His gaze fell on the shower at the stern of the boat and he smiled.
* * *
Stella was putting the supplies away in the galley when she heard a loud splash outside the porthole in front of her. She frowned as she peered out into the night.
Maybe Rick had thrown himself overboard, the dare just too much?
‘Rick?’ she called, a smile on her face. No answer. ‘Rick?’
Still no answer.
Maybe it was one of Moresby’s infamous rascals trying to steal from them and he’d knocked Rick unconscious and into the water.
Her smile died as her heart started hammering in her chest. She reached for the nearest weapon, a heavy-based fry pan, and decided to go up and investigate. She climbed the spiral staircase, one tread at a time, an itch up her spine.
She took a deep breath, then popped her head above the deck line, like a meerkat.
‘Rick?’ she whispered while her eyes took a second or two to adjust from the bright light below to the low cloud-affected moonlight outside.
Still nothing.
She caught a slight movement towards the helm of the boat as the sound of running water defined itself from the gentle slap of sea against hull and the trilling of insects. She squinted to make out the shape, her vision slowly adjusting to its night capabilities.
It was a person...
A man.
Taking a shower.
Taking a shower?
The moon chose that moment to come out from behind the scudding clouds that had been hampering its brilliance all night and Stella was afforded a side view of the man standing beneath the shower spray as if someone had switched on a spotlight.
Rick.
A one hundred per cent, buck naked, Rick.
She stood there frozen to the spot for a long moment caught between two impulses. To get out now before he discovered she was staring at his naked body or just stop and take in every magnificent inch.
As the celestial spotlight continued to bathe him in milky brilliance the latter won out.
The shower head was behind him, his head tipped back, his face raised to the night as the spray bathed his shoulder-length locks into a sleek, silky sheath. His eyes were shut as if worshipping the moonbeams that painted him in alabaster.
He looked like a statue. A Michelangelo nude.
With all the beautiful symmetry of fluid muscles and the more subtle details of sinews, tendons and veins in living, breathing relief.
Water sluiced over his broad shoulders, his chest, his biceps. It ran down the planes of his back, following the curve of his spine, dipping into those two sexy dimples above the rise of his buttocks. It flowed down firm flanks and rippled like a waterfall across the defined ridges of his abdomen.
Rivulets of water ran down one powerful thigh pressed slightly forward, the knee bent, obscuring her view any lower, and Stella frowned.
Damn it, so close...
Vasco’s bath scene had been written over two years ago, and while a lot of it had been scripted out of her imagination some of it hadn’t. Having grown up with Rick wearing barely anything at all—boardies or a skin-tight diving suit being his everyday attire—she’d had plenty of inspiration for Vasco’s body and had been able to portray it with startling accuracy.
There had been some parts, however, that she’d had to... embellish.
It would be nice to know the truth of it. Had her fevered imaginings accurately represented all of Vasco or had it been pure whimsy on her behalf?
And then, as if he’d read her mind, he shifted, twisting his body slightly in her direction, straightening his bent knee and transferring his weight to his other thigh, and she no longer had to wonder if she’d got it right because the evidence that she had was right there.
Riccardo Granville was most definitely Vasco Ramirez in the flesh.
Rick turned so his back was to Stella and smiled to himself as he tilted his neck from side to side, letting the lukewarm water run over muscle that was surprisingly tense. The concentration it had taken to appear unselfconscious and relaxed, as if he were alone and being unwatched, had been much harder to carry off than he’d thought. But to see Stella’s head pop up and then feel her avid gaze on him as tangible as the water cascading from the shower head had made the exercise worthwhile.
He was back in control again and that was exactly the way he liked it. Even if he was playing games with someone he had no business playing games with.
But if she was going to secretly put him in a book and not expect him to have a bit of fun with that then she’d completely forgotten about his devilish sense of humour.
As long as he kept it light and remembered who she was—Nathan’s daughter, not a single, fully grown woman who wrote dirty books—and where the line was, it would work out just fine.
They’d both have a laugh at the end of the voyage and get on with their lives.
It was win-win as far as he was concerned.
* * *
The second Stella strained to see that birthmark she’d been fascinated with since she’d been five years old she knew that happenstance had turned into voyeurism. She forced herself to cease and desist. With one long last lingering look at possibly the most beautiful rear end in the world, certainly in historical romance fiction, she slunk back down below deck, fry pan still in hand.
She should feel guilty; she knew that. If the positions had been reversed she’d have been mortified. But strangely she didn’t. No harm had been committed. He didn’t know that she’d been watching him or that he’d just fulfilled a particularly potent fantasy of hers—so potent she’d put it in a book!—and she certainly wasn’t going to tell him!
But she would use it.
Late at night when a day of crafting sensual tension or a torrid love scene left her restless and achy and the dictates of her body would not be ignored, a naked Rick bathed in shower spray and moonbeams would come in handy.
Very handy indeed.
Vasco examined the milky white perfection of Lady Mary’s hand. He cradled it in the palm of his much bigger, much darker one and admired the contrast for a moment. This was what they’d look like in his bed, their limbs entwined, their stomachs pressed together—coconut and coffee.
He stroked his thumb down the length of her index finger where the long slither of wood had embedded itself and let it drift across her palm. He heard the slight intake of her breath and felt her resistance to his hold.
He looked up into her emerald eyes. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he murmured.
Mary swallowed. They were seated, her knees primly together beneath her skirts, his legs spread wide in that lord-of-all-he-surveyed way of his, bracketing hers. The fabric of his breeches pulled taut across his thighs as he leaned in over her hand, his head perilously close to her cleavage.
‘It really just needs a pair of tweezers,’ she said, trying to pull her hand back. He resisted and she resigned herself to the unsettling heat of his touch.
Vasco smiled at her, her pink mouth a tempting bow before him. ‘I think I can do better than that.’
His voice was low and silky and Mary felt it in places that she’d only recently, thanks to him, become aware of. Her green gaze locked with the startling blue of his as he raised her finger to his mouth and sucked it inside.
Vasco watched surprise pucker her mouth into a cute little O shape as her pupils dilated. Her breathing was loud