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She wondered exactly what was going through Luke’s mind. Nothing as wildly inappropriate as what was going through her own, she decided as she watched the shift of his expression. What ever made her think that he was young for his age? Right now he looked every one of his twenty-eight years—and more...disconcertingly mature and sombre in his seriousness.
His eyes had that glaze of absent-minded, see-nothing vagueness which Rosalind was coming to realise indicated a see-all state of mind. He was focusing on the big picture rather than on the one immediately in front of him, his brain adding up all the possibilities and cross-referencing them with what information he already had.
‘Do you mean it’s some form of motion sickness?’ he asked puzzled. ‘But how can that be...? You weren’t sick on the flight.’
‘Oh, for goodness sake! Not motion—morning,’ she stressed weakly, realising that he wasn’t going to give up until he had a satisfactory answer. ‘Look, just pass me over one of those crackers just there on the bedside table and then toddle downstairs and make me a cup of tea...weak, with just a little milk and not too hot—’
‘Morning? What do you-? Morning sickness!’ He jackknifed upright again, setting up an unpleasant vibration in the mattress. ‘My God, do you mean—you’re pregnant?’
‘For God’s sake, stop rocking the boat and pass me the damned cracker!’ moaned Rosalind, wishing she were well enough to enjoy his shocked reaction.
‘Pregnant!’ he repeated, doing as he was bid, his face almost as pale as hers under the natural tan as he stood uncertainly next to the bed. ‘Who’s the father?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Jordan...my brother-in-law,’ said Rosalind, munching experimentally.
‘What?’ If she had thought he looked devilish before, now he was Satan, King of Hell, come to fry her for every sin she had ever dreamed of committing. ‘You’ve been having an affair with your own sister’s husband?’ he thundered accusingly, smoke practically pouring from his pinched nostrils.
‘No, of course not!’ she cried, stuffing the rest of the cracker in her mouth with kill-or-cure haste. Jordan would hit the roof if that rumour ever got around! ‘Jordan’s the father, but of Olivia’s—my sister‘s—baby!’
His eyes went darkly opaque. ‘My God,’ he breathed. ‘Are you acting as a surrogate mother-is that it? Are you carrying their child implanted in your womb because your sister can’t carry a full-term pregnancy?’
His leap of imagination took her breath away. She was glad that she was already lying down. It wasn’t often these days that she was taken so spectacularly off guard. She felt a deep, dangerous stirring of dark emotions which she ruthlessly repressed.
‘No! Honestly, Luke, I don’t know where you get such wild ideas from; you’re as bad as the tabloids—’ She bit her lip, hoping he hadn’t noticed the slip. The cracker miraculously seemed to have settled down in comfortable residence and she pushed herself cautiously up against the pillows and took pity on his confusion.
‘I’m not carrying anyone’s child, OK? I’m not pregnant at all; I just have the symptoms.’ She thumped the mattress with a frustrated fist and threatened fiercely, ‘Oh, I’m going to kill her for doing this to me when I get back home!’
Sharp alarm briefly pierced the bewildered dark eyes. ‘Kill who?’ he said sharply.
‘Olivia, my sister, that’s who!’ She braced herself for the usual scepticism as she attempted to explain as succinctly as possible, ‘Olivia’s the one who’s pregnant, not me. We’re twins, you see, and we’ve always shared a really close mental and physical connection. When we were children, whenever Olivia got ill I did too...or I showed all the symptoms but not the illness ... and vice versa. Fortunately it’s faded quite a bit as we’ve grown older and become more separate in our lives. Sometimes it’s just the echo of sympathetic feeling, a not-quite-rightness, but sometimes it’s a real, rip-roaring snorter!’
‘Like now.’
Strangers rarely took her affinity with her twin seriously and Rosalind’s mouth formed a pink O at his apparently easy acceptance of the bizarre truth. But then, she reasoned, it was no more bizarre than his guess.
‘Like now,’ she conceded ruefully. She sat up further, and brightened as she realised the nausea had passed. She felt perfectly normal again. She grinned her relief. ‘But, hey, it’s just a temporary condition and it’s not usually this drastic—at least not for me. Jordan told me it’s far worse for poor Olivia, who throws up on and off for hours every single morning—and she hates being ill and helpless even more than I do!’
Thirty minutes later, at the balcony restaurant, Luke was watching in appalled fascination as she poured more syrup onto the plate of waffles next to her decimated serving of bacon, eggs, grilled tomato and hash browns.
‘I don’t know how you can do that,’ he murmured, shuddering as she took a dreamy bite of the sticky-sweet concoction. ‘Anyone else would have settled for dry toast.’
‘I have a naturally high tolerance for food,’ she grinned, paraphrasing his words from last night as she cast a disparaging look at his orange juice and the plain wholemeal toast that had followed his bowl of cereal and fruit. ‘I think it’s something to do with my body chemistry. And don’t forget that Olivia’s hormones are busily info
rming me that I’m now eating for two!’
‘You’ll have to make sure you start getting a bit of exercise today. You don’t burn up many calories sunbathing.’
‘Exactly my plan.’ Rosalind’s smug grin made him eye her warily. He was beginning to know the look that bespoke mischief. ‘When we’ve finished eating we’ll go downstairs and book our jet-skis. I hope we’re still early enough to get a couple for this morning.’
He put down his orange juice. ‘Jet-skis!’
‘They rent them out by the half-hour but I say we get them for a full hour. Surely you didn’t think that we were just going to sit around and flirt with each other all day, did you, Luke?’ she said sweetly, enjoying his startled consternation. ‘That wouldn’t burn up very many calories either. Flirting isn’t a passive art, you know; it’s as much physical as verbal. Being able to flirt on the wing, so to speak, increases your chances of success ... Besides, if you do interesting things you set up opportunities to meet a more interesting type of woman. I take it you haven’t ridden a jet-ski before.’
‘No, nor ever wanted to,’ he said, glancing down at the short jetty and pontoons which marked off the area of the beach which had been set aside for the safe use of power boats and jet-skis. ‘Can’t we do something less... noisy?’
‘No, we can’t.’ She ruthlessly brushed aside his objection. ‘I thought you said you didn’t want to encroach on my holiday? Well, if we do things my way we’ll both get what we want—I’ll have some fun and you’ll provide yourself with a stimulating new experience to talk about.
‘Trust me—once you get the hang of it you’ll love it,’ she predicted, polishing off another waffle. Her green eyes shimmered with innocence as she leaned over the table to add in a low purr that made a flush streak across his cheekbones, ‘Just think of the pleasure of having all that throbbing power between your legs. Who knows? It might prompt you to discover a totally new aspect of your personality!’
