Her legs were slap-bang in front of his line of vision, and he let his lashes float down over his eyes, hoping that lack of visual stimulation might ease the ache in his groin. ‘Yeah,’ he said thickly. ‘I’ll be sorry.’
She heard the slurred quality of his voice and suspected that he wanted to sleep. So she said nothing further—but then silence was easy in such a perfect setting.
She feasted her eyes on the deep blue of the sea, and the paler blue of the sky above it. Remember this, she told herself. Keep it stored in your mind, to bring out on a grey wet day in England, as you would a favourite snapshot.
She flicked a glance over to where Finn lay, watching the rise and fall of his broad back as it became gradually slower and steadier. Yes, he was definitely asleep.
His dark tousled head was pillowed on hair-roughened forearms, and the image of the sleeping man was oddly and disturbingly intimate. Very disturbing. She found herself picturing his bronzed body contrasted against rumpled white sheets and the resulting flush of awareness made Catherine get abruptly to her feet. She needed to cool off!
The sea beckoned invitingly, and she pulled off her sun-hat and ran towards it, her feet sinking into the heavy wet sand by the water’s edge. She splashed her way in, waiting until she was out of her depth before she began to strike out.
The sea was as warm as milk, and not in the least bit invigorating, but the water lapped like silk over her heated skin. Catherine continued to swim quite happily in line with the shore, and was just thinking about going in when she experienced a gut-wrenchingly sharp spasm in her leg. She squealed aloud with the shock and the pain.
She tried to keep swimming, but her leg was stubbornly refusing to work. She opened her mouth to call out, but as she did salt water gushed in and she began to choke.
Don’t panic, she told herself—but her body was refusing to obey her. And the more the leg stiffened, the more water poured into her mouth, and she began to flail her arms uselessly and helplessly as control slipped away…
Finn was lost in a warm world of sensation, inhabited by a green-eyed siren with a cascade of black hair, when his dream was punctured by a sound he could not recognise. His eyes snapped open to find Catherine gone.
Instinct immediately warned him of danger and he leapt to his feet, his blue eyes scanning the horizon until he saw the disturbed water and the thrash of limbs which told him that she was in the sea.
And in trouble.
He ran full-pelt into the sea, his muscular legs jumping the waves, breaking out into a powerful crawl which ate up the distance between them.
‘Catherine!’ he called. ‘For God’s sake, keep still—I’m on my way!’
She barely heard him, even though she registered the command somewhere in her subconscious. But her body was not taking orders from her tired and confused mind and she felt herself slipping deeper…ever deeper…choking and gagging on the sour, salty taste.
‘Catherine!’ He reached her and grabbed hold of her, hauling her from beneath the surface and throwing her over his shoulder. He slapped the flat of his palm hard between her shoulder blades and she spat and retched water out of her mouth, sobbing with relief as she clung onto him.
‘Easy now,’ he soothed. ‘Easy.’ He ran his hands experimentally down over her body until he found the stiffened and cramped leg.
‘Ouch!’ she moaned.
‘I’m going to swim back to shore with you. Just hold onto me very tightly.’
‘You c-c-can’t manage me!’ she protested through chattering teeth.
‘Shut up,’ he said kindly, and turned her onto her back, slipping his arm around her waist.
Catherine had little memory of the journey back, or of much that followed. She remembered him sinking into the sand and lowering her gently down, and the humiliation of spewing up the last few drops of salt water. And then he was rubbing her leg briskly between his hands until the spasm ebbed away.
She must have dozed, for when she came to it was to find herself still on the sand, the fine, white grains sticking to her skin, leaning back against Finn’s chest.
‘You’re okay?’ he murmured.
She coughed, then nodded, a sob forming in her throat as she thought just how lucky she had been.
He felt her shudder. ‘Don’t cry. You’ll live.’
She couldn’t move. She felt as if her limbs had been weighted with lead. ‘But I feel so…so stupid!’ she choked.
‘Well, you were a little,’ he agreed gently. ‘To go swimming straight after you’d eaten. Whatever made you do that, Catherine?’
She closed her eyes. She couldn’t possibly tell him that the sight of his near-naked body had been doing things to her equilibrium that she had wanted to wipe clean away. She shook her head.
‘Want me to carry you back to the lounger?’
‘I’ll w-walk.’
‘Oh, no, you won’t,’ he demurred. ‘Come here.’ And he rose to his feet and picked her up as easily as if she’d been made of feathers.
Catherine was not the type of woman who would normally expect to be picked up and carried by a man—indeed, she had never been the recipient of such strong-arm tactics before. The men she knew would consider it a sexist insult to behave in such a way! So was it?
No.
And no again.
She felt so helpless, but even in her demoralised state she recognised that it was a pleasurable helplessness. And the pleasure was enhanced by the sensation of his warm skin brushing and tingling against hers where their bodies touched. Like electricity. ‘Finn?’ she said weakly.
He looked down at her, feeling he could drown in those big green eyes, and then the word imprinted itself on his subconscious and he flinched. Drown. Sweet Lord—the woman could have drowned. A pain split right through him. ‘What is it?’ he whispered, laying her gently down on the sun-bed.
She pushed a damp lock of hair back from her face, and even that seemed to take every last bit of strength she had. But then it wasn’t just her near escape which was making her weak, it was something about the way the blue eyes had softened into a warm blaze.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered back, thinking how inadequate those two words were in view of what he had just done.
A smile lifted the corners of his mouth as some of the tension left him.
Some.
‘Don’t mention it,’ he said, his Irish accent edged with irresistible velvet. But he wished that she wouldn’t look at him that way. All wide-eyed and vulnerable, with the pale sand sugaring her skin, making him long to brush each grain away one by one, and her lips slightly parted, as if begging to be kissed. ‘Rest for a while, and then I’ll take you back up to the hotel.’
She nodded, feeling strangely bereft. She would have to pack. Organise herself. Mentally gear herself up for switching back into her role of cool, intrepid Catherine Walker—doyenne of Pizazz! magazine. Yet the soft, vulnerable Catherine who was gazing up into the strong, handsome face of her rescuer seemed infinitely more preferable at that moment.
Peter? prompted a voice in her head. Have you forgotten Peter so quickly and replaced him with a man you scarcely know? Bewitched by the caveman tactics of someone who just happened to have an aptitude for saving lives?
She licked her bottom lip and tasted salt. ‘You save a lot of lives, don’t you, Finn Delaney?’
Finn