The Duke's Proposal. Sophie Weston
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the inevitable. It didn’t make her like him any more.
‘Oh—okay, then.’
His dark eyes glinted with real amusement. ‘No need to go overboard with the gratitude,’ he said dryly.
It was a rebuke. Jemima did not like that either.
‘Thank you,’ she said between her teeth.
‘You’re welcome.’
He turned away. ‘Violet, have you seen—?’
But at that moment the doors to the arrivals area opened again and a tall black man in a startling white uniform came through. He came over, smiling widely.
‘Hi, Niall. Al conned you into coming to pick the stuff up, did he? We were waiting for him at the gates. You got the pick-up?’
Niall shook his head. ‘The Range Rover.’
‘Oh, well, bring it round. We got three pallets to load.’
Niall said to Jemima, ‘Where’s your stuff?’
She gestured at the swag bag, sitting squashily in front of the coffee stall.
His eyebrows flew up. ‘That all?’
‘Yes,’ she said, bristling.
‘You travel light!’
Her hackles rose. ‘Hey, what do you need for a holiday in the Caribbean?’
She repressed the thought that all the gear she had was for Europe in February. She had intended to pick up a bikini and some shorts at the airport. But she was not admitting that to Haughty Cheekbones.
The Englishman looked sardonic. ‘A hotel room would have been good. Or do you make a habit of sleeping where you fall?’
On the brink of denying it, Jemima caught herself. It was the perfect alibi, after all. Just in case Basil did, by some fluke, manage to track her to Pentecost. She could let everyone think she was a student backpacker, floating from island to island. So if Basil turned up asking for an international model they could all say, On Pentecost? Nah!
So she tilted her head back to meet his disparaging glance.
‘I go where the wind blows me,’ she said naughtily. ‘Does that worry you?’
For a moment his eyes were as dark and fierce as any Renaissance potentate offended by a minion. Then he seemed to remember who and where he was. He gave a crack of laughter.
‘You really know how to get under a man’s skin, don’t you?’ he said ruefully. ‘How you live is nothing to do with me, thank God. Come along, then, wind-rider. Let’s get you stashed before I start loading.’ He whipped her bag off the floor and onto his shoulder as if it weighed nothing and raised a hand to the coffee stall. ‘See you, Violet.’
‘You’ll like Pirate’s Point,’ Violet told Jemima. ‘Enjoy.’ And, to him, ‘Bye, Niall. Come back soon.’
The two men strode ahead out of the main doors, talking. Ignored, Jemima set her teeth and followed.
Outside the air-conditioned building the hot, still air was like walking into a wall of toasted marshmallow. It also smelled of plane fuel. Jemima stopped dead, gagging.
The man called Niall stopped, looking over his shoulder. ‘You okay?’
‘I’m fine.’
And she was. After the icy rain of London, the heat seemed to reach out and hug her. She drew a deep, deep breath and caught up with him as the man in uniform peeled off towards some high steel gates.
Niall opened the passenger door of a big Range Rover and tossed her bag up into it.
‘You’ll have to sit with your feet on it,’ he said practically. ‘The back seat is reserved for loo rolls and coffee this trip.’
He adjusted the back seats to lie flat while Jemima scrambled up into the vehicle. Then he swung round into the driver’s seat and set the thing in drive just as the gates began to swing open. He drove, she saw, with more precision than one would expect from his careless manner. He shot the vehicle through the gates before they were even half open and not a scrap of paint was scratched. Then he parked meticulously beside the waiting boxes.
‘You’re good at this, aren’t you?’ she said involuntarily.
‘Running errands and an unlicensed taxi service?’ he mocked. ‘Oh, sure.’
She looked at the small tower of goods. ‘Can I help?’
‘Load up, you mean? No, thanks. I do better on my own. Get my own rhythm going.’ He gave her a sudden smile. He was startlingly sexy when he smiled. A Renaissance prince eyeing up a possible favourite. ‘But thanks for the offer.’
He got out of the vehicle. Just as well. Jemima could feel the heat in her face all over again. She took herself firmly to task, watching as he started to load up rapidly.
He was right, she thought. He did do better than he would have done with her amateur assistance. He was very fast, not a movement wasted.
She frowned. The semi-naked beach bum and the precision driver with a scientific loading method did not seem to sit together very comfortably. Was he hiding something?
At once she laughed at herself. Just because you’re on the run, that doesn’t mean everyone in the world has a secret!
But, even so, as she watched the muscles in his arms bunch and release, bunch and release, she thought, He doesn’t try to look like a muscle man, but there’s a lot of latent power there. I wouldn’t like to cross him.
Now, that really was ludicrous. Especially as she had already promised herself that she was never going to be afraid of a man again. Far better to stop fantasising about that surprising strength and concentrate on what she was going to call herself. If she was serious about leaving supermodel Jemima Dare in her box for a week, she’d better think up a name and fast.
It was not until they were belting down a stretch of newly surfaced road that he said, ‘You’d better tell me your name. I’m Niall.’
‘So I gathered,’ said Jemima, a touch acidly. And went on, without so much as an infinitesimal pause, ‘Jay Jay Cooper.’
It would have passed any lie detector test, she thought complacently. Cooper was her mother’s name. Jay Jay was what the family called her.
He nodded gravely. ‘Welcome to Pentecost, Jay Jay. Have you been in the Caribbean long?’
Jemima thought about the last time, in November. It had been a shoot for the Belinda project. They had all put up at a palatial villa on a private island. She had had a mountain of luggage, had never emerged from her suite without a full hair and make-up job, and had given interviews to the international gossip journalists every spare moment when she wasn’t actually working on the shoot.
She bit back a smile. ‘Off and on,’ she said airily.
‘Work or pleasure?’
‘This time it’s pleasure.’
He nodded. ‘So what do you do when you’re not bumming around on pleasure trips?’
She hadn’t prepared for that one and had to think quickly. ‘Nothing very interesting. Bit of this. Bit of that.’
He sent her a look that was part mockery, part suspicion. ‘What sort of this and that?’
‘Oh, I’ve waitressed,’ she said truthfully. Well, she had—when she was at school.
It was not enough. He was still waiting.
She thought wildly and borrowed from Izzy’s chequered career yet again. ‘Cruise ship hospitality. Typing and filing. Anything that pays the rent, basically.’
‘All to fund your travel habit?’
‘I