Diana Palmer - Escapade

Everything had changed a few hours earlier on the beach. Now he didn’t recall her nurturing ways. He wanted her, but he didn’t know how to reconcile that with his affection for her, with their friendship.

With other women, relationships were simple. His lovers were experienced, sophisticated women who could settle for sex without emotional involvement. He knew that wouldn’t be possible with Amanda. He equated Amanda and sex with marriage and children and forever after. Since marriage had become an impossibility for him, he had to reconcile himself to keeping his hands off Amanda. Tonight had been a moment out of time. She’d sensed his rejection at once and with grace and dignity. He had to make sure that he didn’t put her in that position twice, because he didn’t like seeing Amanda humbled. It didn’t suit her spirited nature at all. He’d spent years prodding her temper, helping her stand up to her father. Now he had to keep her on the right track.

He flung open a file folder and buried his thoughts in business.

CHAPTER THREE

THE OCEAN OFF Opal Cay was every shade of mingled green and blue in the color spectrum. Like the rest of the Bahama Islands chain, the water was crystalline, unpolluted. Virginal.

Amanda smiled at the unspoiled beauty and hoped that this exquisite sugar-white beach would never go the way of so many other beautiful coves that now boasted casino and hotel complexes.

She pushed her hands deeper into the pockets of her short white robe. She’d just been swimming, and her slender body was still wet, like her long black hair. She lifted it to the ever-present breeze, feeling the hot, wet wind pull at it, drying it. Under the robe was a yellow bikini with red stripes, the first unconventional statement she’d made since her father’s death.

She knew she should have felt something. Sadness. Grief. Loss. Emptiness. There was only relief. What a eulogy for Harrison Sanford Todd.

“I must be heartless,” she said aloud.

“Why?” came a deep, cynically amused reply from over her shoulder.

She turned, her pale green eyes wide. They softened helplessly at the masculine perfection of the man who approached her. She pushed back her long, windblown hair to keep it out of her mouth in the crisp breeze. “I thought you were going to Nassau.”

“Not until eleven-thirty. It’s barely seven. Why are you out so early?”

“I dreamed about Dad,” she said. It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was close enough. She rammed her hands deep into her pockets. “I wish I could miss him.”

“He wasn’t exactly a family man, Amanda. Don’t waste time on unnecessary guilt. He gave what he could, and so did you. Let that be enough,” Josh said in his soft, deep Texas accent. His dark eyes flashed like the reflection of the ocean in sunlight as he looked down at her from his imposing height. “Didn’t I mention the undertow and the danger of swimming alone?”

“You probably did,” she agreed with a grin. “And I probably didn’t listen. But I only went out a little way. I’m not terribly adventurous. Yet,” she added.

He smiled. “You’ll get around to it. It’s a big world.”

“And full of sharks,” she mused.

His eyes narrowed as he glanced seaward. A smoking cigar dangled from one lean, darkly tanned hand, its only adornment a thin gold watch buried in the thick hair of his strong wrist. He was wearing white slacks with a sedate gray T-shirt, tediously conventional. It was like flying a false flag, because there was nothing, absolutely nothing, conventional about Joshua Cabe Lawson, as his business adversaries had learned to their cost.

He towered over her, despite the fact that she was tall and slender. His blond good looks and superb physical presence drew women like a magnet. His scandalous reputation had dimmed only briefly during the time he was seeing Terri. Although Josh had genuinely loved the woman, she’d left him because he didn’t want to get married. He was incapable of commitment except when it came to business matters. Then he was as dedicated as any workaholic.

Amanda, fresh out of college and brimming with ideas, had some small understanding of the aphrodisiac that a career could provide. She wanted desperately to have a chance to make the Todd Gazette ’s small job press grow to its full potential. The present manager, Ward Johnson, had been in his job so long that he just slogged along from day to day in the same old rut, never bothering to change anything at all. His first love was the weekly newspaper. The job press was only a worrying sideline to him, and like Josh, he wanted to close it down or sell off the equipment. Amanda didn’t. She knew it could pay for itself. If only it were run right!

Amanda loved working at the paper. Although she didn’t have a journalism degree, she did have one in business, and she had some innovative ideas about how to upgrade the antiquated equipment, reorganize the print shop, and structure the job descriptions of the staff who overlapped both businesses. But repressed from childhood by her overbearing, domineering father, she hadn’t yet learned how to be aggressive without being offensive, and when she made gentle suggestions, no one would listen to her. Least of all the man at her side.

She looked up at him and wondered idly why he never made her feel smothered even when he did exercise his protective instincts. For a year after she’d come home from a finishing school in Switzerland, he’d hounded her until she’d entered a local San Antonio college, late, at the age of nineteen.

Joshua had steered her toward college when her father hadn’t even noticed her lack of occupation. Women needed to train in a profession, Josh had insisted, and not be dependent on anyone else for a living—even a husband, if she ever married. She’d taken that one piece of advice and gone on to major in business and minor in marketing. She’d graduated summa cum laude while Josh watched her accept her diploma. Her father had been closing a deal in London.

Josh had gone into business with her father eight years before, and despite the fact that he seemed to hate almost everyone he associated with, he’d been kind to Amanda since the first time he’d seen her.

She remembered that meeting with amused delight. Tough Joshua Lawson had fallen into a prickly pear cactus because of her cat, Butch—a fourteen-pound monster of a cat with the disposition of a rattler. Amanda had been horrified that her pet was going to be strangled, but her compassion for Joshua had been even stronger than her fear for Butch. She’d rushed to get a pair of tweezers, and it had taken her twenty long minutes to pull out every cactus hair. She’d done it painstakingly, while a surprised and then amused Joshua sat docilely and allowed a personal invasion that he would have tolerated from no one else. Amanda hadn’t known that until years later, when he’d confessed it with rueful amusement.

“What are you smiling about?” he murmured.

“The prickly pear cactus,” she said immediately.

He chuckled. “Yes. The prickly pear. What ever became of that blue-eyed cat?”

“He died, remember? While he was staying with Mirri last year,” she replied, a little sad.

“Tiger Lily,” he muttered.

His reference to Mirri made her smile. “Her temper is no worse than yours,” she pointed out. “And she’s the best friend I’ve got.”

“She’s a lot like you,” he said disgustedly. “Incredibly repressed and hopelessly locked into a self-destructive pattern of solitary living.”

“Well, thank you for that professional analysis,” she said sarcastically. “And you aren’t supposed to notice that Mirri’s repressed,” she reminded him gently. “She certainly doesn’t give that impression to strangers.”