Christy McKellen - Mills & Boon Showcase

‘And we—’

‘Enough with the talking,’ he growled, and he silenced her with a kiss.

A kiss to seal their bargain. A kiss to tell her what words could not.

But the kiss rapidly escalated to something hot and hungry and urgent. She matched his urgency with lips, teeth, tongue. He let go her hands so he could pull her tight. Her curves shaped to him as though they were made to fit and she wound her arms around his neck to pull him closer. The strap of her yellow dress slid off her shoulder. He wanted to slide the dress right off her.

He broke away from the kiss, his breath hard and ragged. ‘We’re out of here. To get some privacy.’

‘Wh...what about the shop?’ Her own ragged breathing made her barely coherent.

‘How many books have you sold today?’

‘Just...just a few.’

‘Yeah. Not many customers. Too many gossips.’ He stroked the bare warm skin on her shoulder, exalted in her shiver of response.

‘They did seem to spend more time lurking around corners and looking at me than browsing,’ she admitted.

Her hands slid through his hair with an unconscious sensuality that made him shudder with want.

‘You shut down the computer. I’ll set the alarm.’

‘But Ida...’

‘Don’t worry about Ida.’ He could easily make up to his aunt for any drop in sales figures.

Sandy started to say something. He silenced her with another kiss. She moaned a throaty little sound that made him all the more determined to get her out of here and to somewhere private, where he could kiss her without an audience.

The old-fashioned doorbell on the top of the shop door jangled loudly.

Sandy froze in his arms. Then she pulled away from him, cheeks flushed, eyes unfocused. Her quiet groan of frustration echoed his. She pressed a quick, hard kiss on his mouth and looked up wordlessly at him.

To anyone coming into the store they would look as guilty as the pair of teenagers they’d once been. He rolled his eyes. Sandy started to shake with repressed giggles.

He kept his arm firmly around her as they turned to face the two middle-aged women who had entered the shop. Both friends of his mother.

Two sets of eyebrows had risen practically to their hairlines.

News of kiss number two for the day would be rapidly telegraphed through the town.

And he didn’t give a damn.

‘Sorry, ladies,’ he said, in a voice that put paid to any argument. ‘This shop is closed.’

CHAPTER TEN

DESTINATION? SOMEWHERE THEY could have privacy. Purpose? To talk more freely about what had happened to each other in the twelve years since she’d left Dolphin Bay. And Sandy didn’t give a flying fig that the two bemused ladies Ben had ousted from Bay Books stood hands on hips and watched as she and Ben hastened away from the shop.

Even just metres down the street she fell out of step with Ben and had to skip to catch up. He turned to wait for her, suppressed laughter still dancing around his mouth, and extended his hand for her to take.

Sandy hesitated for only a second before she slid her fingers through his. Linked hands would make quite a statement to the good folk of Dolphin Bay. Anticipation and excitement throbbed through her as he tightened his warm, strong grip and pulled her closer. She smiled up at him, her breath catching in her throat at his answering smile.

When she’d very first held hands with Ben the simple act had been a big deal for her. Most of her schoolfriends had already had sex with their boyfriends by the age of eighteen. Not her. She’d never met a boy she’d wanted to do more with than kiss. When she’d met Ben she’d still been debating the significance of hands held with just palms locked or, way sexier, with fingers entwined.

And Ben?

Back then he’d had no scars.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked, surprised when her voice came out edged with nervousness.

‘My place,’ he said. His voice didn’t sound nervous in the slightest.

Did he live at the hotel? That would make sense. Maybe in an apartment as luxurious as the room where she was staying.

‘Do you remember my family’s old boathouse?’ he asked as he led her down the steps in front of the hotel.

‘Of course I do,’ she said, and she felt herself colour. Thirty years old and blushing at the memory of that ramshackle old boathouse. Dear heaven, she hoped he didn’t notice.

On the sand outside the boathouse, in the shelter of Ben’s father’s beached dinghies, she and Ben had progressed from first base to not-ready-to-progress-further-than-third.

She glanced quickly up at Ben. Oh, yes, he remembered too. The expression in those deep blue eyes made that loud and clear.

She blushed a shade pinker and shivered at the memory of all that thwarted teen sexuality—and at the thought of how it might feel to finally do something about it if she and Ben got to that stage this time around.

‘I live in the boathouse,’ he said.

‘You live there?’ She didn’t know what else to say that would not come out sounding ill-mannered.

Instead, she followed Ben across the sand in silence, wondering why a successful businessman would choose to live in something that was no more than a shack.

But the structure that sat a short distance to the right of the hotel bore little resemblance to the down-at-heel structure of her memory. Like so much of Dolphin Bay, it had changed beyond recognition.

‘Wow! I’m impressed,’ she said.

Ben’s remodelled boathouse home looked like something that could star on a postcard. Supported by piers on the edge of the bay, its dock led out into the water. Timber-panelled walls were weathered to a silvery grey in perfect harmony with the corrugated iron of the peaked roof. Window trim and carriage lamps had been picked out in a deep dusky blue. Big tubs of purple hydrangeas in glazed blue pots sat either side of the door.

Ben leaned down to pluck a dead leaf from one of the plants without even seeming to realise he did it. She wouldn’t have taken him for a gardener—but then she knew so very little of what interests he might have developed in the years since they’d last been together at this rich-in-memories part of the beach.

‘The boathouse was the only part of the guesthouse to survive the fire,’ Ben said. He pushed open the glossy blue door. ‘Jesse lived here before he went away. I had it remodelled as guest accommodation, but liked it so much I kept it for myself.’

‘I can see why,’ she said. ‘I envy you.’

A large ceramic dog bowl filled with water, hand-painted with the words ‘Hobo Drinks Here’, sat just outside the door. She remembered the look of devotion in the dog’s big eyes and Ben’s obvious love for him.

‘Where’s your adorable dog?’ she asked, stepping through the door he held open for her, fully expecting the retriever to give Ben a boisterous greeting.

‘Mum dog-sits him the days I can’t take him to work with me,’ he said. ‘Seems she always has a houseful of strays. He fits right in.’

Sandy was about to say something about his mother, but the words were stopped by her second, ‘Wow!’ as Ben stepped aside and she got her first glimpse of the interior of the boathouse.

She only had a moment to take in a large open-plan space, bleached timber and shades of white, floor-to-ceiling windows facing the water at the living room end and a vast wooden bed at the other.

The thought that it would be a fabulous location for an advertising shoot barely had time to register in her mind, because the door slammed shut behind them and she was in Ben’s arms.

* * *

Ben didn’t want to give a tour of the boathouse. He didn’t want to talk about the architectural work Jesse had done on the old building. He just wanted, at last, to have Sandy to himself.