Love Islands: Red-Hot Sunsets. Jane Porter
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kidnapping you.’
‘You were kidnapping me, in a manner of speaking!’
‘Tell me how it feels to be a kidnap victim.’ His voice was light and teasing as he continued to tend to her knee, now applying some kind of transparent ointment, before laboriously bandaging it and then turning his attention to foot number two. ‘I always wanted to be a doctor,’ he surprised her and himself by saying.
‘What happened?’ For the first time since she had been deposited on his bed, Katy felt herself begin to relax, the nervous tension temporarily driven away by a piercing curiosity. Lucas could be many things, as she had discovered over the past few days. He could be witty, amusing, arrogant and always, always wildly, extravagantly intelligent. But confiding? No.
‘My father’s various wives happened,’ Lucas said drily. ‘One after each other. They looked alike and they certainly were all cut from the same cloth. They had their eyes on the main prize and, when their tenure ran out, my father’s fortune was vastly diminished. By the time I hit sixteen, I realised that, left to his own devices, he would end up with nothing to live on. It would have killed my father to have seen the empire his grandfather had built dwindle away in a series of lawsuits and maintenance payments to greedy ex-wives.
‘I knew my father had planned on my inheriting the business and taking over, and I had always thought that I’d talk to him about that change of plan when the time was right; but, as it turned out, the time never became right because without me the company would have ended up subdivided amongst a string of gold-diggers and that would have been that.’
‘So you gave up your hopes and dreams?’
‘Don’t get too heavy on the pity card.’ Lucas laughed, sitting back on his heels to inspect his work, head tilted to one side. He looked at her and her mouth went dry as their eyes tangled. ‘I enjoy my life.’
‘But it’s a far cry from being a doctor.’ She had never imagined him having anything to do with the caring profession and something else was added to the swirling mix of complex responses she was stockpiling towards him. She thought that the medical profession had lost something pretty big when he had decided to pursue a career in finance because, knowing the determination and drive he brought to his chosen field of work, he surely would have brought tenfold to the field of medicine.
‘So it is,’ Lucas concurred. ‘Hence the fact that I actually enjoy being hands-on when it comes to dealing with situations like this.’
‘And have you had to deal with many of them?’ She thought of him touching another woman, one of the skinny, leggy ones to whom those thong swimsuits forgotten on the yacht belonged, carefully stored just in case someone like her might come along and need to borrow one of them.
‘No.’ He stood up. ‘Like I said, my time on this yacht is limited, and no one to date has obliged me by requiring mouth-to-mouth resuscitation whilst out to sea.’ He disappeared back into the bathroom with the kit and, instead of taking the opportunity to stand up and prepare herself for a speedy exit, Katy remained on the bed, gently flexing both her legs and getting accustomed to the stiffness where the bandages had been applied expertly over her wounds.
‘So I’m your first patient?’
Lucas remained by the door to the bathroom, lounging against the doorframe.
Katy was riveted at the sight. He was still wearing his bathing trunks although, without her even noticing when he had done it, he had slung on his tee-shirt. He was barefoot and he exuded a raw, animal sexiness that took her breath away.
‘Cuts and grazes don’t honestly count.’ Lucas grinned and strolled towards her, holding her spellbound with his easy, graceful strides across the room. He moved to stand by the window which, as did hers, looked out on the blue of an ocean that was as placid as the deepest of lakes. His quarters were air-conditioned, as were hers, but you could almost feel the heat outside because the sun was so bright and the sky was so blue and cloudless.
‘I’m sorry if I ruined your down time.’
‘You never told me why you leapt off your deckchair and raced for the pool as though the hounds of hell were after you,’ Lucas murmured.
She was in his bedroom and touching her had ignited a fire inside him, the same fire that had been burning steadily ever since they had been on his yacht. He knew why she had leapt off that deck chair. He had enough experience of the opposite sex to register when a woman wanted him, and it tickled him to think that she wasn’t doing what every other woman would have done and flirting with him. Was that because she worked for him? Was that holding her back? Maybe she thought that he would sack her if she was too obvious. Or maybe she had paid attention to the speech he had given her at the start when he had told her not to get any crazy ideas about a relationship developing between them.
He almost wished that he hadn’t bothered with that speech because it turned him on to imagine her making a pass at him.
Lucas enjoyed a couple of seconds wondering what it would feel like to have her begin to touch him, blushing and awkward, but then his innate pragmatism kicked in and he knew that she was probably playing hard to get, which was the oldest game in the world when it came to women. She had revealed all sorts of sides to her that he hadn’t expected, but the reality was that she had had an affair with a married man. She’d denied that she’d known about the wife and kiddies, and maybe she hadn’t. Certainly there was an honesty about her that he found quite charming but, even so, he wasn’t going to be putting any money on her so-called innocence any time soon.
‘It was very hot out there,’ Katy muttered awkwardly, heating up as she recalled the pivotal moment when raging, uncontrolled desire had taken her over like a fast-moving virus and she had just had to escape. ‘I just fancied a dip in the pool and unfortunately I didn’t really look where I was going. I should head back to my room now. I think I’ll give my legs a rest just while I have these bandages on—and, by the way, thank you very much for sorting it out. There was no need, but thanks anyway.’
‘How long do you think we should carry on pretending that there’s nothing happening between us?’ Which, frankly, was a question Lucas had never had to address to any other women because other women had never needed persuading into his bed. Actually, it was a question he had not envisaged having to ask her, considering the circumstances that had brought them together. But he wanted her and there was no point having a mental tussle over the whys and wherefores or asking himself whether it made sense or not.
On this occasion, self-denial probably made sense, but Lucas knew himself and he knew that, given the option of going down the route of what made sense or the less sensible route of scratching an itch, then the less sensible route was going to win the day hands down every time.
He also knew that he wasn’t a man who was into breaking down barriers and jumping obstacles in order to get any woman between the sheets—and why would he do that anyway? This wasn’t a game of courtship that was going anywhere. It was a case of two adults who fancied one another marooned on a yacht for a couple of weeks..
In receipt of this blunt question, presented to her without the benefit of any pretty packaging, Katy’s eyes opened wide and her mouth fell open.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’ve seen the way you look at me,’ Lucas murmured, moving to sit on the bed right next to her, and depressing the mattress with his weight so that Katy had to shift to adjust her body and stop herself from sliding against him.
She should have bolted. His lazy, dark eyes on her were like lasers burning a hole right through the good, old-fashioned, grounded common sense that had dictated her behaviour all through her life—with the exception of those few disastrous months when she had fallen for Duncan.
The slow burning heat that had been coursing through her, the exciting tingle between her legs and the tender pinching of her sensitive nipples—all responses activated by being in his presence and feeling his cool fingers on her—were fast disappearing under a tidal wave of building anger.
‘The