Anne McAllister - Mcgillivray's Mistress

She blinked, then shook her head. “With you? I don’t think so.”

He stared at her, astonished at her refusal. “What do you mean, you don’t think so?” He was annoyed that she’d said no, more annoyed that she didn’t seem to recognize him, and most annoyed by the fact that the closer he got to her the more gorgeous she became.

He wanted to see flaws. There weren’t any.

“Maybe you don’t remember me.” It was possible, he supposed. He didn’t think he’d changed that much, but she sure as hell didn’t look the way she used to!

“Oh, I remember you,” she said, and gave him a blinding smile as she slipped between him and the barstool. “That’s why I don’t want to.”

And leaving him standing there staring after her, Fiona sashayed out the door, letting it swing shut after her.

Behind him, over the sounds of the steel drum band playing “Yellow Bird,” Lachlan heard Joaquin and Lars Erik hooting.

“Well, helloooo, darlin’,” a sultry voice sounded in his ear, and Lachlan turned to see a busty blonde sitting on the barstool behind him.

“Hello, yourself,” he said, teeth still clenched, but managing a smile to meet her own.

She put a hand on his arm and slid off the stool to stand next to him, almost pressed against him. “You’re Lachlan, aren’t you? The one they call ‘the gorgeous goalie’?”

“Some people have said that.” He rubbed the back of his neck.

“Some people are very perceptive,” the blonde purred. She smiled. “I was just heading out for a little walk on the beach. Want to go for a swim?”

“Why not?” It sounded a hell of a lot more appealing than listening to Joaquin and Lars Erik snickering into their beers. He looped an arm around the blonde’s shoulders and steered her out the door.

Fiona, after her grand exit, hadn’t gone far. He spotted her standing on the porch of the gift shop talking to Carin. She didn’t look his way.

Lachlan looked hers—and gave her a long slow smug smile as he and the blonde walked past.

“I knew I’d get lucky,” the blonde was giggling. “I’ve got my red panties on tonight.”

Deliberately Lachlan nibbled the blonde’s ear. “Not for long,” he promised her.

He didn’t remember whether she’d been wearing red panties or not. He didn’t remember anything about her. He’d gone back to England two days later—and the only thing he remembered from the holiday was blasted annoying Fiona!

“The fish that got away,” Joaquin called her.

“Like letting in a goal,” Lars Erik said, “when you’ve kept a clean sheet.”

“We’ll see about that,” Lachlan muttered.

He hadn’t had time then. But when he came back this past winter, sailing over on the boat he’d bought in Nassau, making plans to move to the island permanently that spring, he’d taken another shot.

Hugh had been going out with a model he’d met who was doing a honeymoon photo shoot, so Lachlan had suggested a double date—a blind double date.

“Why not?” He’d made the suggestion casually. “Just ask Fiona Whatshername along.”

Hugh had raised his eyebrows. “She’s busy with her dad.”

“I’ll get someone to stay with her dad,” Lachlan had said. “It will be good for her.” He arranged for Maurice to go by and play dominos with Tom Dunbar and Hugh did the asking.

To say that Fiona had been surprised when Lachlan had been the one to pick her up would have been putting it mildly. She looked stricken when he turned up on the doorstep. Then she said, relieved, “Oh, you must have come to see my dad—”

“No. I’m here for you.”

“But—”

She looked like she might protest. But in the end, she’d let herself be drawn out on to the porch and down the steps. “We’re meeting Hugh and his girl at Beaches.”

“Beaches?” Fiona’s eyes widened.

Beaches was the nicest place on the island. Not a place Hugh could afford.

“I’ll pay,” Lachlan had told him. “You want to impress this girl, don’t you?”

“Yeah. But…” Hugh had shaken his head. “Do you want to impress Fiona Dunbar?”

Lachlan hadn’t known what he wanted to do with Fiona Dunbar. Then. Later that night he’d known exactly what he wanted—

He hadn’t got it.

She’d damned near drowned him instead.

These days he wasn’t touching Fiona Dunbar with a ten-foot pole!

Other than the sympathy note he’d sent when Hugh had told him of her father’s death in March, he’d had no communication with her at all. In fact, ever since he’d moved into the Moonstone a month ago, he’d done his best to avoid her.

Of course he still noticed her. Hard not to when the island wasn’t that big and she was still the most gorgeous woman around. But he didn’t have to have anything to do with her. Pelican Cay was big enough for both of them.

Try telling Fiona Dunbar that.

Less than a week after he’d opened the Moonstone, a letter to the editor had appeared in the local paper decrying the “standard branding” of the island. Fiona Dunbar, signing herself “a concerned citizen” made it sound like he was singlehandedly trying to undermine local culture.

For God’s sake, he was trying to salvage an abandoned architectural treasure and turn it into something tasteful and profitable before time and the weather reduced it to kindling—out of which the artistic Ms. Dunbar would doubtless construct one of her bloody sculptures!

Tactfully as possible, he had attempted a letter to the editor of his own in reply.

A week later there had been another letter, this time about the local youth soccer team.

“People who are going to take advantage of local amenities,” the perennially concerned Ms. Dunbar had written, “should be willing to contribute their skills—however meager—to the betterment of the island’s children.”

Him, she meant. Teach them soccer, she meant.

“Well, it is how you made your millions,” Hugh pointed out.

“It would be such a great thing for the kids,” Carin Campbell agreed.

So did Maurice and Estelle. Their grandsons would love a soccer team with a real coach for a change.

“Or don’t you think you can?” Molly had said in that baiting little-sisterly way she could still dredge up in a pinch.

Of course he damned well could.

And so he had. For the past month Lachlan had spent hours with a rag-tag bunch of ten- to fifteen-year-old kids who called themselves the Pelicans. The Pelicans were never going to win the World Cup, but they were a lot more capable now than they had been when he’d started working with them. Marcus Cash was turning into a pretty decent striker, Tom Dunbar, Fiona’s nephew, was a good defender, and Maurice’s grandson, Lorenzo, had the makings of a born goalkeeper.

Lachlan was proud of them. He was proud of himself as their coach. He was a damned good teacher, and he’d have liked Fiona the ferret to see that—but she’d never once come to watch them play.

She never said a word to him.

She didn’t have to. Her sculpture said it all.

Lachlan shoved himself up from his chair and stalked across the room to glare once again at her message.

And as the full morning sun illuminated Fiona Dunbar’s trash masterpiece, he saw what he’d been unable to make out before—the pair of red women’s panties that flapped—like a red flag in front of a bull—from the sculpture’s outstretched arm.

THE POUNDING ON HER DOOR woke her.

Fiona groaned, then pried open an eyelid and peered at the clock: 7:22.

7:22? Who in God’s name could possibly want to talk to her at 7:22 in the morning? No one who knew her, that was for sure.

Never an early riser, Fiona preferred to start her day when the sun was high in the sky.