as it turned out, had taken it and delivered it to the cabin she had been assigned. Lucas pushed open the door and Katy stood for a few seconds, looking at the luxurious bedroom suite, complete with a proper king-sized bed and a view of the blue ocean, visible through trendy oversized port holes. Lucas showed her a door that opened out onto a balcony and she followed him and stood outside in a setting that was impossibly romantic. Balmy air blew gently through her hair and, looking down, she saw dark waves slapping lazily against the side of the yacht. She was so conscious of him leaning against the railing next to her that she could scarcely breathe.
‘In that case, there’s an ample supply of laundered swimsuits and other items of clothing in the walk-in wardrobe in the cabin alongside yours. Feel free to help yourself.’
‘Why would that be?’
‘People forget things. Maria digs her heels in at throwing them out. I’ve stopped trying to convince her.’ He raked his fingers through his hair and watched as she half-opened her mouth, and that intensely physical charge rushed through him again.
‘Okay.’
‘You have the freedom of my yacht. I’ll work while I’m here and the time will fly past, just as long as we don’t get in one another’s way...’
LUCAS LOOKED AT the document he had been editing for half an hour, only to realise that he had hardly moved past the first two lines.
At this point in time, and after three days of enforced isolation on his yacht, he should have been powering through the intense backlog of work he had brought with him. Instead, he had been wasting time thinking about the woman sharing his space on his yacht.
Frustrated, he stood up, strolled towards the window and stared out, frowning, at a panoramic view of open sea. Every shade of blue and turquoise combined, in the distance, into a dark-blue line where the sea met the skyline. At a little after three, it was still very hot and very still, with almost no breeze at all rippling the glassy surface of the water.
He’d looked at this very skyline a hundred times in the past, stared through this very window of his office on the lower deck, and had never been tempted to leave it for the paradise beckoning outside. He’d never been good at relaxing, and indeed had often found himself succumbing to it more through necessity than anything else. Sitting around in the sun doing nothing was a waste of valuable time, as far as he was concerned; and on the few occasions he had been on weekend breaks with a woman he had found himself enduring the time spent playing tourist with a certain amount of barely concealed impatience.
He was a workaholic and the joys of doing nothing held zero appeal for him.
Yet, he was finding it difficult to concentrate. If he had noticed Katy’s delicate, ridiculous prettiness on day one, and thought he could studiously file it away as something he wasn’t going to allow to distract him, then he’d made a big mistake because the effect she was having on him was increasing with every second spent in her company.
He’d done his best to limit the time they were together. He’d reminded himself that, were it not for an unfortunate series of events, the woman wouldn’t even be on his yacht now, but for all his well-constructed, logical reasons for avoiding her his body remained stubbornly recalcitrant.
Perversely, the more uptight he felt in her company, the more relaxed she seemed to be in his.
Since when had the natural order of things been rearranged? For the first time in his life, he wasn’t calling the shots, and that was what was responsible for his lack of focus.
Being stuck on the yacht with Katy had made him realise that the sassy, independent career women he dated had not been as challenging as he had always liked to think they were. They’d all been as subservient and eager to please as any vacuous airhead keen to burn a hole in his bank account. In contrast, Katy didn’t seem to have a single filter when it came to telling him what she thought about...anything and everything.
So far, he had been regaled with her opinions on money, including his own. She had scoffed at the foolishness of racing towards power and status, without bothering to hide the fact that he was top of her list as a shining example of someone leading the race. She had quizzed him on what he did in his spare time, and demanded to know whether he ever did anything that was actually ordinary. She seemed to think that his lack of knowledge of the layout of his own private yacht’s kitchen was a shocking crime against humanity, and had then opined that there was such a thing as more money than sense.
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