When she opened her mouth she intended to say yes, but her dad hadn’t raised a reckless child. Caution had been drilled into her from her infancy, and at the last second her conditioning kicked in.
‘Thank you, but I couldn’t.’ He was a total, a total stranger who could, for all she knew, be a psycho or even a married psycho. She shook her head; she was out of her depth and she knew it. ‘Thank you, but I’m afraid I can’t. My boyfriend wouldn’t like it.’
Under other circumstances the look of baffled frustration on his lean face would have been laughable.
Georgie didn’t feel like laughing; she didn’t even feel like smiling. She was actually pretty ambivalent about the entire ‘done the right thing’ situation.
His dark brows lifted. ‘Are you saying no?’
She could hear the astonishment in his voice and she realised that being knocked back had never crossed his mind. No was obviously not a word this man was used to hearing.
She nodded.
This time there was a hint of annoyance in his appraisal. ‘As you wish.’
His irritation made her feel slightly better. Her normal nature, the one she had when she wasn’t turned into a brainless bimbo by the sexual aura this man radiated, briefly reasserted itself. Why should he assume she was a sure thing? She might have been a bit obvious, but a girl could look without necessarily wanting to touch…
She flashed a quick semi-apologetic smile in his general direction. She wasn’t trying to strike a blow for female equality here—better and braver women had already done that—she just wanted to get the hell out of there without making herself look any more a fool than she already had!
Aware that his disturbing eyes were following her actions as she crammed her possessions in her canvas bag made her clumsy.
‘Jack!’ she bellowed, zipping up the bag with a sigh of relief.
‘You forgot this.’
She half turned and saw he was holding out a tube of sunblock.
She extended her hand. ‘Thank you.’ The fingertip contact lasted barely a heartbeat but it was enough to send an electrical tingle through her body. Her wide, startled eyes lifted momentarily to his and she knew without him saying a word that he knew exactly what she was feeling.
Well, at least someone did!
Without waiting to see if her aggravating stepbrother was following her, Georgie stumbled and ran across the sand to the pebbly foreshore, all the time fighting an insane impulse to turn back.
A childish shout jolted Georgie back to the present. She made admiring noises as her son proudly showed her a small pile of stones he had placed on the patio.
She could remember doing the same thing as a child herself; continuity was important. Her own childhood had been a long way from deprived, but there was a gap—questions that remained unanswered because her mother hadn’t been there to answer them. Now Nicky had an absent father… Continuity strikes again!
Her jaw firmed. Rejection wasn’t hereditary, it was bad luck, and if she had anything to do with it Nicky was going to be a better judge of character than his mother.
It was strange—she had changed beyond recognition from that girl running away that day on the beach, but the beach house and the town hadn’t. It was as if the place were in some sort of time warp.
The town remained defiantly unfashionable. There were no trendy seafood restaurants and no big waves to attract the surfing fraternity, but despite everything Georgie had a soft spot for this place. She rubbed her sandy palms on the seat of her shorts and accepted the seashell Nicky gravely handed her.
This was the first time she’d been back here since that fateful summer. Partly she had come to lay the ghosts of the past and more practically there was no way she could afford a holiday for Nicky any other way.
The jury was still out on whether she had succeeded on the former!
She inhaled, enjoying the salty tang in the air. Memories sort of crept up on you, she reflected. The most unexpected things could trigger them: a smell…texture. As earlier, one second she had been trying to get the sand off her feet before putting on her sandals, the next—zap!
It had been incredibly vivid.
Her foot had been in Angolos’s lap, his dark head down-bent, gleaming blue-black in the sun as he’d brushed the sand from between her toes. The touch of his fingers had sent delicious little thrills of sensation through her body. He had felt her shiver and his head had lifted. Still holding her eyes, he’d lifted her foot to his mouth and sucked one toe.
Her hand had pressed into the sand as her body had arched. ‘You can’t do that!’ she gasped. Snatching her foot from his grasp, she lifted her knees to her chin.
Angolos’s expressive mouth quirked. ‘Why?’
‘Because you’re killing me,’ she confessed brokenly.
The way he looked at her, the hungry, predatory gleam in his glittering eyes, made her insides melt. ‘You won’t have long to wait, yineka mou,’ he reminded her. ‘Tomorrow we will be man and wife.’
Back in the present, Georgie opened her clenched fists. Her palms were damp and inscribed with small half-moons where her neatly trimmed fingernails had dug into the flesh. She sighed and rubbed her palms against the seat of her shorts. Would she ever be able to think about her husband without having a panic attack?
‘They could hardly keep their hands off one another.’
The salacious details…This I can really do without.
‘I’m no prude,’ the older woman continued, ‘but really…she couldn’t keep her hands off him…’
Mortifying though her grandmother’s comment was, Georgie, not a person given to self-delusion, had to admit that it was essentially true.
Always a little scornful of her contemporaries’ messy and, it seemed to her, painful love affairs, she had been totally unprepared for the primal emotions Angolos had awoken in her. She had been totally mesmerised by him.
‘My son and I disagree on most things, but on that occasion we were of one mind. Robert said to her, “Sleep with the man if you must, live with him even, but marry him…! Insanity.”’
‘But one we have all experienced, Ann,’ came the rueful response.
To imagine the two elderly women experiencing the insanity of blind lust that she had felt with Angolos made Georgie blink.
‘The girl has reaped the consequences of her stupidity.’
The scorn in her grandmother’s voice brought a flush of mortified colour to Georgie’s sun-warmed cheeks. She had made a big mistake and she was willing to own up to it, but she sometimes thought that if her family had their way she would still be eating humble pie when she was eighty!
‘She was very young.’
‘Young and she thought she knew it all.’
‘The young always do. He…the man in the magazine…he looked older?’
‘Thirty-two or something like that, I believe, at the time. You have to understand that Georgie was very young for her age…very naïve in many ways, and he had been around the block several times. Oh, a handsome devil, of course. I’m not surprised she fell for him.’
The admission amazed Georgie; to her face her grandmother had never offered any understanding.
‘You think he took advantage…?’