‘Oh, my…!’ she heard the older woman gasp. ‘He really is quite…yes, very…! They do say opposites attract…’ she tacked on weakly.
Nice try, Ruth, thought Georgie.
‘There are opposites, and then there is Angolos Constantine and my granddaughter.’
Georgie’s lips curved in a wry smile. You could always rely on her grandmother to introduce a touch of realism.
‘It was always an absurd idea. She was never going to fit into his world, and they had nothing in common whatsoever except possibly…’ Ann Kemp lowered her voice to a confidential whisper. It had a carrying quality that only someone who was a leading light of amateur dramatics could achieve.
‘Sex! Or love, as my granddaughter preferred to call it. Personally I blame it all on those romances she read in her teens,’ she confided.
‘I’m partial to a good romance myself,’ the other woman inserted mildly.
‘Yes, but you’re not a foolish, impressionable young girl who expects a knight in shining armour to come riding to the rescue.’
‘Young, no, but I haven’t totally given up hope.’
Georgie missed the dry retort.
A distracted expression stole over her soft features as she rubbed her bare upper arms, which, despite the heat, had broken out in a rash of goose bumps. Low in her pelvis the muscles tightened. She blinked hard to banish the image that had flashed into her head, but like the man it involved it didn’t respond to her wishes, or even, she thought, her soft mouth hardening, her entreaties.
In the end, bewildered and scared, she had lost all dignity and begged him to reconsider. He couldn’t want her to go away. They were happy; they were going to have a baby. ‘Tell me what’s wrong,’ she had pleaded.
Angolos had not said anything, he’d just looked down at her, his midnight eyes as hard as diamonds.
Strange how one decision could alter the course of your life.
In her case, if she hadn’t caved in to her stepbrother’s nagging and taken him down to the beach, when she had actually planned to curl up in an armchair and finish the last chapter in her book, she would never have met Angolos. Not that there was any point speculating about what might have been.
You just had to live with what was, and Georgie thought in all modesty that she wasn’t making such a bad job of it. She had good career, rented her own flat, a gorgeous son. A single friend had remarked recently that she didn’t know how Georgie managed to cope being a single parent with a young child and a full-time, demanding job.
‘I couldn’t imagine my life without Nicky; he’s the reason I do cope,’ Georgie explained. It was true—not that her friend had believed a word of it.
The fact there was no man in her life was a matter of choice. Not that she had ruled out the possibility of meeting someone; she just couldn’t imagine it.
Sometimes she tried to. She tried to imagine another man touching her the way Angolos had. She did now, and it was a mistake. Her nerve endings started to ache as she thought of his long, cool fingers on her skin.
Angolos had made her ache a lot.
When she wasn’t thinking about Angolos’s ability to make her ache, she occasionally wondered what sort of person she might have been if she had never met him. Would she still be as naïve and trusting as she had been that summer?
Such speculation was pointless, because she had met him, and every detail of that fateful occasion, the moment she had laid eyes on Angolos Constantine, the moment her life had changed for ever, was burnt into her brain.
She had been sitting on a blanket, one eye on the paperback she had been trying to finish and the other on her stepbrother, who had been playing with a group of boys farther down the beach. His shoes had been the first thing she had seen, shiny, hand-tooled leather, and then the exquisitely tailored legs of his dark trousers, expensive, tasteful, and wildly inappropriate for a beach.
She’d just had to see who would be stupid enough to venture onto the beach in a get-up like that! Georgie had lifted a hand to shade her eyes, squinting against the sun as her glance had travelled upwards.
Oh, my goodness…!
The owner of the shoes had had long legs, very long legs; the rest of him had been a lot better than OK too. In fact, if you went for lean and hard—and what woman wouldn’t, given half the chance?—he was as close to perfect as damn it.
By the time she had reached his face the last shreds of amused mockery had vanished from her amber eyes—the eyes he had professed to love—and she had been smitten and had stayed that way until the day he had told her he wanted her to go away.
‘Go away…?’ Uneasy, but sure this was all a silly mistake, she had asked, ‘How long for?’
‘For ever,’ he had replied and walked away.
But on that first summer’s afternoon there had been no hint of the casual cruelty he was capable of. She had been totally overwhelmed and too inexperienced to hide it as she’d stared back into those dark eyes shaded by preposterously long lashes that had thrown a shadow across the prominent angle of his chiselled cheekbones.
Those seductive, velvety depths had held a cynical world-weariness that her impressionable self had found fascinating, but then she’d found everything about him fascinating, she reflected grimly, from his sable-smooth hair to the mobile curve of his sensual lips.
Tall and lean, darkly arresting, his olive-skinned face an arrangement of strong angles and fascinating bone structure, he was the essence of male beauty.
‘Hello,’ he said, flashing her a seriously gorgeous smile. Like his appearance his voice with its faint accent marked this most rampantly male of males out as fascinatingly different.
She was hot, her face was sticky, her skin was glossed with a film of sweat and the salty dampness had gathered in the valley between her breasts. The jacket casually slung over one shoulder was the only concession this stranger made to the heat, which appeared not to affect him.
She lifted a self-conscious hand to her hair and discovered it was full of salt from an earlier dip in the sea. She wanted desperately to be cool and say something intelligent but all she could manage was a breathless, ‘Hello.’ Her heart was beating so fast she could barely hear her own voice.
She knew she was staring, but she couldn’t help it. She simply couldn’t tear her eyes off this incredible man. Men like this did not walk down the beach of an old-fashioned family resort…She hadn’t actually believed they existed outside the pages of popular fiction!
Did wondering what a total stranger looked like naked make her depraved? This had never happened to her before; maybe it was the weather? Hadn’t she read somewhere that heat had an effect on the libido? But her libido had never given her any problems; in fact she had occasionally wondered if it wasn’t a little underdeveloped.
‘I’m not familiar with the area.’
‘I know…’
One darkly defined brow lifted and she rushed on in hot-faced explanation.
‘This is a small place and strangers…well, they stand out.’ In the most fashionable and glamorous watering holes on the planet he would have stood out! She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to walk into a room and have heads turn and conversations stop. What would he feel like?
She lowered her gaze. Stop this, Georgie!