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But it was Rosalind who was first to make that discovery a short time later as she prowled restlessly around Luke’s chalet while she waited for him to change into his swimsuit and collect his beach gear. They were only going to have a short wait for their jet-skis and she didn’t want to waste a minute of their allocated time. Since she was wearing a matching bikini under her sunflower-printed cotton Lycra swing-dress she had only needed to slip next door and fetch her beach bag, give her teeth a quick clean and slap on some sunscreen. Typically, Luke was obviously being more meticulous ... or merely reinforcing his mistrust of her interpretation of fun.
Impatient with the wait and incurably nosy, Rosalind couldn’t resist poking around his tidily arranged possessions to see what they revealed about his personality... other than the fact that he was a relentless neatnik. She was investigating his reading matter, noting the depressing lack of holiday trash amongst the pile on the small teak table, when she came across the torn-out pages of a magazine. It was the article about her that she had read on the flight from New Zealand, the story that rehashed the worst excesses of her ‘wild child’ exploits, carefully undated so that an uninformed reader might assume they had occurred weeks rather than years ago.
Luke must have torn it out of his copy of the magazine on the plane. Her heart began to thump as she realised the implications.
Rosalind was still staring at the crumpled pages when Luke came down the stairs, dressed as he had been before, except for the dark shadow of his swim-shorts showing under the white trousers and the sunglasses hanging out of his shirt pocket.
He halted abruptly when he saw what she had in her hand, his mouth closing over what he had been going to say, and Rosalind was stung by a sense of betrayal.
‘You knew!’ she attacked him, snapping her fist closed and balling up the offending paper with vicious, jerky movements of her fingers. ‘Damn it—you read this and you knew who I was even before I sat down beside you on that first flight, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’
He shrugged, his eyes faintly hooded under the etched brows, his narrow face revealing nothing of what was going through his mind. And she had thought that he was so wonderfully transparent...had convinced herself that his air of bumbling helplessness was cute as well as harmless!
‘Well, answer me, damn it!’ she hissed at him, goaded by his silence, golden sunflowers flaring out around her slender hips as she stormed closer to impale him with the emerald fury of her eyes. God forbid that he should turn out to be a journalist after all.
‘Why didn’t you say you’d recognised me?’ she demanded, spoiling for a reply that would allow her temper full rein.
But instead of looking guilty Luke casually bent over and picked up a-white panama hat from a rattan chair, holding it loosely alongside his thigh as he answered. ‘Because I received the very strong impression that you were travelling incognito, wanting to avoid drawing any attention to yourself or your identity,’ he said, with the calmness of sincerity. ‘Was I so wrong?’
‘Well, no,’ she admitted, unwilling to let go of her anger, or face the underlying emotion which had prompted her to lash out. ‘But you still could have given me some indication—’
‘How—without intruding on the privacy which was obviously so vital that you went to the trouble of disguising yourself?’ he asked, with devastating logic.
She brooded on that one. He had managed to turn the tables very neatly, but that didn’t mean that he was exonerated.
‘What about later, when I told you I was an actress and you said you didn’t go to the theatre? You could have mentioned the article; you didn’t have to still pretend you didn’t know anything about me,’ she insisted sharply, the strong sense of pique she had felt at the time still mockingly clear in her memory.
‘Ah...well, perhaps I couldn’t help teasing you a little bit there—’
‘Hah!’
He ignored the accusing sound. ‘But by then it would have been awkward to admit otherwise without causing embarrassment,’ he continued evenly. ‘I thought it more diplomatic to behave as if we were strangers, which to all intents and purposes we still are...’
Rosalind’s chin went up in a familiar gesture of dramatic defiance. ‘I wouldn’t have been embarrassed!’ she declared, her eyes blazing with the refusal to apologise for the way that she had lived. She had made mistakes, but she had paid the price for them too, and in one case would go on paying, for the rest of her life...
‘Maybe not, but I would.’ He made a self-deprecating gesture with his hands. ‘I thought you might think I had done it with malice aforethought—pretending not to recognise you in order to scrape an acquaintance, so that I could boost my ego by boasting about our conversation later...selling my story, that kind of thing. I know there are some people like that...’
He looked down at the hat in his hand, sliding the brim between his fingers with his other hand. ‘And I didn’t think that particular story was something you would want to discuss, particularly with a stranger. Unless you brought up the subject yourself, I didn’t see a way to mention it...’
‘Hmm.’ Rosalind summoned up her worst-case scenario to attack his aura of guilty innocence. ‘So you’re not in some kind of security intelligence service?’
His head jerked up. ‘No!’
‘Or a detective?’
He shook his head, the movement blurring the expression in the dark eyes.
‘A reporter?’
‘God forbid!’ he blurted out.
He was either being honest or he was a spectacularly good liar. Rosalind only had her instincts to go on.
‘Hmm.’ She tapped her foot, reluctant to let him entirely off the hook as she tried to think whether there were any other unwelcome possibilities she hadn’t covered.
‘You needn’t worry about your privacy being compromised,’ he said, as if reading her scurrying thoughts. ‘Accountants are, by the very nature of their work, trustworthy and discreet. We’re often privy to extremely sensitive, private information about people’s lives and we’d soon find ourselves out of work if we boasted about our inside knowledge. Not that I’m one for boasting anyway...’
Rosalind immediately felt like a paranoid witch. Of course he wasn’t, and that was part of the reason why he couldn’t hold a woman’s interest beyond the first ten minutes!
