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‘Would it be impossible to withdraw?’
He cast her a speaking look. ‘No, but I won’t be withdrawing.’
‘You could be tired,’ she suggested. ‘It’s been—hectic.’
He stretched out his legs and clasped his hands behind his head. ‘Hectic,’ he repeated. ‘Not easy to relax, certainly.’
‘How do you relax?’ Alex asked.
‘Wine, women and song,’ he replied flippantly and turned his head to study her reaction.
She looked away awkwardly and he laughed with—not that she was to know it—self-directed irony. ‘You’re quite safe with me, Alex.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t say that—’ she scowled, suddenly fired from awkward to annoyed ‘—with quite so much conviction!’
‘I thought it would be reassuring.’
‘It’s more than that,’ she stated. ‘I mean, I don’t mind being reassured, but I do object to being made to feel like the last woman on the planet you would find desirable.’
‘I didn’t mean to make you feel like that. Come to think of it, I’ve paid you some extravagant compliments and made it clear you looked sexy enough for most men—’
‘In the most backhanded way,’ Alex broke in.
He sat up. ‘Well, what would you like me to do?’
Alex stared at him, her outrage still plain to be seen, but it was also slipping away fast.
‘Oh, dear,’ she said, looking down the barrel of having made a fool of herself, not to mention quite possibly giving herself away. ‘That may not have come out quite right. Is there any possibility you could understand it was nothing personal?’
‘Nothing?’ he queried.
‘Maybe just my vanity,’ she conceded, after accusing herself mentally of being a liar as well as a fool.
He smiled and watched her for a moment, and thought how young, troubled and essentially innocent she looked. She was also probably the least vain female he knew, yet it was only human to resent being told she was ‘quite safe’ in that context, and curiously lovable.
As for wine, women and song, not that she’d ever know it, but it might not have been so far off the mark. Well, a nightcap maybe, some favourite music in the den, a girl in his arms on the wide, comfortable settee, to relax him from his high-pressure business life.
This girl?
Especially this girl, he thought with an indrawn breath. How sweet would it be to initiate her into the rituals of love-making? To make her gasp with desire and focus those beautiful eyes solely on him, to very slowly bring alive all her most sensitive erogenous zones. To possess that slender figure, those stunning legs and to be the one to meld the different elements of her personality, her sense of humour, that keen intellect and the scholarly side of her into warm, lovely womanhood.
He gritted his teeth suddenly and forced his mind back to her last remark. ‘Uh—yes, I understand perfectly. I’m sorry—’ a smile appeared fleetingly in his eyes ‘—I didn’t realize I was making you feel like that. Actually, going back to what led up to this, one thing I really like to do to relax is fish. I even have a favourite spot that I go up to a couple of times a year. Seisia, but not many people have heard of it.’
Alex, who had listened to his apology and deliberate change of subject with an inward sigh of relief, sat up alertly. ‘The port of Bamaga? On Cape York?’
‘The same,’ he agreed with a quizzical look. ‘You know it?’
She nodded. ‘I spent a holiday there with my parents. My father was also—talk about a mad, keen golfer, he was a fanatical fisherman. Oh! I loved it. We drove up in a four-wheel drive we’d hired and we camped at the holiday park, then we went back to Cairns on a cargo ship, the Trinity Bay.’
‘I know it well.’
‘But …’ She looked puzzled, for there was little at Seisia she could associate Max Goodwin with, unless … ‘Oh, I get it. You probably hire one of those extremely expensive fishing boats that go out into the Gulf of Carpentaria from Seisia for weeks at a time. Or do you own your own?’
‘I deny that charge. But, yes, I hire one, although I usually only manage a week at the most. How did you fish?’
Alex smiled. ‘Off the jetty—it’s supposed to be the best fishing jetty in Australia—and the beach. And we took a dinghy trip up the Jardine River. It was so beautiful and so remote.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I’ll never forget the colours of twilight.’
‘Blue on blue?’
