Sharon Kendrick
SABRINA looked, and then looked again, her heart beating out a guilty beat while she tried to tell herself that her eyes were playing tricks on her. Because he couldn’t possibly be for real.
He was standing close to the water, close enough for her to be able to see the carved symmetry of his features. Chiselled cheekbones and a proud, patrician nose. The mouth was luscious—both hard and sensual—a mouth which looked as though it had kissed a lot of women in its time.
Only the eyes stopped the face from being too beautiful—they were too icily cold for perfection. Even from this distance, they seemed to glitter with a vital kind of energy and a black, irresistible kind of danger…
Oh, Lord, thought Sabrina in despair. What am I thinking of? She was not the kind of woman to be transfixed by complete strangers—especially not when she was alone and vulnerable in a foreign country. And while Venice was the most beautiful place on earth—she was there on her own.
On her own. Something she was still having to come to term with. Once again, guilt stabbed at her with piercing accuracy.
But still she watched him…
By the edge of the water, Guy felt his body tense with a sense of the unexpected, aware of the unmistakable sensation of being watched. He narrowed hard slate-grey eyes as they scanned the horizon, and his gaze was suddenly arrested by the sight of the woman who drifted in the gondola towards him. Madonna, he thought suddenly. Madonna.
The pale March sun caught a sheen of bright red-gold hair, drifting like a banner around her shoulders. He could see long, slender limbs and skin so pale it looked almost translucent. She’s English, he thought suddenly as their eyes clashed across the glittering water. And for one mad, reckless moment he thought about…what? Following her? Buying her a cup of coffee? His mouth hardened into a brief, cynical smile.
It was reckless to want to pick up a total stranger and he, more than most people, knew the folly of being reckless. Hadn’t his whole life been spent making amends for his father’s one careless act of desperation? The knock-on effect of impulsive behaviour was something to guard against. Resolutely he turned away from her distractions.
Sabrina felt something approaching pain. Look at me, she urged him silently, but her gondolier chose that moment to give an expert twist of his wrist to glide the craft into shore and he was lost to her eyes.
She pushed her guidebook back into her handbag and stood up, allowing the gondolier to steady her elbow, nodding her head vigorously, as if she understood every word of his murmured Italian. But she had paid him before the journey and didn’t have a clue what he could be saying to her.
And then there was a shout behind her, a deep, alarming shout, and instinctively she knew that the voice belonged to the man with the dark hair. She automatically turned in response, just in time to feel a great whooshing spray of icy cold water as it splashed over her.
It jetted towards her eyes and the shock made her handbag slip from her fingers. She was aware of her gondolier shouting something furiously, and when she opened her eyes again she could see the zigzag of foam left in the wake of a small speedboat.
And the man with the dark hair.
He was standing on the shore right next to her, holding his hand out, and despite the look of icy anger on his face some instinct made her take it, losing herself immediately in the warmth of his firm grasp.
‘Why the hell can’t people control the machines they’re supposed to be in charge of?’ he said, in a voice as coolly beautiful as his face. He gave a brief, hard stare at the retreating spray of the boat, then narrowed his eyes as he looked down at the shivering woman whose fingernails were gripping painfully into the palm of his hand. Her face was so white that it looked almost translucent, and he felt a strange kick to his heart. ‘You are English?’
Up close, he was even more devastating. Breathtakingly so. Awareness shimmered over her skin like fingertips. ‘Y-y-yes, I am,’ she replied, from between chattering teeth. ‘How c-c-could you tell?’
He carried on holding her hand until he was certain that she was grounded. ‘Because pale women with freckles and strawberry-blonde hair look quintessentially English, that’s why,’ he answered slowly as he allowed his eyes to drift irresistibly over her. ‘And you’re soaking.’
Sabrina looked down at herself, and saw that he wasn’t exaggerating. She was wet right through—her T-shirt stained with dirty lagoon water, the pinpoint thrust of her nipples emphasising her plummeting body temperature as much as the chattering of her teeth.
‘Not to mention freezing.’ He swallowed as he followed the direction of her eyes, tempted to make a flippant joke about wet T-shirt competitions, then deciding against it. Not his scene to make remarks like that to a complete stranger.
Sabrina suddenly realised what was missing. ‘Oh, my goodness—I’ve dropped my handbag!’ she wailed.
‘Where?’
‘In the w-water. And it’s got my purse in it!’
He went to peer over the edge of the lagoon, but the dark waters had claimed it.
‘Don’t!’ Sabrina called, terrified that