister,’ he repeated.
‘Yes. We don’t look alike.’ We aren’t alike, she wanted to say, but you couldn’t very well denigrate your sister to a total stranger.
‘No, you don’t.’ The eyes held her in their thrall, piercing and direct, like twin blue swords.
That day in the restaurant, he had been wearing a dark and superbly cut suit with a dazzlingly white collar and a tie and, barring the thick and unruly waves of his dark hair that had stubbornly refused to lie flat, he had looked the epitome of elegant sophistication.
But today he looked different. Today, he was dressed from head to foot in denim, with the dark hair curling untidily over the collar of his denim shirt, and the blue of the material only emphasised the cold blueness of his eyes. The denim of his jeans was faded to a paler blue, the fabric stretched almost indecently over long, muscular thighs which seemed to go on forever . . . Today, he was worlds away from the man she had seen in the restaurant. Today, he looked earthy, an innate sexuality shimmering off that lean physique like a haze.
Sam gulped. ‘About that day—’ But he silenced her with a shake of his head, so that all those tangled curls moved with a life of their own.
‘That day had little enough to commend it without raking it over any further,’ he said coldly. ‘Tell me, do you make a habit of going on long, boozy lunches and picking up total strangers? It could get you into all kinds of trouble.’
She half wanted to say, I’m not like that—I was sober! But something in his high-handed manner angered her. Why should she attempt to defend herself to him? He probably wouldn’t give her the job now in any case. And, even though she had been embarrassed by Charlotte’s behaviour at the time, now she perversely felt a sudden stirring of loyalty. Charlotte had been out of order, yes—but, from the disapproving expression on Declan Hunt’s face, anyone would have thought that they had both stood up on a table and performed a striptease!
She stared at him, her dark brown eyes sparking with insurrection, wondering how he would terminate the interview, when she decided that she would not give him that pleasure. ‘It’s all right, Mr Hunt,’ she told him, with an attempt to sound at her most reasonable. ‘I quite understand that you probably don’t want to consider me for the job now.’
The flamboyant swoop of one ebony brow curved up by a fraction. ‘Oh? And why’s that?’
‘You obviously disapprove of how I conduct my social life—’
But he interrupted her, with a small humourless laugh. ‘Do you really think,’ he began, ‘that I only ever employ people of whose lifestyles I approve?’ He rubbed his neck at a bare piece of skin, visible through the top button being open, and she found herself noticing where the tanned column of his neck became shadowed with dark whorls of chest hair. ‘If I did that, Ms Gilbert, I can assure you that I would be chronically understaffed.’ He put his head a little to one side, and stared at her consideringly, as if lining up a shot for the camera. ‘I must admit that I do have reservations about you—but the company you mix with isn’t one of them.’
Robin, her current employer, had told her bluntly that he was a difficult man, and she had been prepared to overlook that, making allowances for his genius behind the camera—but the reality of his caustic tongue had her senses sizzling with indignation. ‘What reservations?’
He gave the smallest shrug, and Sam was irritated with herself for noticing that even that slight movement drew attention to the breadth of his shoulders, giving definition to the interplay of muscle which rippled beneath. Again, she was caught in the crossfire of his gaze.
‘Well, firstly—there’s your size,’ he commented.
‘My size?’ She stared at him in bewilderment, for the briefest second experiencing every woman’s universal fear—that he was accusing her of being fat. ‘What’s wrong with my size?’
‘You’re very small,’ he said lazily. ‘Quite tiny, in fact.’
Sam unconsciously drew herself up to her full height and tossed her head back, so that the heavy bob of her mahogany hair swayed like a wheatfield in the wind. ‘I’m five feet three inches,’ she pointed out. ‘That’s hardly midget class.’
The rugged features remained unconvinced. ‘And you probably only weigh around ninety-five pounds.’
She mentally crossed her fingers. Didn’t they say that a woman was allowed to lie about her age and her weight? And if Declan Hunt had some kind of problem with petite women, then lie she would. After all, she did want the job—and she didn’t want him thinking that she was some undersized weakling, although she had to admit that standing in front of a man who was so big, and broad, made her feel decidedly more fragile than usual. ‘I’m a hundred and ten,’ she lied. ‘And my size surely has nothing to do with my ability to handle a camera. Right?’
‘Wrong. And I’ll be handling the camera mostly, not you. I need an assistant, not a partner—and certainly not a liability. Someone to carry my equipment—hump it up and down stairs, into cars, over fields. I do not want to spend valuable time when I could be assessing the light quality worrying that you’re going to give yourself a hernia, or, even worse, to find that you simply can’t hack it and manage to drop a load of valuable and very expensive equipment.’
More used now to the intensity of that stare, Sam met his gaze squarely. ‘Try me,’ she challenged.
There was a brief smile as he acknowledged the challenge, and the dark, tangled head was nodded in the direction of a large silver box. ‘Carry that camera over to the other side of the studio.’
The studio was vast and the box weighed a ton, but she would have died sooner than let him know that, and besides—her slight looks were deceptive. The squash she played twice a week had strengthened her, so that her ‘tiny’ frame—as he had called it so disparagingly—was surprisingly strong without being in the least bit sturdy. With a serene smile she accomplished his instruction. ‘How’s that?’ she questioned guilelessly.
He sat down on one of the two
