Jane Porter - Love Islands - Red-Hot Sunsets

In short, she had managed to be as offensive as any human being was capable of being and, to his astonishment, he had done nothing to redress the balance by exerting the sort of authority that would have stalled her mid-sentence.

He had the power in his hands to ruin her career but the thought had not crossed his mind.

She might have been in his company for all the wrong reasons, but he was no longer suspicious of her motives, especially when she had no ability to contact anyone at all, and her openness was strangely engaging.

It was also an uncomfortable reminder as to how far he normally went when it came to getting exactly what he wanted, and that he had surrounded himself with people who had forgotten how to contradict him.

Without giving himself a chance to back out, he headed to his quarters and did the unthinkable: he swapped his khakis for a pair of swimming trunks that hadn’t seen the light of day in months, if not years, and a tee-shirt.

Barefoot, grabbing a towel on the way, he headed up to the pool area where he knew Katy was going to be.

She had been oddly reticent about using the swimming pool and, chin tilted at the mutinous angle he was fast becoming accustomed to, she had finally confessed that she didn’t like using stuff that didn’t belong to her.

‘Would you rather the swimsuits all sit unused in cupboards until it’s time for the lot to be thrown away?’

‘Would you throw away perfectly good clothes?’

‘I would if it was cluttering up my space. You wouldn’t have to borrow them if you’d thought ahead and brought a few of your own.’

‘I had no idea I would be anywhere near a pool,’ she had been quick to point out, and he had dealt her a slashing grin, enjoying the way the colour had rushed into her cheeks.

‘And now you are. Roll with the punches, would be my advice.’

His cabin was air-conditioned, and as he headed up towards the pool on the upper deck he was assailed by heat. It occurred to him that she might not be there, that she might have gone against her original plan of reading in the afternoon and working on ideas for an app to help the kids in her class with their homework, something he had discovered after some probing. If she wasn’t there, he’d be bloody disappointed, and that nearly stopped him in his tracks because disappointment wasn’t something he associated with the opposite sex.

He enjoyed the company of women. He wasn’t promiscuous but the truth was that no woman had ever had the power to hold his attention for any sustained length of time, so he had always been the first to do the dispatching. By which point, he was always guiltily relieved to put the relationship behind him. In that scenario, disappointment wasn’t something that had ever featured.

Katy, with her quirky ways and forthright manner, was yanking him along by some sort of invisible chain and he was uneasily aware that it was something he should really put a stop to.

Indeed, he paused, considering that option. It would take him less than a minute to make it back down to his office where he could resume work.

Except...would he be able to? Or would he sit at his desk allowing his mind idly to drift off to the taboo subject of his sexy captive?

Lucas had no idea what he hoped to gain by hitting the upper deck and joining her by the pool. So what if she was attractive? The world was full of attractive women and he knew, without a shred of vanity, that he could have pretty much any of them he wanted.

Playing 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?’