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‘Patience.’ His dark, sexy voice was laced with humour as he stood upright and twisted a towel around his lean waist. ‘Breakfast first. Hop into bed and I’ll bring it to you. You’ll need to keep your strength up, considering what I’ve got in mind for you over the next few days.’ His voice suddenly sobered, his brows lowering over darkening eyes as he promised, ‘I’m going to make love to you until your head’s reeling, until all the bad things are wiped out and our lovemaking is the only thing you remember.’
Georgia dismissed his sudden and unexpected return to gravity. Her head was reeling already. She watched him walk out of the room, devouring the way the tanned skin lay tight and inviting over wide rangy shoulders, the muscles of his back tapering to the towel-covered lean hips, the long, perfectly proportioned, hair-roughened legs.
She gazed at the door for minutes after he’d closed it behind him, her eyes glittering with sudden tears. She didn’t know what she had done to deserve such a wealth of happiness.
Then she blinked and walked to the bed, glorying in her perfumed nakedness. She had been made for this, for this one man, had known it since the first time she’d seen him. She hadn’t been celibate for seven years because, as she’d told herself so often, she didn’t trust emotional involvement, but because there was only one man for her.
And the next few days, the ones he had talked about, would only be a prelude to the rest of their lives. She wouldn’t have to remember the passion of his lovemaking because that, too, would be with them always.
She flopped on the top of the coverlet and piled pillows up behind her. There were plenty for him, too, but when he carried a tray through he sat at the foot of the bed, then swung his long legs up, lacing them with hers, the tray balanced between them.
‘Now I can watch you eat,’ he told her, smoky eyes glinting. ‘I intend to cram everything possible into this escape from reality.’
Fleetingly, she thought to remind him that this, their rediscovery of each other, their loving, was as real as it got, but he leaned forward and popped a morsel of sweet, juicy pineapple between her parted lips.
He’d sliced all the fruits he could lay his hands on—mangos, strawberries, and the highly perfumed and slightly tart soursops balancing sweet banana slices and luscious grapes.
Georgia said, ‘I’m starving, but if we eat all this and Blossom comes in to prepare our breakfast—’
‘She won’t.’ He selec
ted a plump, ripe strawberry and rubbed it over her lips until she took it between her teeth. ‘I put a note on the kitchen table telling her we’d eaten and that apart from wanting her to put together a picnic lunch we’d be looking after ourselves. So quit worrying.’ He grinned at her suddenly. ‘You may be the boss lady back at the agency, but I’m in charge of your well-being and pleasure—with particular emphasis on the pleasure aspect—for the next few days.’
There it was again, the mention of a few days. Maybe he was too busy to stay longer. In that case she’d cut her own holiday short and return to England when he did. She couldn’t bear to be here without him. Couldn’t bear to be without him, full-stop.
‘We could borrow Elijah’s boat and visit the other side of the island—as I recall, it’s littered with isolated, sheltered cays,’ he suggested when they’d eaten their fill of the delicious fruit. ‘Unless you fancy trudging up the spurs and hacking a way through the forest?’ He buttered a slice of cornbread and handed it to her. ‘The cove on the doorstep here isn’t nearly secluded enough for what I have in mind.’
She knew exactly what he had in mind. Her throat tightened and her heart began a wild tattoo. Around him she was in a permanent state of arousal.
The bread dropped from her suddenly nerveless fingers, back on to the plate, and Jason leant over to put the tray down on the floor, then looked deep into her wide, expressive eyes.
‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘I know.’ And he lifted the small foot that was tucked against his hip bone and began to suckle her toes.
‘I could get used to island life!’ Georgia murmured pleasurably as she wriggled her bottom into the soft cushions of the comfy cane chair. She eyed Jason over the silver coffee pot and delicate china cups the waiter was placing exactly so on the tabletop.
Jason looked particularly edible this morning. Over the past five days his tan had deepened spectacularly, and his dark hair needed the attentions of the top-flight barber he obviously used. But she liked it that way. With the fine cotton black collarless shirt opened down to his waist, where it tucked into narrow-fitting white trousers, it gave him a buccaneering look that completely turned her on.
Yet everything about him turned her on, she admitted, grinning at him as the waiter moved away. She had never, in the whole of her life, been happier. Never felt so feminine, so sexy, so utterly ravished!
‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. You already own one of them.’ He returned her smile, but his was guarded. He poured coffee for them both, concentrating on that, and Georgia watched him from under her lashes and turned his words over in her mind very carefully.
She had wondered. Jason hadn’t proposed, and he hadn’t said he loved her. But every touch, every look told her that he did. It was unthinkable that they wouldn’t spend the rest of their lives together, but the idea of living in this paradise with Jason was almost too wonderful and perfect to comprehend.
Thanks to Harold’s legacy neither of them need work for a living ever again. But Jason possessed a fierce ingrained pride that would baulk at the mere thought of living off her money. Not for the first time she wished Harold had divided his assets equally between his stepchildren.
But they could certainly spend every holiday on Blue Rock… She allowed her thoughts to drift, soaking up the atmosphere of San Antonio’s most exclusive hotel. They were sitting outside on the pillared open piazza, amongst tubs of perfumed flowering shrubs, with a glorious view over the hotel’s manicured lawns. The spreading branches of enormous cotton trees made a leafy frame for the natural harbour below, where the yachts of the seriously wealthy were moored.
When Jason had suggested visiting San Antonio this morning because he needed to make a couple of phone calls, and he couldn’t do that from Blue Rock, she had immediately agreed, and now she remembered him saying, ‘Elijah will be glad to see the back of me. He must be desperate to have the use of his boat. Going fishing is his only way of getting away from Blossom’s sharp tongue!’
‘We could hire a boat,’ she told him now, stirring her coffee, enjoying the tiny sound of the silver spoon clicking against fine china. The smallest, most surprising things gave her pleasure since she and Jason had come together again. ‘It would give Elijah his freedom back. What do you think?’
It seemed the fairest thing to do. Stuck at base, poor Elijah would be getting restless, with Blossom constantly on his case, chivvying him to do this, that and the other chore around the place when he obviously preferred to shift himself ‘when the spirit moved him’.
And they would still have the means of getting to the farthest side of the island, anchoring off one of the uninhabited cays that lay in the shelter of the reefs, as they had been doing for the past five days. Taking one of Blossom’s lavish picnics, swimming, drowsing on the hot white sands, making love…
Jason took his time responding. Georgia leant back in her chair and relaxed. They, too, seemed to be living on island time, the pace slow and dreamy. Magical. As divorced from the reality of everyday life as the distant millionaires’ mansions that could be glimpsed in wide clearings carved into the forest that clothed the high hills of the interior.
With a sigh of pleasure, she leaned forward and refilled their coffee cups, her smile faltering when she saw the lines of tension suddenly carve into his darkly handsome face, making him look austere—lines that had been absent recently.
