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‘Good girls don’t play with fire? And bad boys spoil in the sun!’ She was trying hard to picture him as an unattractive boiled lobster. Unfortunately, his devouring kiss had changed everything. There was no getting away from the fact that, no matter how she might loathe and despise him, he was a seriously sexy man.
‘It’s his skin,’ Mrs Cooper chimed in helpfully, putting two muffins onto his plate, and then adding a third for good measure. ‘He’s very sensitive.’
As sensitive as an elephant!
‘I can tell,’ Emily cooed. ‘He’s so wonderfully in touch with his feminine side…’
The bitch part, anyway, her sweetly smiling eyes informed him.
Ethan ran a hand over his cheek and jaw, hiding the reluctant tick at the corners of his mouth as Mrs Cooper retreated into the coolness of the house. ‘She means to the effects of the sun,’ he clarified. ‘I get my susceptibility from my volatile mother. She was a true redhead—in appearance as well as in temperament.’
That explained the fiery sparks in his hair, and the lack of an obvious tan in a man who must spend a fair bit of time outdoors.
Emily knew that his parents had both been killed in a light-plane crash several years ago, but she refused to allow his quirky comment to soften her defences.
‘So you inherited a slight trace of one maternal trait, and a big, fat dollop of the other,’ she said, leaving him to work out which was which.
‘Actually, I’m generally considered to have a cool head and a highly stable personality,’ he said wryly. He ruffled a hand over the top of his head, stirring the dark embers. ‘But if you want me to prove to you that I’m a natural redhead, I’d be happy to oblige.’
She only just stopped herself from rising to his sly taunt. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ she said repressively.
‘Pity.?
?
‘Do you always have to bring everything down to the level of sexual innuendo?’ she said, snatching up a muffin she had had no intention of touching, and taking a combative bite.
He looked surprised. ‘Was I talking about sex?’ he said innocently. ‘I thought we were discussing genetics. By proof I was referring to photographs of generations of redheaded Wests. What did you think I meant?’
He selected a muffin off his own plate and took a matching bite, holding her gaze as his straight white teeth sank deep into the sweetly tart concoction.
She swallowed. A tiny, tender spot on her lower lip throbbed at the reminder of his sensuous bite and she unknowingly worried at it with the tip of her tongue, her fingers absently crumbling the rest of her muffin.
Only when his winter-blue eyes became fixed on her mouth did she realise what she was doing, and quickly framed a diversionary question. ‘Does your brother have red highlights in his hair, too?’
‘Not a trace. He’s ash-blond—the spitting image of my father, and he seems to have a very similar philosophy of life.’
‘What’s that?’
His mouth took on a cynical twist. ‘Live fast, die young.’
Emily vaguely remembered something about leaving a good-looking corpse being part of the original quotation, but it wasn’t surprising that Ethan had left off the tag-line.
Malcolm West had only been in his mid-forties when he died at the controls of his personal plane, still young by modern standards, but it was not a pretty way to die.
Prior to his death he had won—and lost—several fortunes running cut-price airlines around the South Pacific region, and Emily wondered whether Ethan’s granite hardness and suspicious nature were a reaction against the roller-coaster effects of a boom-bust childhood.
‘And what’s your personal philosophy?’ she asked, seizing the chance for a further insight into the murky workings of his mind.
But he wasn’t co-operating. ‘Live slow and die old,’ he drawled. He demolished his muffin in two more wolfish bites, washed down with a mouthful of steaming black coffee, and started another.
‘What about your parents?’ he said, deftly turning the tables. ‘Which one do you most resemble?’
The question seemed innocuous enough, but by now Emily was wary of his verbal traps. She reached to pour a glass of iced-water from the pottery jug Mrs Cooper had left sitting in the centre of the table while she decided it was safe to answer.
‘Neither, really. They’re very tall and fair-haired, and both of them are extremely thin…’ she tensed, wishing she hadn’t mentioned that little detail, when his gaze drifted with a reminiscent smile to the breasts he had so recently handled ‘…but that could be the result of over-generosity, rather than genetics,’ she finished, unaware of the faint nuance of old guilt that had crept into her voice. ‘They’re prone to giving away their rations and living off the smell of an oily rag.’
Curiosity brought his eyes winging back to her face, the smirk wiped from his lips.
