The touch of his fingers on her bare skin sent a tingle of sensation rippling through her, a sensation that was as pleasurable as it was disturbing. She shook herself free. ‘Don’t you listen?’ She looked up at him...and wished she hadn’t. The blue of his eyes bedazzled her; the arrogant tilt of his head alarmed her. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
‘I’ll join you.’
‘I don’t want you to join me. I want to be left alone.’ Her voice had a breathless quality. ‘I have some thinking to do—’
‘About the cottage?’
‘Yes.’ How unfair that a man should have such lustrous and seductively long black eyelashes. ‘About the cottage.’
‘We can stand here all day,’ he said equably, ‘with you refusing to walk unless I go away...which I warn you I’m not about to do...or we can stroll along the beach... together. I’m going to be here for the summer, your grandmother tells me you’ll be spending most of your weekends here, too. You apparently don’t have a man in your life at the moment, and at present I am also unattached. We have a history, you and I...so why don’t we add to it!’ His lips twisted in a smile. ‘Just a summer affair, Greer—what do you think?’
Had Greer not been so stunned by his suggestion, she would have cut him off the moment he made it. But she was stunned...and not only stunned, outraged. Yet to be honest she had to admit he must feel it perfectly in order to make such a suggestion; after all, when she was seventeen she had allowed him to believe she’d slept with Brad Pierson...and just minutes ago her grandmother had remarked on her ‘easy come, easy go’ relationships with men. What Gran didn’t know was that the men she dated now were—because she wanted it that way—just friends, and nothing more.
‘You’re suggesting we have an affair?’ Greer raised her eyebrows mockingly. ‘In spite of my...promiscuous behavior? Don’t you think that might be dangerous—for you—all things considered?’
‘There are ways to...get around...that.’ A breeze gusted from the lake, tossing a heavy strand of hair over his forehead; gold gleamed at his wrist as he raised a hand and impatiently raked the strand back into place.
‘You’ve changed a lot.’ He really had beautiful hands, she reflected distractedly; long-fingered, elegant, with neatly trimmed spatulate nails. Just watching him thread those fingers through his glossy black hair had sent an odd dark shiver spiraling to some indefinable place deep inside her. ‘You’re not the man I once knew.’ Her tone was icy. ‘You say we have a history. We do, and that’s all it is. History! As far as I’m concerned you are history!’
He sidestepped her and blocked her way as she tried to go down the stairs. Now that he was standing on the step below her, their faces were on the same level...and she was staring right into those lethal blue eyes.
‘I’ve always found it impossible to understand,’ he said roughly, ‘why someone as lovely as you would need to look to a married man like Brad Pierson for satisfaction. You could have had any man you wanted. Why did you have to set out to seduce him? Good God.’ His voice had hardened. ‘I’d known him for years and I’d have sworn he was the last person to have gotten involved in an adulterous affair.’
‘You thought you knew Brad but you didn’t. You thought you knew me but you didn’t.’ Greer couldn’t keep the bitterness from her tone as memories of that long-ago summer rushed in again...
And shock froze her as, with a swift and totally unexpected movement, Colby grasped her by the shoulders and jerked her toward him. Before she could even gasp, he took her mouth in a deliberate and soul-shattering kiss.
It was over in a few seconds. Nothing was left of the abrupt assault but his harsh breathing, and her own...and the bruised tingling of her lips. She and Colby had never touched before, in any sexual way. This...this attack had her cringing from him as surely as if he slapped her.
‘Don’t ever,’ she whispered raggedly, ‘try to do that again.’ She stared at him through blurred eyes, seeing the dark mass of his hair, the bronzed color of his face, the brilliant blue of his eyes...
The cynically twisted slash that was his mouth.
He had kissed her. In days gone by she would have sold her soul for one kiss, just one kiss, from Colby Daken.
She would never have believed it would come to this. A tiny sob escaped her, before she could stifle it.
‘Very good,’ he said softly. ‘Very convincing. And oh, my God, very tantalizing. This summer—’ slowly, eyes never leaving hers, he ran the tip of his index finger over the chiseled curve of his upper lip, as if he would capture and store forever the memory of his stolen kiss ‘—is going to be far more fun than I’d expected. And before it ends, my darling Greer, I shall take you to my bed. And there I’ll find out just what it is about you that can make a man like Bradley Pierson succumb to your advances while his wife is in hospital waiting to give birth to their child. A challenge.’ His breath hissed in through narrowed nostrils. ‘That’s what you are. And one I accept.’
With a self-assured swing of his shoulders, he turned away and bounded down the steps. A moment later, she heard him open the screen door at the east side of his cottage; and then she heard the door clatter shut again.
Her mind in turmoil, Greer walked slowly down the steps, across the lawn and out onto the sandy white beach.
Why had she agreed to come with Gran to the cottage? Oh, what a mistake that had been. How she wished she had never come...
Still, when she thought of Jamie, and his troubled little mind, she acknowledged that perhaps something good would come out of this summer. Jem would get to know her great-grandson, and with her wonderful way of dealing with children, she might well be the means of drawing the boy from his state of unhappiness and confusion.
Had it not been for that, she would have reneged on her promise to Jem, and insisted they go back to the city right now.
She couldn’t. There was Jamie to consider.
She would just have to handle Colby as best she could, when he started his campaign to get her into his bed.
For that must never happen.
If she slept with him, he would discover she was a virgin. He would know she had never slept with Brad Pierson....
And he would have no option but to come up with another scenario, one that had obviously never crossed his mind.
It was Eleanor who had been involved with Brad. Eleanor, Colby’s own wife, the woman he’d loved so blindly it had verged on idolatry...and it would have destroyed him, Greer had believed then and still believed now... if he’d discovered she had betrayed him.
And this, of course, was why she’d agreed to cover up for her cousin. Oh, not for Eleanor’s sake—she had despised the woman for her adulterous behavior—but for Colby’s, to protect him from the truth that would have shattered him.
Now all Colby had left of his wife were his precious memories. And she, Greer, would do anything in her power to keep those memories intact.
Lisa Pierson and her three children turned up at Lake Trillium that afternoon.
Greer didn’t see them arrive. She’d gone out to the shed in the backyard after lunch, and had spent a couple of hours sorting out tools and planters and half-empty packages of this, that and the other, telling herself she was just getting things organized in case Jem had to sell the cottage...but all the time knowing in her heart that she was trying to avoid Colby.
Around four-thirty, she had just flopped down on an old tree stump outside the shed, and was wiping a grubby hand over her brow, when she heard the back door of the cottage swing open. Expecting to see Jem, she looked up with a smile...the smile changing to an exclamation of astonishment when she saw the woman coming down the path toward her, a petite brunette in her late thirties, dressed in a navy blouse and a pair of