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The fact was if she didn’t escape her friends, she might end up telling them what she thought of them, which, although tempting, was out of the question.
They were nice people at home. It was only on holiday they turned into monsters who talked incessantly about their tans and looked at her as though she were insane when she suggested taking a picnic and hiking to the next village.
However, being alone lost its appeal pretty quickly when you found yourself lost with a flat tyre, a burnt nose and aches in muscles you hadn’t known you had.
Panic was there just under the surface. A stray thought like, I’ll be a government statistic of tourists who disappeared without trace, and it would come rushing to the surface.
Well, she wasn’t alone anymore.
Erin lifted her hand to shade her eyes from the glare of the strong evening sun. With the sun behind him the figure in the saddle appeared as a dark silhouette outlined by a corona of golden light.
The man saw her and slowed his mount as they approached. The wild-eyed animal, nostrils flared, pawed the ground. Erin, with a mental image of those hooves coming crashing down on her unprotected head, took several hasty steps backwards.
The precaution proved unnecessary as without any apparent effort the rider controlled his animal with nothing more than a soft murmur in fluid Italian and brought it to an abrupt halt.
The horse stood there quivering and the rider sat astride him for what seemed like an age just staring down at Erin until she became frustrated by her inability to see his expression.
Dry-mouthed, she watched warily as he finally kicked his booted feet free of the stirrups and slid off the back of the horse. He patted the creature’s quivering flank, sending up a puff of dust, and casually relinquished the reins. The animal pawed the ground restlessly but did not take the opportunity to escape.
Erin, her feet seemingly nailed to the ground and her body reacting at a basic and humiliating level to the undiluted raw sex this stranger exuded from every dusty pore, wondered if the horse, too, was held in thrall as she was.
As he straightened up to his full height it immediately became clear that what she had imagined was an illusion of height created by his vantage point on top of the towering animal was in fact reality!
This man was seriously tall. Tall she could deal with, but the rest was more of a problem! The animal and its master had a lot in common—namely they were both magnificent and indisputably dangerous.
The danger should have repelled her but instead it made her heart beat faster, releasing a flood of adrenaline into her bloodstream. She sucked in a shaky sigh, too awed in that moment to be sensibly wary of this large stranger who exuded a predatory, seductive quality that would normally have had her running for the hills.
She studied him covertly through the screen of her halflowered lashes. Tall and lean with broad shoulders and narrow hips, he carried himself with the natural grace of an athlete and the casual arrogance of someone who knew that he was one of the beautiful people whose presence alone stopped conversations.
This was the sort of man that she was on principle unimpressed by.
Too good-looking, too sure of himself, he would have been treated from the moment of his birth as if the universe revolved around him.
Strangely as she watched the beautiful stranger peel the leather gloves off his hands she could summon none of the amused contempt she could normally tap into on these occasions.
Maybe it was the leather boots that ended midcalf that were distracting her.
For some reason Erin couldn’t tear her eyes off the dusty leather. When she did her gaze travelled up bleached, torn denim and long, long legs. She watched, conscious of the sound of her own shallow breathing, as he banged the dust off his thighs. Below the rolled-up sleeves of the shirt he wore open the skin of his strong, sinewed forearms was a deep gold meshed by a dusting of fine dark hair.
He stood there, feet slightly apart, and hooked the leather gloves into the waistband of jeans that were fitted enough to reveal the taut musculature of his powerful thighs and give Erin a hot flush. The black T-shirt he wore beneath his unbuttoned shirt was also snug enough to draw attention to his washboard-flat belly.
Her attention was riveted!
Erin knew she was staring but she couldn’t stop. She wanted to move, but her body seemed strangely disconnected from her brain. Her limbs seemed not to belong to her, and inside her chest her heart crashed against her ribcage, almost drowning out the sound of his boots on the cobbles as he walked towards her.
CHAPTER TWO
ERIN swallowed, knowing that this was one of those scenes that would be etched into her mind for ever.
He stopped a few feet away from her but close enough for her to see the dust ingrained in the fine lines radiating from his eyes, extraordinary eyes, incredibly dark and fringed with equally dark curling lashes.
His expression was inscrutable though the groove above his aquiline nose deepened as he looked down at her. Erin felt a shudder chase its way down her spine. There was something almost cruel about the curve of his sensually moulded lips.
He fired a question at her in a deep voice that had an almost tactile quality.
Erin swallowed and lifted her shoulders helplessly to indicate she had no idea what he was talking about.
She saw something that could have been irritation flicker in his dark eyes as he dragged a hand through his hair, which was pitch-black and sheared off at collar level. It was riverstraight and she imagined that under the dust it was silky.
