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She snuggled under a down-soft blanket and fell asleep watching a movie she had particularly wanted to see, and when she awoke was disorientated to find herself muffled in total darkness. She fought her way free of the blanket covering her face and found that the cabin lights had been dimmed and almost everyone else was asleep. The attendants were murmuring in hushed voices in the curtained galley.
Feeling a pressing need, Rosalind stumbled blearily into the aisle, staggering slightly as the plane hit mild turbulence. Not quite everyone was asleep, she found as she groped her way sleepily towards the toilet. The James man’s bent head was burnished by a pool of light, revealing glints of red-gold amongst the nondescript brown strands which had slipped forward to mask his
tilted profile. As she passed his seat she saw that his laptop was open on his unfolded table and that in his hand he was holding...
‘Are you crary?’ Rosalind lurched forward and snatched the object from him. ‘Have you been using this?’ she whispered, shaking the cellphone accusingly in his startled face.
‘I—’
‘Didn’t you read the safety information? Don’t you know it’s prohibited to use portable phones on board planes?’ she hissed.
‘Well, I—’
Rosalind glanced around to see if anyone had noticed and crammed herself down into the seat next to him. ‘They can play havoc with the plane’s electronic systems,’ she told him, speaking quietly so as not to disturb the sleeping passengers around them. But even in a whisper her classically trained voice retained its full range of articulation and expression. ‘If anyone had reported you, you could be arrested as soon as we land... that’s if you don’t cause us all to crash first!’
His eyebrows rose above the straight line of his spectacle frames at her fiercely delivered lecture. ‘Are you going to report me?’ he asked curiously.
She was offended by the suggestion. ‘Of course not!’ She was still slightly muzzy with sleep but he looked disgustingly bright and alert as he studied her expressive face. For a fleeting moment she thought she glimpsed a smouldering rage in the dark eyes, but when he blinked it was gone and she decided that it must have been a trick of the light.
‘There’s no “of course” about it,’ he said evenly. ‘You might have found it amusing to get me into trouble with the authorities—’
Her snort of indignation was genuine. ‘You must have a very odd idea of my sense of humour. I don’t happen to think it’s funny to mock the innocent.’
‘Is that what you think I am? An innocent?’ His mild voice sounded hollow, incredulous even. No doubt in his own mind he was a witty, sophisticated man of the world... The imagination had wonderful ways of compensating for one’s personal inadequacies!
‘Well, an innocent abroad, anyway,’ she said, humouring him. ‘It does rather stick out: you didn’t know about not using portable phones...or about the check-in procedures, and you were practically falling to pieces with nerves at the airport—’
‘Perhaps I was merely stunned speechless by your beauty.’
His sarcastic retort left her unruffled. She knew she wasn’t beautiful in the classical, restrained sense but she had flamboyant good looks that most men found attractive and an innate sense of style. ‘You thought I was a boy,’ she reminded him smugly.
‘Did I?’ he murmured quizzically, leaning back in his seat so that his face moved out of the spotlight. Thrown into shadowed relief, his features were stripped of gentleness, imbued now with a brooding strength that seemed vaguely sinister. A man of dark secrets and intriguing mystery...
‘You know you did,’ she said, admiring the effectiveness of the illusion: comic relief as villain. She had always believed that lighting was more effective than make-up in creating a character and here was the proof.
He said nothing and she frowned, suddenly remembering the magazine he had been leafing through at the beginning of the flight. Her pride bristled. Damn it, if he was toying with her over the matter of her identity...!
‘But you obviously know who I am now, right?’ she challenged.
His eyes dipped to her breasts, which were barely visible under the loose drape of her shirt, and to the slender curve of her hips, spanned by a wide leather belt which emphasised the narrowness of her waist. His gaze travelled down further, to the cellphone resting on her upper thigh, next to where the snug V of her jeans was pulled flat across her pubic bone.
‘Yes...you’re obviously a woman.’
The stifled statement was somehow more flattering than a gush of admiring words. To her surprise Rosalind felt her body tingle as if he had physically touched her where his eyes had wandered. Usually perfectly comfortable under the most leering male appraisal, she hurriedly crossed her legs in an unconscious gesture of self-protection.
A woman. If all she was to him was an anonymous female then he hadn’t paid much attention to that magazine, she thought with relief. He’d probably just skimmed over the glossy pages of celebrity clones before tossing it aside.
She looked at him through her lashes and received another small shock. Instead of politely averting his gaze, he had allowed it to linger on the deepened V created in her lap by her crossed legs, almost as if he could see the transparent emerald lace bikini briefs she wore beneath the sturdy denim. The muscles along her inner thighs tightened with a feathery ripple and she instinctively sought to shatter her unexpected self-consciousness with flippancy.
‘Those aren’t X-ray glasses by any chance, are they?’ she joked, and his eyes jerked back to hers. ‘Or are you going to confess they’re just plain glass and you’re simply a mild-mannered reporter?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ His eyes looked like polished jet—or perhaps it was just a coating on his spectacle lenses that made them look so hard.
‘You know—like Superman?’ He looked at her steadily and she let out a huff of disbelief. ‘For goodness’ sake, you don’t have much of a grasp on popular culture, do you? What do you do for a crust?’
‘Crust?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘A living? What sort of job do you do?’ She leaned sideways to peer at his laptop, to see if it would give her a clue. She glimpsed a busy clutter of characters before, with the swift tap of a single finger, he closed the file he had been working on, leaving the cursor blinking on a blank screen.
