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He nodded. ‘So who was the other one?’
She screwed up her nose again.
‘That was a bit more embarrassing. I had a bit of a crush on this guy at school. Anyway, someone laced the punch with alco-pop at the end-of-school party and Simon and I got a bit carried away—maybe more than a bit, if you know what I mean. It was awful. We were both so horrified, we never spoke to each other again.’
He knew what she meant. He’d done his own fair share of experimenting when he was in high school. Until he and Emma had become an item.
God, he didn’t want to think about Emma now. Not here, not while he was screwing Fletcher’s sister.
He pushed away, letting go of her as he sat up, his head in his hands, waiting for the explosion of pain he knew would come. The guilt at his betrayal that he should be sleeping with this woman.
That he would be enjoying it, after what Fletcher had done!
And the pain came, though nowhere near as intense as he had expected. Dulled through too much sex, he assumed. It was a wonder he had feelings left at all.
‘What’s wrong?’
He looked skyward, to the blanket of stars and moon overhead, and sighed. ‘It’s late and I’ve got an early start. Let’s go to bed.’
Whatever had been bothering him that night—first in disappearing so abruptly into his office before dinner, and then his all-too-rapid change of mood in the pool—it hadn’t hung around. Sophie looked dreamily out of the window of her office, wondering if she’d ever regain the ability to focus for longer than two minutes at a time. The last few days and nights had been amazing and it was hard to imagine a time when sex or memories of their love-making hadn’t figured so prominently in her life.
But how could she—as someone who had never hungered for the touch of a man, who had never missed it from her neatly ordered life—suddenly be so obsessed by the sensations stirred within her?
And how could Daniel make her feel the way he did with just one look, one caress? How could he reduce her to nothing more than a mass of screaming nerve endings again and again?
Those nerve endings made themselves known to her now. She looked at the clock; he would be home soon. He’d been coming home earlier and earlier every day. When Millie had commented on it, he’d said there wasn’t much on, but he’d winked at her while he said it and had given her that look and whisked her off to the bedroom before dinner. And last night he’d had Millie prepare a picnic basket and they’d had dinner on the private beach in the cove below, taking turns at swimming, making love and feeding each other with treats from the basket.
If he kept this up, a girl could almost think she was special. Almost.
If he hadn’t told her that she was his best lover so far, she might already believe she was. For, even if he’d been telling her the truth that night, his words had been a stark reminder that she was one of many and that Daniel was used to moving on.
As he would no doubt do again.
With a sigh she forced her thoughts back to the reason why she was here—to organise a wedding, not fall head over heels with Daniel Caruana. There was no future in it, no point to their relationship. Because even if their affair lasted that long once Monica and Daniel were married there was no reason for her to stay on the island, no reason not to return to Brisbane.
She refused to look at the clock again, to see how much or how little the minute hand had moved since she’d last looked. She had to keep her head, not lose her heart.
If only he didn’t make it so difficult.
The computer on the desk behind pinged with incoming mail: hopefully confirmation at the last of the printing job’s completion. She turned to her desk, happy to have an excuse to think about work, and clicked on her email programme. She smiled when she saw it was from Jake instead. She opened it, thinking they must be back from their cruise, wondering how it had gone even as her smile turned to a frown.
I need to talk to you. Urgently. Are you alone?
J
She stared vacantly at the message, hit reply with trembling fingers and sent off a brief message.
Bare seconds later, her phone buzzed. ‘Jake,’ she said, ‘what’s wrong? Is Monica okay?’
‘She’s fine. She’s at the hairdresser. We’re both fine.’ But he sounded anything but, his words tight and clipped and angry as hell. ‘I need to give you a message for Caruana.’
‘Sure, what is it?’
‘Tell him I don’t want his money. Tell him to call off his dogs.’
Her blood ran cold. ‘What money?’ But somehow she knew before he’d uttered another word.
‘The money he offered me to dump Monica. We hadn’t been here ten minutes and his thug was on the phone, offering me half a million to leave her cold.’
