Love Islands: Red-Hot Sunsets. Jane Porter
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with his reluctant prisoner wasn’t on the cards. He’d warned her off getting any ideas into her head so there was no way he was going to try to get her into his bed now.
Just thinking about that, even as he was fast shoving it out of his head, conjured up a series of images that sent his pulses racing and fired up his libido as though reacting to a gun at the starting post.
He reached out one hand and supported himself heavily against the wall, allowing his breathing to settle. His common sense was fighting a losing battle with temptation, telling him to hot foot it back to the office and slam the metaphorical door on the siren lure of a woman who most definitely wasn’t his sort.
He continued on, passing Maria in the kitchen preparing supper, and giving a brief nod before heading up. Then the sun was beating down on him as he took a few seconds to appreciate the sight of the woman reclining on a deck chair, eyes closed, arms hanging loosely over the sides of the chair, one leg bent at the knee, the other outstretched.
She had tied her long, vibrant hair into some kind of rough bun and a book lay open on the ground next to her.
Lucas walked softly towards her. He hadn’t seen her like this, only just about decently clothed, and his breathing became sluggish as he took in the slender daintiness of her body: flat stomach, long, smooth legs, small breasts.
He cleared his throat and wondered whether he would be able to get his vocal cords to operate. ‘Good job I decided to come up here...’ He was inordinately thankful for the dark sunglasses that shielded his expression. ‘You’re going pink. Where’s your sunblock? With your skin colouring, too much sun and you’ll end up resembling a lobster—and your two-week prison sentence might well end up being longer than you’d bargained for. Sun burn can be a serious condition.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Katy jack-knifed into a sitting position and drew her knees up to her chest, hugging herself and glowering from a position of disadvantage as he towered over her, all six-foot-something of bronzed, rippling muscle.
Her eyes darted down to his legs and darted away again just as fast. Something about the dark, silky hair shadowing his calves and thighs brought her out in a sweat.
She licked her lips and steadied her racing pulse. She’d kept up a barrage of easy chatter for the past few days, had striven to project the careless, outspoken insouciance that she hoped would indicate to him that she wasn’t affected by him, not at all, and she wasn’t going to ruin the impression now.
He’d warned her not to go getting any ideas and that had been the trigger for her to stop gaping and allowing him to get under her skin. She was sure that the only reason he had issued that warning was because he had noticed her reaction to him and, from that moment onwards, she had striven to subdue any wayward reactions under a never-ending stream of small talk.
To start with, she’d aimed to keep the small talk very small, anything to break the silence as they had shared meals. In the evenings, before he left to return to the bowels of the yacht, they’d found themselves continuing to talk over coffee and wine.
Her aim had been harder to stick to than she’d thought because something about him fired her up. Whilst she managed to contain her body’s natural impulse to be disobedient—by making sure she was physically as far away from him as possible without being too obvious—she’d been seduced into provoking him, enjoying the way he looked at her when she said something incendiary, head to one side, his dark eyes veiled and assessing.
It was a subtle form of intellectual arousal that kept her on a permanent high and it was as addictive as a drug.
In Lucas’s presence, Duncan no longer existed.
In fact, thanks to Lucas’s all-consuming and wholly irrational ability to rivet her attention, Katy had reluctantly become aware of just how affected she had been by Duncan’s betrayal. Even when she had thought she’d moved on, he had still been there in the background, a troubling spectre that had moulded her relationships with the opposite sex.
‘I own the yacht,’ Lucas reminded her lazily. He began stripping off the tee-shirt and tossed it onto a deckchair, which he pulled over with his foot so that it was right next to her. ‘Do you think I should have asked your permission before I decided to come up here and use the pool?’
‘No, of course not,’ Katy replied, flustered. ‘I just thought that you had your afternoon routine and you worked until seven in the evening...’
‘Routines are made to be broken.’ He settled down onto the deck chair and turned so that he was looking at her, still from behind the dark shades that gave him a distinct advantage. ‘Haven’t you been lecturing me daily on my evil workaholic ways?’
‘I never said that they were evil.’
‘But you were so persuasive in convincing me that I was destined for an early grave that I decided to follow your advice and take some time out.’ He grinned and tilted his shades up to look at her. ‘You’re not reacting with the sort of smug satisfaction I might have expected.’
‘I didn’t think that you would actually listen to what I said,’ Katy muttered, her whole body as rigid as a plank of wood.
She wanted to look away but her greedy eyes kept skittering back to him. He was just so unbelievably perfect. More perfect than anything she had conjured up in her fevered imaginings. His chest was broad and muscular, with just the right dusting of dark hair that made her draw her breath in sharply, and the line of dark hair running down from his belly button electrified her senses like a live wire. How was it possible for a man to be so sexy? So sinfully, darkly and dangerously sexy?
Every inch of him eclipsed her painful memories of Duncan and she was shocked that those memories had lingered for as long as they had.
Watching him, her imagination took flight. She thought of those long, clever fingers stroking her, touching her breasts, lingering to circle her nipples. She felt faint. Her nipples were tight and pinched, and between her legs liquid heat was pooling and dampening her bikini bottoms.
She realised that she had been fantasising about this man since they had stepped foot on the yacht, but those fantasies had been vague and hazy compared to the force of the graphic images filling her head as she looked away with a tight, determined expression.
It was his body, she thought. Seeing him like that, in nothing but a pair of black trunks, was like fodder for her already fevered imagination.
Under normal circumstances, she might have looked at him and appreciated him for the drop-dead, gorgeous guy that he was, but actually she wouldn’t have turned that very natural appreciation into a full-on mental sexual striptease that had him parading naked in her head.
But these weren’t normal circumstances and that was why her pragmatic, easy-going and level-headed approach to the opposite sex had suddenly deserted her.
‘Tell me about the deal.’ She launched weakly into the first topic of conversation that came into her head, and Lucas flung himself back into the deck chair and stared up at a faultlessly blue, cloudless sky.
He was usually more than happy to discuss work-related issues, except right now and right here that was the last thing he wanted to do. ‘Persuade me that you give a damn about it.’ He slanted a sideways look at her and then kept looking as delicate colour tinged her cheeks.
‘Of course I do.’ Katy cleared her throat. ‘I’m here because of it, aren’t I?’
‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ He folded his arms behind his head and stared at her. ‘You’re only here because of the deal but, now that you are here, are you having a good time?’
Katy opened her mouth to ask him what kind of question that was, because how on earth could she be having a good time when life as she knew it had been turned upside down? Except she blinked and thought that she was having a good time. ‘I’ve never been anywhere like this before,’ she told him. ‘When I was a kid, holidays were a week in a freezing-cold British seaside town. Don’t get me wrong, I adored my holidays, but this