Amy Andrews - The Heat of the Night

He sighed. He was not looking forward to this.

He shucked off his shoes and stripped off his socks leaving them at the row of lopsided palm trees that formed a natural demarcation between beach and land. Or what was left of them anyway.

Crescent Cove’s beloved palm-tree avenue, which hugged the long curve of beach, was looking equally devastated. Whole trees had been ripped out by the roots, plucked clean from the ground and thrown around as if they’d been mere matchsticks, some still lying on the path or beach wherever they’d been hurled.

It would take a lot of years to build it back to its former glory.

The hot sun beat down on Luke’s neck, a far cry from chilly London, and he shrugged out of his jacket too. He undid his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves on his business shirt. He turned his phone to silent and slipped it in his back pocket. He didn’t want to be disturbed when he spoke to her and he’d already had three urgent texts from the office.

Taking a deep, fortifying breath, he stepped onto the beach and headed towards the woman he’d known nearly all his life, his footsteps squeaking in the powdery sand.

* * *

Claudia stared at the wreck before her, a sense of helplessness and despair overwhelming her. She should have known that only a cyclone named Luke could cause this much damage.

She refused to give into the harsh burn of tears scalding her eye sockets.

She would not cry.

Crying was for wimps and she was not a wimp. She’d spent a year of her life renovating her beloved family resort and just because it lay in a shambled ruin in front of her didn’t mean it was time to give into a fit of girly histrionics.

She held tight to the comfort of her clipboard. They would recover from this. They had to.

But how? a little voice asked somewhere in the back of her brain, bleating away in time to the distant drone of generators that had filled the air for days now. The same voice she’d been hearing every time she stood on the beach and was confronted by the true horror of the destruction of the only home she’d ever known.

Well, there was the main resort building—the original structure—for a start. Even now its white stucco façade gleamed beneath the full morning sun like a beacon amidst the rubble, its sturdy stone construction having somehow miraculously survived Mother Nature’s fury with only minimal damage.

How, Claudia had no idea.

How had the dinosaur—or White Elephant as Luke had coined it—managed to survive when the newer edition bungalows, made to the highest ever cyclone specifications, had perished?

It didn’t make any sense. It had been four days since Cyclone Luke, a huge category-five juggernaut, had crossed the coast right on top of them, and it still didn’t make any sense.

None of it did.

Tears threatened again and Claudia blinked them back. She refused to cry as Avery had done. Tears wouldn’t get the Tropicana back on its feet and Claudia was determined to hold it all together if it killed her. She’d been doing that since Luke had deserted her to run the place by herself, since their respective parents had handed the keys over to them and entrusted twenty years of their life’s work to their children.

She would not be cowed by the mammoth task ahead of her just as she’d refused to be cowed by Luke’s ultimatum this time last year to have the resort turned around in twelve months—or else!

She hadn’t needed him to elaborate on his threat—and it really hadn’t been an issue because she had turned it around. They’d had a bumper summer, there was money in the bank and they’d been poised to welcome their best ever winter season in over a decade.

And then along came Cyclone Luke. As determined as the other Luke in her life to take away everything she’d ever known and loved.

‘Bloody hell, Claude. You’re never going to recover from this.’

Claudia blinked as the eerily familiar voice behind her caused everything inside her—her heartbeat, her breath, the metabolism in her cells—to come to a standstill.

Luke?

She turned and there he was. Standing right there. Every tall, lean, clean-shaven inch of him. Close enough to touch. Close enough to feel a very familiar pull down deep and low.

Luke.

The boy she’d hero-worshipped, the teenager she’d crushed on, the man who’d disappointed her more than she’d ever thought possible when he’d turned his back on their legacy.

You’re never going to recover from this?

His words were like a jolt to the chest from a defibrillator and then everything surged back to life. Her lungs dragged in a swift harsh breath, her heart kicked her in the ribcage with all the power of a mule, her cells started metabolising again at warp speed.

You’re never going to recover from this?

Oh, no! He had to be kidding. This had to be a monumental joke. A very bad one.

But no, here he was, in a freaking business shirt and trousers. On the beach. Gloating. A tsunami of emotion Claudia had been stuffing down for four days—hell, for the last year—rose in her chest and demanded to be expressed.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

Luke’s eyes widened at the distinct lack of welcome turning her normally chirpy voice deeper. Darker. He shrugged. ‘I saw it on the tele...I just...came.’

And he had. As much as he’d resented the weird pull this place still had over him, he couldn’t not put in an appearance. Escaping to the other side of the world a decade ago, immersing himself in a completely different life had dulled the pull, but one look at the devastation and it had roared back to life.

Claudia blinked at his explanation, then let loose a laugh that bordered on hysteria. But if she didn’t laugh she was going to cry. And it wasn’t going to be dainty little London tears he was no doubt used to from his bevy of gorgeous sophisticated Brits, it was going to be a cyclonic, north Queensland snot fest.

And she’d be damned if she’d break down in front of Luke.

‘How’d you even get here?’ she demanded. ‘The road is still cut in both directions.’

‘Jonah picked me up in his chopper from Cairns airport.’

Claudia vaguely remembered hearing the chopper a little while ago and she silently cursed Jonah for being so damned handy. She made a mental note to tell Avery to withhold sex from him as his punishment for fraternising with the enemy. Because as far as she was concerned, Luke Hargreaves was public enemy number one.

Not that Avery would—those two were still so loved up it was sickening.

‘Well, you came, you saw,’ she snapped. ‘Now you can leave. Everything’s fine and dandy here.’

Fine and dandy? Luke looked at the unholy wreck in front of him. It was the complete antithesis of fine and dandy. He shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘I’m not going to do that, Claude.’

Claudia gave an inelegant snort. ‘Why not? Isn’t that what you do? Leave?’

‘I thought I could...’ Luke flicked his gaze to the flattened resort ‘...help.’

‘Help?’ Her voice sounded high even to her own ears. ‘Now you want to help?’

‘Claude...’ Luke sighed, unsurprised she was still carrying a grudge that he hadn’t wanted anything to do with their parents’ giant folly when they’d decided to retire and pass on the management to their children last year. ‘I can help with the clean-up. And there will be partnership decisions that need to be made.’

A sudden surge of anger burned white-hot in Claudia’s chest. Partnership decisions? What the hell? Did he think she’d be too distraught to not understand the true meaning behind such a casual announcement?

She drew herself up to her full five feet one inch, and jammed a hand on her hip. ‘You think you have the right to waltz in here—’