demanded.
“Mmm. Like you’ve been smacked with a frozen fish.”
He wiped whatever look he had on his face off. He felt as though he’d been smacked, all right, and not with a frozen fish. Smacked with awareness of her. He had the ugly feeling she wasn’t as innocent as she appeared. In fact, Connor had the ugly feeling that she might be toying with him.
He forced himself to find his voice. It had to be addressed. “You really should have left your hair up.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
What was he doing talking about her hair? He needed to tell her the bathing suit wasn’t going to work. At all. “You don’t want to get it in your face.”
“I’m not planning on getting my face wet.”
“You have to get your face wet. To swim.”
She didn’t look the least convinced. She dismissed him with a little wave of her hand. “Oh, well, maybe next time I’ll get my face wet.”
Address it, he ordered himself. “Uh, that bathing suit—”
“Yes?” Her voice was husky.
“—is really nice.”
Now, that he had not meant to say. At all. Isabella was beaming at him.
“—but, it isn’t, er, really made for swimming.”
Unless he was mistaken, and he was pretty sure he was not, the little minx was lapping up his discomfort.
“It’s called a bathing suit,” she said stubbornly.
“Maybe it’s for sunbathing. I mean, if you were to dive in the water with that thing...”
His voice trailed away.
“I’m not planning on diving today, either,” she informed him primly.
Wait a minute. Who was in charge here? He suspected, in that bathing suit, she was. “Well, I wasn’t planning on that, either, but—”
“The bathing suit will have to suffice,” she said. The schoolteacher voice was very at odds with the drop-dead gorgeous woman standing in front of him. “Selection—”
Seduction? No, no, she’d said selection, not seduction.
“—is very limited in Monte Calanetti at this time of year. I ordered some other things on the internet. They should arrive soon.”
How soon was soon, he wanted to demand. Maybe they could postpone.
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Isabella said, “You already said it’s not as if I’m training for the national swim team.”
She had him there. He wanted to teach her enough to hold her own if she fell out of a boat. Or in the river. Or got carried away unexpectedly by a current. He wanted to teach her enough that being around water did not make that pulse go crazy in her throat, like a rabbit being chased by dogs. The way it was now.
Was that because she was about to get wet? Or was it because she was trying out her bold new self on him?
Connor considered, again, postponing. He glanced at her face. A tiny little smile was playing across her lips before she doused it. She was toying with him!
“Get in the water,” he snapped. The sooner she was covered up with anything, including water, the better. If the bathing suit fell off, or melted, they’d deal with that when it happened. Just as they had dealt with the shower catastrophe.
But really, how much could one man take?
Isabella stuck her toe in and yanked it back out. She made a face. She hugged herself, either not as confident in the skimpy suit as she wanted him to believe or suddenly aware that she was tackling something she was afraid of.
“I can’t just jump in,” she decided.
She could sit on the edge of the pool, reach out and put her hands around his neck... Connor gave himself a shake. This was going to be quite hard enough! “There are stairs at that end.”
She looked where he was pointing and saw the stairs entering the pool at the shallow end. She eyed her dropped caftan for a second, as if she was considering putting it back on for the short walk to the stairs. Or putting it back on and fleeing.
Instead, she tilted her chin up and went over there, wiggling her hips self-consciously the whole way. It gave Connor plenty of opportunity to study how much of her was not covered by those skimpy green scraps of fabric. It also gave him plenty of opportunity to set his face into a mask of indifference.
At the top of the stairs, she repeated the put-one-toe-in-and-withdraw-it procedure. Still in the water, he slogged his way over to that end of the pool and stood close to the bottom of the stairs.
“At this rate we are still going to be here tomorrow,” he groused out loud, instead of saying what he really wanted, which was get in the water, dammit.
She held up a hand, a very Italian gesture that warned him not to hurry her, and then Isabella proceeded to get into the water with painful slowness.
AS CONNOR WATCHED, Isabella got on the first stair leading into the pool. She was acting as if the world was tilting and her life depended on her hanging on to the handrail.
The world was tilting, and Connor felt as if his life depended on her getting in the water. With the water at her ankles, she paused there, allowing him to wallow in the full impact of that bathing suit. Was that a piercing, right below her belly button? Was his jaw clenched?
“The easiest way is just to jump in,” he told her. Yes, definitely clenched. He deliberately relaxed it.
“Never let it be said I’m easy.”
He contemplated her. Her command of English and all its nuances and slang was not good enough for her to have meant that the way it sounded. Though the beautiful young widow was probably about the furthest thing from easy that he had ever met.
She went down one more step. Now she was up to her knees. She had both hands on the handrail. Her knuckles were white.
“I thought the water would be warmer,” she said.
“It’s perfect.” His jaw was clenching again.
She wrinkled her nose, letting him know their ideas of perfect were different, which would be a very good thing for him to keep in mind, because a bathing suit like that made a man think he could make anything work out, even against impossible odds.
And the odds were impossible. Everything about them was different. He was large, she was tiny. He was powerful, she was fragile. He was cynical, she was innocent. They were culturally a million miles apart. He’s seen colleagues fall for the seemingly exotic girls of foreign lands. It never worked.
He tried to hold those thoughts as, finally, Isabella was at the bottom of the steps, up to her cute little belly button in water. It was a little dark mole under her belly button, not a piercing. He was not sure which was sexier.
Isabella was still holding onto the handrail as if her life depended on it. He tried to remember why he had thought getting her in the water would be easier on him. It was not.
“Let go of the handrail and walk over to me,” he said.
“Not yet.” Her voice had a little quaver to it.
And that changed everything. Because it reminded him this wasn’t about him. It wasn’t about recalculating impossible odds. It was about her, giving her a few tools to deal with the harsh realities of life. And he could not let her scanty little bathing suit distract him from that. That’s one of the things he was trained to do. Sift through information very quickly,