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‘This is sublime…’ Bianca employed her favourite word, which she used to distinguish everything from a good meal to phenomenal sex and expensive perfume.
Rafael had forgotten her presence. She had little stimulating conversation, so tuning her out was not a challenge. Previously he had decided that the ability to emulate wallpaper was a something in her favour. Now, blonde hair trailing into a flowing mane over one shoulder, she was reclining on the bed. As befitted a supermodel who was internationally renowned for her beauty, she looked as inhumanly perfect as an advertising hoarding. She was posed for maximum effect, her flawless body arrayed in silk lingerie the colour of a café latte, artfully dampened nipples poking through the lace for his admiration. Oozing confidence in her manifold attractions, she stretched out languid legs that were an incredible thirty-six inches long. But Rafael wasn’t a photographer, and he liked his sex a little less choreographed. At this moment he felt nothing and knew that, once again, he had become bored.
Anyway, Bianca’s green eyes, smoky with smudged kohl, were fixed with mesmeric intensity on the true object of her desire. She smiled a Helen of Troy smile of unsurpassable luminosity that lit up the exquisite symmetry of her face. Rafael watched this display of blatant self-love that no mere man—or woman—could ever hope to equal. Bianca shifted position, skimming a light, caressing hand down over the smooth sculpted line of her slender thigh. She was enthralled to the point of ecstasy by her own beautiful reflection in the eighteenth-century mirror on the wall opposite.
A sudden noise from outside sent Rafael’s attention flying back to the tall sash window. A horse was galloping at breakneck speed across the field below his lawn. His interest was caught; he was a great horse-lover, and the owner of an internationally acclaimed stud farm in Kildare. He stood up for a better view; a flutter of colourful movement behind the lower hedge that bounded the field made him reach for the binoculars on the pier table.
A woman was fighting her way through the hedge. She was wearing a quite bizarre outfit: a camisole and shorts fashioned of fabric decorated with large pink flowers. Pyjamas? Worn with green Wellington boots? An aristocratic black brow climbed. A stray shard of sunshine made her hair shine as bright as polished copper in firelight. It was an amazing colour, red as the richest wine against her pale skin. Could this be the tough and savvy London career woman who had refused to sell the Gallagher property back to the Flynn Court estate? The woman who wanted to downshift to the idyllic illusion of rural simplicity? Rafael grinned. One more dreamer bites the dust….
‘If the mountain won’t come…’ Bianca giggled and let intimate hands stray below his shirt to trace his muscular back and then sink below his waist.
Rafael’s even white teeth gritted and he shifted to dislodge her. He wasn’t in the mood. After a week on the yacht in which Bianca had entertained his entire crew by walking around nude at every opportunity she had lost all mystery and allure. He had shagged her on the plane to pass the time. Perhaps out of guilt over his essential indifference now that desire had fled. Why did he get bored so easily? Why was the chase always so much more exciting than the sexual catch? But then, honesty urged him to admit, when had he ever had to mount a pursuit to score with a woman? Or employ the tactics of charm and persuasion?
His intent gaze narrowed on the woman charging across the field full tilt. Her firm round breasts bounced with unfettered abandon. The stallion soared like a great bird over the fence onto the rolling lawn. The redhead flung herself sideways over the same barrier, got into difficulties and virtually fell down the other side. She had a generous bottom, shaped like a heart. In fact, he acknowledged, his interest fairly ensnared, the body below that clinging jersey fabric was as lush and ripe with curves as an old-fashioned hourglass. That voluptuous hint of pure feminine abundance was distinctly sexy. Without any warning, she achieved the effect that Bianca had failed to rouse. His slumbering libido kicked in with a surge of sexual enthusiasm that startled him.
‘There’s a fat woman running round your garden!’ Bianca exclaimed in disbelief.
Fat? Rafael would have laughed out loud had he not at that moment registered that the stallion was frantically rolling its eyes in fear and panic. In that state of terror the horse was as much a danger to himself as to the foolish woman chasing him. Without hesitation, Rafael raced for the stairs.
‘Pluto…shush, there’s a nice boy,’ Harriet wheezed, struggling to make her voice calm and comforting, but so out of breath that her lungs felt strangled.
Showing the whites of his eyes, Pluto careered round like a crazy mechanical bucking horse, and then he started coming right at her and she froze. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a flash of sudden movement, but that was the only warning she got before she was snatched off her feet and pinned face down to the damp ground, her ribcage momentarily squashed flat beneath a powerful masculine body. The thunder of hooves passing too close to her ears for comfort made her appreciate that she had very nearly been trampled.
‘Stay here,’ an accented male voice growled, and the weight on her back lifted again as he tugged Pluto’s head collar from her loosened grasp.
Harriet flipped over and watched him approach the sweating, snorting stallion. He was very tall and his movements were incredibly quiet, assured and graceful. His black hair was cropped short, his feet bare in the dew-wet grass. His blue shirt fluttered back in the morning breeze from the soft, well-worn denims that hugged his narrow hips and long powerful thighs to reveal a hair-roughened bronze torso that was as sleek and hard with muscle as the proverbial six-pack. She flushed at her straying attention and then noted that he was talking softly to Pluto. He knew his way around horses all right. The huge stallion trembled. The man reached up and, still talking with soothing cool, slowly and deftly slipped on Pluto’s head collar. In silence she watched as the stallion calmed down beneath much firmer handling than she would have dared to attempt.
Prior to this point she had only seen her rescuer’s bronzed profile, and now she saw him face-on. Her blue eyes widened and her heart began a slow, heavy beat that echoed her growing tension. He was drop-dead gorgeous, and for an instant she thought there was something eerily familiar about that stunning bone structure of his. Frowning, she discarded that unlikely notion, but still she stared at him, drinking in every vibrant aspect of him with a hunger that was startlingly new to her. His high cheekbones framed brilliant, dark golden eyes, divided by a strong masculine nose and completed by an aggressive jawline.
‘Thank you,’ Harriet said unevenly.
‘So you’re the lady who is planning to get back to nature and raise organic vegetables on my doorstep,’ he husked. ‘I’m Rafael Flynn.’
‘Harriet Carmichael.’ Only when she encountered that mocking scrutiny did she finally recall that she was wearing her comfy floral pyjamas, which could not be said to flatter the fuller figure. Her face coloured up and burned with embarrassment. She was furious with herself for blushing. After all, only a bikini would have shown more flesh. ‘Sorry about all the fuss. I don’t know how Pluto got out—’
‘If your horse had strayed onto the road he would be dead,’ Rafael Flynn slotted in smoothly.
Feeling that it was grossly insensitive to point out the obvious, Harriet stiffened defensively and resisted the urge to inform him that Pluto did not belong to her. Technically the stallion had been in her charge, and she was not one to duck responsibility. ‘But fortunately he didn’t,’ she countered tightly, while also trying not to wonder how long Pluto would have had to hang around the very quiet road to get run over by passing traffic.
A weather-beaten older man in a dark suit hurried round the side of the house towards them and came forward to take charge of the stallion. ‘Tolly will ensure that Pluto is brought back to you in a horsebox,’ Rafael Flynn asserted.
Harriet bit her lip, feeling like a schoolgirl being rebuked for imprudent behaviour. She would dearly have loved to seize hold of Pluto herself and frogmarch him back to his stable. But there were too many barriers to be cleared, and she was too sensible to even consider taking such a risk with a horse too powerful for her to hold. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been inconvenienced.’
‘Relax…I would have been gutted had I missed out on those enchanting pyjamas,’ Rafael murmured silkily.
His heavily lidded dark eyes roamed with unashamed intent over the jutting swell of her ripe breasts and lingered there with wicked appreciation before he directed his attention back up to the wonderfully voluptuous promise of her full-lipped pink mouth. If it had not been for Bianca he would have invited his neighbour to join him for breakfast in bed. At the same time, he knew that with regard to Harriet Carmichael he had to take care of business first. He never, ever allowed anything to deflect him from his goal. And she was in for a rough and rocky passage if she continued to oppose him.
Wholly unprepared for his comment and appraisal, and interpreting both as derisive amusement, Harriet flung him a look of angry disconcertion. ‘Very funny. Don’t let me keep you!’
Taken aback by that inept response to a mildly flirtatious comment, Rafael frowned as Bianca chose that inopportune moment to stroll out of the house. ‘The countryside is sublime,’ she sighed, invading his space.
The statuesque blonde was so beautiful that Harriet simply gaped, only glancing away uncomfortably when she appreciated that the other woman was virtually naked below the silk wrap that she had forgotten to close over. The possessive hand she curved over Rafael Flynn’s arm made Harriet feel equally uncomfortable. Had she been guilty of casting admiring eyes over another woman’s husband?
‘Miss Carmichael…’ In a fluster, Harriet focused on the silver haired older man, who had passed custody of Pluto over to a younger man in working clothes. ‘I’m Joseph Tolly. Forty years back our families were neighbours. You have a great look of your mother.’
A huge smile of surprise and pleasure momentarily banished Harriet’s discomfiture. ‘Honestly? My goodness, you must have known her. I would really love to hear what you remember about those days.’
‘You’d be very welcome to visit me this evening,’ the old man told her warmly.
