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‘I think whatever it was has come out anyway,’ he said. His tongue appeared between his lips and he dabbed at it and then inspected his fingertip. ‘Ah, yes, I’m sure it did...’
Rosalind suddenly remembered that her injury had supposedly been imaginary. ‘Can I see?’ She propped herself up on her hands but even as she spoke he was casually flicking whatever was on his fingertip into the breeze.
‘Sorry, but it was hardly worth looking at. Such a tiny thing to cause you so much discomfort,’ he said, so blandly that Rosalind’s suspicions were reawakened.
But no, that was silly! Luke would never have summoned the nerve to make such an outrageously seductive move on purpose.
Would he?
‘What made you want to try to get it out like that anyway?’ she asked, thinking that tax avoidance was actually a fairly devious field requiring a certain amount of risk-taking by its practitioners. And Luke was a self-declared specialist.
‘I saw it once...in a Bond movie,’ he admitted.
Rosalind recalled the scene...and the way the woman’s gratitude had been expressed afterwards, in typical Bond-girl fashion. She delivered him a tart warning. ‘You should know that things you see done in the movies don’t always work out the same in real life!’
‘No, only sometimes,’ he agreed meekly, his gaze briefly brushing her treacherously firm breasts. Rosalind shifted her foot hastily back onto the sand and as she did so the slight bristliness of his leg struck a familiar chord.
Her green eyes narrowed, squinting for a better look as she blurted out, ‘For goodness’ sake, Luke, do you shave your legs?’
‘As a matter of fact, I do,’ he said coolly, moving around beside her. ‘I cycle, and shaving your legs makes treating the scrapes much less painful if you fall on the tarmac, not to mention reducing drag and chafing of the Lycra kit...’
‘Oh.’ Rosalind had discovered something else equally intriguing. ‘You shave your chest too, don’t you?’
She couldn’t resist reaching over and touching it. His skin was like hot satin, slipping against her fingers, smooth but with a faint catch in a broad area from collar-to breast-bone. She guessed that in his natural state he would be quite furry.
His voice also had a slight, uneven catch. ‘We wear Lycra body-shirts as well.’
Rosalind drew back, her fingers drifting absently to her parted lips, and the clean, salty tang of him suddenly filled her nostrils, creating an unexpected hunger. Her tongue crept out to touch her fingertips and now the taste of him was inside her too, lush and tempting...
Through a veil of lashes she watched Luke’s eyes glaze at her action and then sink down her half-reclining body, drifting into intimate territory before faltering and returning to find the flaw in the otherwise pearly perfection of her skin.
His lips parted, his brows darting upwards in a slight frown. He bent over to trace the faint silvery line low down on her abdomen with his finger.
?
??What’s this? Appendix?’
It was like being delicately brushed with a live wire. Rosalind’s skin quivered and she could feel the downy-fine hair on her belly spring erect. His finger jerked away, only to return almost immediately to explore the tiny ridge. He was getting bolder by the minute.
‘No!’
She had thought she had herself under control but suddenly she was fighting a fierce, almost overwhelming urge to plunge her fingers into the fine, silky hair that had slid across his temples, twine them amongst the sun-warmed strands and force his mouth slowly, slowly down to her body...to feel him move his open lips against that small, inoffensive, earth-shattering scar. And then, and then...
She put a flat hand just below his shoulder, hesitating when she felt his heart pumping as violently as hers, then she pushed him away—a hard shove that sent him sprawling on the sand.
He blinked up at her. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. I just think it’s time we made a move!’ she said, leaping up, her jerky movements revealing her inner agitation.
‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to dredge up bad memories for you,’ he said, rolling lithely to his feet beside her, brushing the sand off his side.
‘You didn’t. It’s just an operation scar—from years ago...when I was living in London.’
She could probably tell him the exact day if she wanted to dwell on it. But she had long ago decided that she wouldn’t because that would mean dwelling on Justin—wonderful, laughing, handsome Justin—the first and last great love of her life, the shining knight of her dreams who had turned out to be utterly without honour or conscience.
Rosalind—young, passionately in love and blinded by her own romantic idealism—had been a willing victim of his forceful charm. Because her trust had been as absolute as her love she had ignored the most elementary precautions with the man she had expected to marry, only to find out that he had been unfaithful with a string of one-night stands.
She had been lucky. She could have faced a death sentence for her naivety. As it was, the consequences of her liaison with Justin had sent her recklessly off the rails for a while, but she had quickly realised the self-destructive futility of her actions. Yes, something precious had been taken away from her, but she had since found other things, other blessings to put in its place...
