Mcgillivray's Mistress. Anne McAllister
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to sculpt you nude” line, but the game wasn’t over yet.
“No!” she yelped. “I mean, no,” she said in more moderate tones. “Not…now. I can’t…now. I…I have to get some…some clay first.”
“Some clay?” he mocked her.
“Clay,” she repeated with a quick jerky nod. “I’ve never done terra-cotta. I don’t have it on hand.”
“Right.” He didn’t believe it for a minute. Oh, he believed she didn’t have any on hand. But he didn’t believe she really wanted to sculpt him. She was scoring a point. Making him squirm. Wishing him gone.
But he wasn’t going anywhere and it was time she realized that.
“Get plenty,” he instructed her.
“What?” She blinked and half a dozen expressions flickered across her face.
“If you’re going to sculpt me,” he challenged her. He saw consternation on her face. Was that panic? Resolution? Determination? He couldn’t sort them all out.
Then she squared her shoulders. “I will,” she said after a moment. “Hugh can bring it from Nassau when he goes on Wednesday.”
Now it was his turn to gulp. Then he got a grip and managed a credibly nonchalant shrug. “Whatever you say.” It wasn’t going to happen no matter what she said. “Look, Fiona. What do you really—”
“So how about Thursday morning?”
He hadn’t expected her to set a date. “Fiona, we’re not—”
Soft chicken gobbling noises met his protest.
He ground his teeth. “I have a meeting Thursday morning.”
It was nothing but the truth. Thursdays were meeting day. And if he didn’t have one with someone from an agency or a supplier, he and Suzette spent the time discussing on-going developments at the Moonstone and the other inns he’d bought over the past year. It was right there on his appointment calendar. In ink.
Not that Fiona believed him.
“I have meetings every Thursday morning,” Lachlan told her.
“Of course you do. I should have guessed.” A tiny smile played on her lips. “I’ll bet you have lots of meetings coming up. I’ll bet your life is just full of meetings.” Her singsong tone mocked him.
“Fine. I’ll change the meeting,” he snapped. “You want me nude, you’ll get me nude, sweetheart. Thursday morning.” He looked straight at her. “Six o’clock.”
“Six o’clock!”
“What’s the matter?” he asked smugly. “Too early for you? I thought you looked a little ragged.” Deliberately he let his eyes rove over her mussed hair and unironed shorts. “Too bad. Some of us have jobs. Or maybe you’d like to change your mind?”
Fiona drew herself up sharply. “Six o’clock will be fine. I’ll look forward to it.”
“You do that.” He went out the door and down the steps. “I’ll see you then.”
“I’ll see you first!” Fiona’s voice carried after him on a soft laugh.
“I SAW The King of the Beach this morning,” Carin announced cheerfully when Fiona arrived at her shop that morning with a wheelbarrow full of sculptures. “I love the new arm. It gives him power. You ought to hang something on the end of it.”
I did, Fiona thought as she unpacked the wheelbarrow and carried the sculptures into the shop. But saying so would have meant explaining what she’d hung there, which would have led to explaining why it wasn’t there now, which would have led the conversation even further in a direction she didn’t want to go.
Had she really told Lachlan McGillivray she wanted to sculpt him nude?
Had he really agreed to do it?
“But I guess you have to wait for something to wash up, don’t you?” Carin went on.
“Yes.” Fiona ducked outside to get more sculptures.
“You’re at the mercy of the tide,” Carin told her with a grin when Fiona came back.
Or her own idiocy. She hadn’t been able to focus since Lachlan had stomped down her stairs and stalked away. What had she done?
“Oh, this is great!” Carin held up a metal surfer balanced on his board, riding the break of a wave, the whole thing cut from a single square foot of steel. “Absolutely perfect.”
Fiona smiled. “Glad you like him.”
The surfer was the first new cutout she’d made in well over a year. There wasn’t much surfing on Pelican Cay. The waves were rarely large enough to attract surfing aficionados. But over on Eleuthera there were a few spots that drew surfers from all over the world.
“You ought to be doing new things,” Carin said. “Stretching a bit. Spreading your wings. I worry about you.”
“I’m fine,” Fiona assured her, just as she’d been assuring everyone since her father’s death. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
Carin didn’t look convinced. “Well, the surfer is a step in the right direction. I like him. What else can you do?”
Fiona wondered what Carin would think if she said she was going to sculpt Lachlan McGillivray nude!
She was still in a state of panic every time she thought about it. Not just because of Lachlan. Because she didn’t know the first thing about terra-cotta sculpting!
Not that it would matter, she assured herself, because it wouldn’t happen.
But it had been worth it to see the look on Lachlan’s hard handsome face.
Lachlan McGillivray had always been too high-and-mighty for his own good.
“What have you got against McGillivray?” her brother Paul had asked her when she’d begun the sculpture on the beach.
“Ride out a storm with him, I would,” Paul had said. And Mike had agreed. “He’s a good guy.”
But Fiona couldn’t see it.
As far as she was concerned Lachlan McGillivray was still a weasel.
He’d called her “carrots” from the moment he’d met her, when she’d been almost nine and he a haughty fifteen. No one called Fiona carrots! Ever!
Except Lachlan.
He’d even tugged her braid whenever she’d got close.
Not that he’d let her get anywhere near him. She and his sister Molly had spent a lot of hours trying to. They’d been studying to be secret agents in those days, lurking in the bushes, peering around corners, peeking over the rocks.
“Spying,” Lachlan had accused furiously, “on me!”
Could anyone resist a challenge like that?
Well, Molly probably could have. She had to live with Lachlan, after all.
But Fiona had been inspired. And intrigued.
Despite his bad attitude toward the island—and toward her—there had always been something about Lachlan McGillivray…
Or something perverse about her own hormones, Fiona thought grimly. Because heaven help her, over the years her fascination with him had never waned.
She’d been besotted with him.
Lachlan, of course, had not been besotted with her.
He would be, she assured herself, once he realized she’d grown up. She remembered with total clarity and abject humiliation the day she’d decided it was time to make her move.
It had been