In Mcgillivray's Bed. Anne McAllister
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it here. Or cut the line and pull me out,” she ordered, stretching out a hand and sounding like Barrett, his old commanding officer, the one they’d called Captain Ahab behind his back because he was as irrational and stubborn as Melville’s legendary captain.
Barrett—and Ahab—had nothing on this woman. If she’d acted the least bit desperate, he would have handed over his knife in an instant. But he was damned if he was taking orders from a bossy mermaid.
“Well?” she demanded impatiently when he didn’t move. “What are you waiting for?”
“The magic word?” he drawled, raising one brow.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!” She began kicking again, splashing him.
“You might not want to do that,” he suggested. “You’ll attract sharks.”
Her eyes widened. “There aren’t—”
“Of course there are,” he said. “Big ones. Hungry ones. In case,” he added, “you thought Jaws was just a movie.” He cocked his head, and smiled at her, all the while thinking this was the most surreal experience he’d ever had in his life.
Belle whined and peered over the side.
The woman looked from him to his dog and back again. She pressed her lips together tightly, then rolled her eyes and shrugged, nearly sinking as she did so. Then she muttered a less than gracious, “Please.”
“By all means,” Hugh said affably and nudging Belle out of the way, grasped the woman’s outstretched hand and pulled. As she came out of the water, he got both of her hands, and she floundered, kicking and slithering, and landed against him, cold and wet as a fish.
But she didn’t feel like a fish.
She felt like 100 percent woman with soft breasts and shapely hips. And feet.
He felt both relieved—and irritated—that she had feet.
“What the hell were you doing out there swimming around in the middle of the damn ocean?” he demanded, gripping her arms.
She twisted out of his grasp and shoved away to stand on her own. Then she shook long wet dark hair out of her eyes and glared at him. “Well, I wasn’t swimming laps. I was trying to reach your boat obviously!”
“My boat?” That hadn’t even occurred to him.
“Your boat.” She corrected his emphasis. “It was the closest thing to aim for,” she explained as if he were slightly dim-witted.
Hugh didn’t think that under the circumstances he was the one whose wits needed questioning.
But he had a notion now where she’d come from. He arched a brow and looked her up and down, taking in the sparkly beaded dress that ended just above very shapely knees and outlined extremely enticing curves. A very snazzy cocktail dress. Not exactly day-tripper wear. More ritzy party girl. She could only have fallen off the yacht whose running lights he could still see far off in the distance.
“What happened?” he asked her. “Drink too much? Get a little tipsy? Lose your footing?”
“What?” She looked at him, offended.
So he spelled it out. “Fall off the yacht, sweetheart?”
“I did not fall off the yacht,” she told him flatly, lifting a chin not unlike Captain Ahab’s chin. “I jumped.”
Hugh’s jaw dropped. “You what!”
“I jumped,” she repeated calmly, which was exactly what he couldn’t believe she’d said the first time.
“Are you crazy? You jumped? In the middle of the bloody ocean? What the hell did you do a stupid thing like that for?”
The crazy woman drew herself up as tall as she could manage, which meant she was almost as tall as he was, and looked down her definitely Captain Ahab nose. “It was,” she informed him, “the proactive thing to do.”
Hugh sputtered. “Proactive?”
How like a ditsy female to use business babble to justify temporary insanity. At least he hoped it was temporary. He jerked his baseball cap off, ran a hand through his hair, jammed it back on again and shook his head.
“You don’t have to be embarrassed just because you drank a bit too much,” he told her. “Lots of people get a little wasted when they have a day’s holiday.”
But her chin just went higher. “It wasn’t a holiday. And I did not touch a drop. I never drink on business occasions.”
“You jump often?” Hugh inquired. “On business occasions?” His mouth twitched.
She gave him a fulminating glare, then wrapped her arms around her dripping dress and scowled. “Fine. Don’t believe me. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me whether you believe me or not.” Pause. “But I would appreciate a towel.”
He didn’t move.
The scowl grew deeper, the glare more intense. Their eyes dueled. Then Miss Captain Ahab pressed her lips together tightly. There was a long pause. Finally she gave an irritable huff and added with bad grace, “Please.”
Hugh grinned. “Coming right up!”
He fished a not-very-clean towel out from beneath the bow of the boat where he always stowed his sleeping bag and cooler and other sundry gear and tossed it back to her. “It’s all yours.”
She caught it, wiped her face, then met his gaze over the top of it. “Thank you,” she said with exaggerated politeness.
Still grinning, he dipped his head. “Anytime.”
She looked away then and began drying off. Hugh stood there watching, fascinated, as she rubbed her arms and legs to dry them, then tried to sop up as much water from the beaded dress as she possibly could. It was a losing battle.
“You could take it off,” he offered helpfully.
“Yes, I could,” she reflected aloud.
And damned if she didn’t!
Right then. Right there.
Well, actually it took a few moments for her to get the dress off. Palm-dampening, mouth-parching, body-hardening moments as far as Hugh was concerned. Soaking-wet and clingy beaded dresses were obviously not easy to shed.
But as he stood there gaping, the crazy woman peeled the silvery straps of her beaded dress right down her arms and wriggled and shimmied and squirmed until the dress pooled at her feet and she was wearing a strapless bra and a pair of itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny bikini panties and nothing more.
Hugh’s mouth went dry. His body got hot. He gaped, then tried to speak, but all he could manage was a croak like a frog’s. Abruptly he shut his mouth.
The woman didn’t seem to notice. She gave a huge sigh as she stepped neatly out of the pool of dress. “Thank God. You have no idea how heavy a wet beaded dress is.”
No, he didn’t. And if he tried to think about it, his mind whirled. All the blood that ordinarily made his brain function was far too busy elsewhere.
Without thinking, he sat down. Belle came and put her head on his knee, but her gaze was still on the crazy woman.
So was Hugh’s.
“If we’re going to be polite,” the woman told him firmly, “you shouldn’t stare. My father always told me it wasn’t polite to stare.”
Hugh swallowed, but he didn’t stop staring. The ability to move his eyes was beyond him. His brain was still in neutral. Certain parts of his body, however, were on high alert.
“Huh?” he managed to croak at last, his gaze still impolitely roving over her slim but decidedly curvy form.
“What?” he said, aware that she had spoken yet unable to find