Though she couldn’t see his eyes beneath the brim of his soft, worn cap, she could feel them on her. Her right shoulder tingled. The sensation moved up her neck. It finally settled in her lips. The urge to run her fingers across them was so strong she had to curl them into her palms.
Then he finally moved. He pressed away from the tree and shifted his cap into a more comfortable position on his head before crossing his arms across his chest. His strong, tanned, brawny arms. His broad chest.
She breathed in deep, releasing it on a long, slow, deliciously revitalising sigh.
What if this was what she needed more than even a holiday right now? More than granola or t’ai chi. More than early-morning jogs or internal reflection classes. A little bit of something for herself.
Could she? Should she? Considering every step and every misstep she experienced outside the walls of her family home somehow ended up being known by the whole country, it took something extra extraordinary for her to put herself out there. The lanky stranger who would not take his eyes off her was exactly that.
She took another deep breath, faced him square on and gave him an honest, inviting, unambiguous smile.
Needless to say, after all that build-up, it was more than a bit of a shock when she didn’t get one in return. Nada. Not a twitch, a nod, not any kind of acknowledgement that he was paying her any attention at all.
Her cheeks heated from the inside out, her fingernails bit into her palms, and her lungs suddenly felt very, very small.
Meg fair leapt out of her skin when Tabitha leant on her shoulder and sighed. ‘Imagine,’ she said, ‘if we hadn’t kidnapped you to this place this moment never would have happened.’
‘I’m trying my very best to imagine it right now,’ Meg said on a mortified croak.
Pathetically late though the attempt at saving face was, Meg let her gaze glance off Mr Tall Dark and Silent Rugged Man, then up into the sky as if she were pondering the time and using the sun as her guide.
‘I might well be seeing things,’ Rylie said, finally upright and now staring brazenly at the silent stranger, ‘but isn’t that Zach Jones?’
Meg grabbed Rylie by the hand and spun her around to face front. All the while her wits began to return and synapses connected in the back of her brain. ‘Why do I know that name?’
Rylie said, ‘He was a rower years back. Olympic level. Keeping it up too, by the looks of him. Now he’s a businessman. Big time. Owns this place, in fact, as well as a dozen-odd of its like all ‘round the world. Self-starter. Self-made. Renegade. Refuses to list his company on the exchange. Not all that much known about him otherwise. He somehow manages to live under the radar.’
‘Single?’ Tabitha asked.
‘Perpetually,’ Rylie said with a grin.
‘Perfect.’ Tabitha grinned. ‘Your dad’ll hate him.’
Meg turned on her. ‘So?’
Rylie said, ‘She has a point. You don’t have to limit your dating schedule to charming, skint, ambitionless, undemanding men to get back at Daddy.’
Meg’s right eyebrow tweaked to a point. ‘I actually prefer to spend time with men who don’t consider bragging about that day’s corporate buyout fit for pillow talk, thank you very much. I get enough of that around the family dinner table to find it in any way an aphrodisiac. The only way my father comes into it is that at least men not on their way up the corporate ladder never try to get to him through me.’
Tabitha mirrored her expression. ‘Whatever you say.’
Meg poked a face, then looked decidedly back to the front of the group.
What she didn’t say was that the men she favoured also weren’t the types to press for any kind of commitment. They weren’t in any rush to start families of their own. One less pressure to concern herself with.
Besides, it had been a long time since she’d bothered doing anything extreme in order to get through to the big man herself. What was the point? It had never worked anyway.
Rylie pushed in tighter, her voice a secretive stage whisper. ‘It has to be him. Zach Jones. He’s notoriously impossible to pin down. He’s one of those ungettable interviews that would take a girl like me out of Sunday morning fluff TV into the big leagues. I wonder what he’s doing here rather than flitting around the world buying up great wads of prime real estate like it’s going out of fashion? I smell a scoop.’
Meg shook her escaping curls from her cheeks and peeked out of the corner of her eye one more time.
He’d tilted his head up ever so slightly. Sun-kissed skin was smoothed over the most immaculately masculine bone structure Meg had ever seen. The shadow of three-day growth covered a jaw that just begged to be stroked. And his lips were so perfectly carved she struggled to take her eyes off them.
All that perfection somehow managed to pale in comparison when she finally saw his eyes.
They were locked on hers.
Dark, dangerous eyes, too far away for her to make out the colour, but she had the feeling she could have doubled the distance between them and still been hit by the thwack of awareness behind them.
She sucked in a breath, thick with tropical humidity that caught in her throat. And a trickle of what was most definitely sweat ran down her neck and between her breasts.
Zach Jones.
His name buzzed about inside her head in her father’s most frosty voice as he flapped the Financial Times in a way that meant he was not happy. ‘He got too big, too quick. Stubborn fool is overreaching. One of these days he’ll land flat on his face. Mark my words.’
Meg didn’t know about overreaching, but she did know that her father didn’t give a damn about anyone below a certain level of accomplishment—client, competitor, offspring …
She swallowed.
There was no flirtation in Zach Jones’s gaze. No measure of awe about who she was. Just copious amounts of brooding intensity centred in those unfathomable dark eyes. Despite it all, the backs of her knees began to quiver.
He blinked. And rolled his shoulders. The first sign he wasn’t as nervelessly blasé as he was making out.
The very thought made way for an unimpeded rush of sexual attraction to slide through her, like a waterfall breaking through a dam of knotted foliage that had held it back a decade.
The ferocity of her reaction had her literally taking a step back. The blister on her heel popped, again. A hiss of pain slid through her teeth as she hopped madly on her good foot.
The man took a step towards her, a hand appearing to flicker in her direction. The tension curling inside her ratcheted up a notch and a half and she knew her sudden breathlessness had far less to do with her stinging foot, and more to do with the stranger in her midst.
Thankfully she caught her balance all on her own, and the man unclenched from his ready-to-pounce position.
She spun back to face front. ‘When are we going to start running, for Pete’s sake?’ she whispered through her teeth.
Rylie reached out and pinched her hot pink cheek. ‘Look who’s suddenly Miss Eager Exerciser.’
‘You bet,’ she said, shuffling from one foot to the other as though she had ants in her pants. ‘Bring on the lactic-acid burn!’ Better that than having to endure the feel of the man’s burning eyes on her back.
She shook out her hands, attempting to shake off the fidgets. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been rebuffed before. It came with the celebrity package as much as being excessively adored. It just thankfully generally happened from afar. By strangers. Whom she didn’t have to look in the eye and pretend