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‘Did he? What else did he say?’ He dropped to his knees, removing his tank top and mopping
his forehead, throat and chest with it. His brows twitched together. ‘What were you two talking about?’
‘I was telling him all your TranStar secrets, of course,’ she said sweetly. ‘We were plotting a way to get rid of you and take over the company ourselves.’
The snatched eyebrows melted into a laugh. ‘Did you happen to mention I’d brought you here against your will and beg him to take you back to Auckland? I mean, this was your big chance to escape my wicked clutches and cause me maximum pain and embarrassment.’
Wicked? If only!
‘I—He—As you pointed out, he’s only a boy. It wouldn’t have been fair to involve him,’ she floundered, trying to disguise the betraying fact that it hadn’t even occurred to her. ‘And, anyway, since you’re neighbours and he’s obviously applied to you for some sort of holiday job, I doubt he would have risked crossing you—’
‘But you didn’t know that when you spoke to him.’ Blake twisted the top off a second water bottle and she watched, fascinated, the rippling of his strong throat as he drank. Then he tilted his jaw to one side and splashed some of the water down on to his sweaty chest, causing the skin to tighten and his nipples to visibly contract. The muscles in Nora’s arms went lax, and to hide her sudden weakness she lay flat on her back, wriggling her bottom to form a comfortable hollow in the sand beneath the towel.
Blake froze, the bottle still held high, watching the shimmy of her hips and the matching shimmer of her breasts against the thin covering of Lycra.
‘The colour of that suit is almost the same shade as your freckles. From a distance you look as if you’re not wearing anything at all.’
She forced herself not to move. ‘I do not!’
‘How do you know?’ he goaded. ‘I bet that’s why Steve came hotfooting over—he thought you were sunbathing in the nude. Did he look wildly disappointed when he got up close?’
‘No, he didn’t!’ she gritted, although, come to think of it, he had given her a rather sheepish grin. ‘I’ve had this suit for ages; no one’s mentioned anything before—’
‘Maybe lover boy enjoyed the view too much.’
‘We hardly ever went to the beach together—or the pool,’ she recalled. ‘Ryan doesn’t like swimming.’
‘Except in bathtubs.’ He took another cool swig of water. ‘I forget, was it the breast-stroke he was doing—or the crawl?’
Nora’s voice suddenly trembled on the verge of a laugh and her riposte was correspondingly weak. ‘You’re an insensitive pig!’
‘And he apparently never cared enough to do with you the things that you liked to do. You’re a genuine water-baby, aren’t you? Doug said that you used to swim as a teenager and you still do lengths at the local pool several times a week, summer and winter.’
‘I only took it up because I wanted to lose weight,’ she found herself confessing. ‘And then I kept on because I loved it—the swimming part, I mean, not the competing.’
‘I didn’t see it at first because of that ghastly dress you were wearing,’ he said, ‘but you have the classic swimmer’s body—strong shoulders, high breasts, slim hips and long slender legs that look as if they have a real kick in them.’
He was leaning over, his shadow falling across her like a cool, dark caress, and for a shattering moment Nora hoped he was actually going to follow through on his softly flattering words but he suddenly rocked back on his haunches and jack-knifed to his feet, tossing the water bottle into the sand.
‘I usually cool off in the surf after a beach run.’ He started towards the line of breakers, casting a careless invitation over his shoulder. ‘Join me if you want to give that suit a workout….’
His tantalising advance and retreat set the scene for the entire day. They spent the morning on the beach and went back up to the house for a lunch which meandered into midafternoon, then lazed around on the terrace, with Nora in a sun-lounger firmly wedged up against the glass doors of the house, her heart in her mouth every time Blake rolled indolently into the pool to disport like a seal in the silky blue water. Envy and a much fiercer emotion burned in her breast, but no amount of subtle encouragement or needling, or outright flirting on Nora’s part, succeeded in provoking the desired response. His eyes intermittently smouldered with banked fire and he made plenty of excuses to touch her, but any impulse to turn the fleeting contact into anything more intimate was firmly diverted into conversational channels.
Not that Nora was bored. She learned all about his mother and his sisters—thirty-seven-year-old Kate and her Terrible Twins, whose father had dropped out of sight before they were even born; Maria, the thirty-five-year-old union lawyer who resided with her live-in lover and was following in her mother’s activist footsteps, delighting at nipping at her brother’s corporate heels; and his youngest sister, Sara, who worked at the restaurant managed by her husband, and whose two daughters were sports mad.
‘I don’t know why you need nephews; it sounds like the family females have all the bases covered,’ she kidded.
‘It’d be nice to have at least one of the next generation of MacLeods who sees the world from my perspective,’ he said wryly.
‘Well, it’s obviously being left up to you to provide the masculine branches on the family tree.’
Something shifted behind the hawkish features, the steel-grey eyes darkening as they registered a seismic shift in his perceptions, then the cynical mask snapped back into place. ‘Wondering if I’ve left any stray twigs lying around, Nora? I haven’t, I assure you—I take all my responsibilities seriously.’
It was only natural that Blake’s relaxed talk of his assorted relatives should lead Nora into comparisons with her own family, and stories of growing up in Invercargill and how Tess had been a great substitute mother, just not very domesticated. While her aunt and uncle were busy running their sales business it had fallen to Nora to manage the family household and do most of the shopping and cooking.
She was eager to boast about Sean, especially when Blake showed a genuine interest in her brother’s career as a marine salvage diver and sometime Caribbean treasure-hunter. Over pre-dinner cocktails she confided that Sean’s tales of his treasure-seeking expeditions had inspired her to start designing a computer programme which would help him more accurately predict the break-up and dispersion pattern of ancient wrecks in any given combination of sea-floor topography and wind and sea currents. Chin propped on his hand, Blake listened with such rapt absorption to her enthusiastic description of her ideas that she stopped worrying about his unfathomable behaviour and gave in to the sheer joy of being in his company, licensing herself to ignore the whispered warnings from her vulnerable heart.
Cocktails flowed almost seamlessly into another delicious home-cooked dinner, but in spite of Nora rifling her meagre cache of clothes for her one and only dress—a simple floral wraparound with a flirty flimsy skirt—the combination of excess sun, sea, fresh air and nervous tension took their inevitable toll and she actually yawned when Blake walked her along to her room and took her tightly in his arms.
