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Untouched
Sandra Field
Lessons in SeductionTechnically, Finn Marston was Jenessa's new employer and she ought to be nice to him… . But thirty seconds in his company was enough for her to establish that Finn would try the patience of a saint! Trouble was he was also georgeous.Men had never held much fascination for Jenessa Reed, but Finn Marston was certainly a persuasive argument! She wanted him, and he didn't seem averse to being target practice for a twenty-six-year-old virgin! But could Jenessa take into her bed a man she didn't even like, let alone love?"Samantha Field pens a phenomenal love story." - Romantic Times
“You and I are alike—we’re both risk takers, Jenessa!” (#u8cd39cbc-932d-57a4-b8e9-05aa1432b7db)Title Page (#uac6bd6ca-6650-58cb-a706-f5fd6838f49d)CHAPTER ONE (#u99827008-82fc-57d0-9c67-4be9c95edaec)CHAPTER TWO (#ub1a955a2-1068-5203-93e8-8dc12e9ec518)CHAPTER THREE (#u8babe3cf-0f04-5943-abf2-4263770582a3)CHAPTER FOUR (#u16f488cf-3f5c-5da6-9254-ffdd5cce4d15)CHAPTER FIVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SIX (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
“You and I are alike—we’re both risk takers, Jenessa!”
Then Finn reached out for her, his arms hard around her waist. This time his intention was quite clear: he was going to kiss her.
“Don’t, Finn—please don’t. You’re changing everything, and I don’t want that.”
“You can’t fool me—you don’t play it safe any more than I do.”
“There are some risks I choose not to take. Getting involved with you is one of them!”
Although born in England, SANDRA FIELD has lived most of her life in Canada. While she enjoys traveling, and passing on her sense of a new place, she often chooses to write about the city that is now her home. Sandra says, “I write out of my experience. I have learned that love with its joys and its pains is all-important. I hope this knowledge enriches my writing, and touches a chord in you, the reader.”
Look out for Sandra Field’s next book,
HONEYMOON FOR THREE, next year!
Cory wanted a baby—no strings attached! Her exhusband had done more than enough to convince her that men were surplus to requirements. Apart from one basic detail—she needed a lover. Someone who would make a baby...then a convenient exit. Slade Redden fulfilled all her criteria. But their lovemaking had left him wanting...more! He didn’t want a one-off deal—he wanted Cory for always. It took only one night to make a baby. Slade had nine months to make a wife!
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Untouched
Sandra Field
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
CHAPTER ONE
JENESSA REED swung her four-wheel-drive Toyota into Ryan’s driveway and turned off the ignition. What she needed was a hot shower, a home-cooked meal and ten hours of sleep. In that order. Picking up her haversack from the passenger seat, she climbed out of the van and for a moment surveyed Ryan’s house with rueful affection.
The architecture, she had long ago decided, could only be labelled Newfoundland Eccentric. The core of the house was square, two-storey and altogether unremarkable, but over the years Ryan had added two porches, a sunroom, a root cellar, a studio where he did folk art that sold like hotcakes to the tourists, and a couple of balconies from which to survey a view that was far from inspiring. Some of these additions had been painted, some not. Two were askew. The overall effect expressed perfectly Ryan’s innate exuberance and his total lack of interest in what his neighbours might think.
‘I’m home,’ Jenessa called, heading for the back porch.
The door opened. ‘About time,’ Ryan grumbled, taking her haversack and urging her indoors. ‘And me with a new job all lined up for you.’
‘Oh, no,’ Jenessa groaned, ‘I’ve got to recover from the last one first.’
He poured two mugs of ink-black tea from the pot that sat all day long on the stove and said unsympathetically, ‘A wild-goose chase makes more sense than tryin’ to sight whales in late August.’
She had been guiding a small group of German tourists, who under her tutelage had bagged their limit of Atlantic salmon and had then requested to be shown whales. ‘I drove the entire length of the northern peninsula, just about froze to death out on the ocean and was seasick twice.’ Jenessa grinned. ‘But we saw fin whales, humpbacks and porpoises—so my clients were happy.’
‘Hope they tipped good.’
‘Enough so I don’t need another job right away.’
‘You’re to meet some guy by the name of Finn Marston tomorrow night on the late flight. Said he’d explain what he wanted when he got here.’
‘How long does he want me for?’ she said in a resigned voice.
‘Didn’t say. Forceful kind of guy—didn’t give me much chance to get a word in edgeways. Plus it was a lousy connection—he was callin’ from some place in Indonesia.’
Anyone who could prevent Ryan from taking his fair share of the conversation had her instant respect. ‘Indonesia...did he speak good English?’ she asked. She had spent ten days in July trying to teach the intricacies of fly-fishing to three admittedly very handsome but unilingual Spaniards.
‘Yeah... he’s Canadian, by the sound of him.’
‘I wonder why he’s coming?’ Jenessa said. ‘I suppose he wants to catch the last of the fishing season ... I’ll tell you one thing—he’d better not have ocean-going mammals on his list.’
She levered the lid off the can sitting on the table and helped herself to one of Ryan’s molasses cookies. ‘You made these because you knew I’d be back today, didn’t you?’ she added, smiling across at Ryan. He never hugged her when she came home, but he would make sure she had all her favourite things to eat.
‘Gotta put some flesh on your bones,’ Ryan muttered. He was a small man, no taller than her five feet eight, and wiry as a fox, his beard and hair still showing vestiges of their former fiery red, his eyes a snapping brown. He was her one tie to a life that had fallen apart when she was thirteen; Jenessa valued him both for that and for himself. Father-surrogate and true friend—not a bad combination, and one she knew she was fortunate to have.
Taking another cookie, she said with a caution that in the past had often been justified, ‘You did tell this Finn Marston that I’m a woman, right?’
Ryan dunked his cookie in his tea. ‘Well, now, not sure I did. Like I said, I didn’t get much chance to talk. This guy’s more used to givin’ orders than listenin’ to other people, I’d say.’
‘Ryan, I wish you wouldn’t do that to me,’ Jenessa complained. ‘I hate turning up at the airport when someone’s expecting a six-foot hunk of brawn in a red flannel shirt and what they get is me instead. All you have to do when you’re talking to them is use the correct pronoun—she. One short word and that does it.’
Ryan and she had had this discussion before. ‘And lots of them wouldn’t hire you then; you know that as well as I do, Jenny. I keeps my mouth shut, they get the best guide this side of Gander airport—and we’re all happy.’
Jenessa rolled her eyes. ‘You’re the best guide this side of anywhere—maybe you should go to the airport to meet the forceful Mr Marston.’
‘I taught you everythin’ I know and I’m too old to go crashin’ around in the woods.’ He leered at her. ‘More interestin’ things to do round home.’
Not all his interests lay in the areas of folk art and home improvements. Another of them was the widowed Mrs McCarthy, whose lemon meringue pie could have graced any restaurant in Toronto. ‘How’s Grace?’ Jenessa said on cue.
‘She’s fine,’ he answered airily. ‘Want some more tea?’
Ryan’s tea, taken in any quantity, would corrode a moose hide. ‘I’m going to clean up,’ Jenessa said. ‘Any messages for me?’
‘Ruth called. She wants you to go over and see the baby after supper. It’s got a tooth, she said. Can’t see what’s so special about that; we all got teeth.’
‘It’s their first baby, Ryan; of course they think he’s special.’
‘Not so special I see you makin’ any moves to get one.’
Surprised, Jenessa stopped midway across the kitchen. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re pushin’ twenty-six and I don’t see no signs of you gettin’ yourself hitched.’
She felt a pang of mingled hurt and dismay. ‘Don’t you want me living here any more, Ryan?’ Her eyes widened. ‘Are you and Grace planning to get married?’
‘Course not! She’d have me paintin’ the balcony and mowin’ the grass; she likes things all shipshape, does Grace. And I’m not about to change my ways.’ His brow wrinkled in one of the formidable frowns that signified deep thought. ‘In the last five years you’ve met more men than a stag has cows. So how come you haven’t married any of ’em?’
She said flippantly, ‘None of them asked me.’
‘You don’t even date ’em!’
‘They’re my clients, Ryan; there’s such a thing as professional ethics.’
Ryan’s opinion of professional ethics was both brief and perilously close to obscene. Jenessa added suspiciously, ‘Are you sure you don’t want Grace to move in here?’
He opened the oven door. ‘As sure as I am that if you don’t hustle my roast’ll be ruined.’
Jenessa left the room, trailing upstairs to her bedroom, whose balcony overlooked a clump of wind-scoured spruce trees. Ryan had never before implied that he even noticed her single state, let alone that he thought she should end it. Maybe—she blinked at herself in the mirror—he wanted to dandle her own baby on his lap. It was the nearest he would get to being a grandfather, after all.
Ryan? Interested in babies? She had to be joking.
Oddly unsettled, she gathered up some clean clothes and headed for the shower. But three hours later, when she was sitting in Ruth and Stevie’s kitchen with baby Stephen regarding her unwinkingly from solemn, navy blue eyes, Ryan’s remark was still on her mind.
‘You look very thoughtful,’ Ruth commented.
Ruth’s husband Stevie was a wilderness guide, like Jenessa, and Jenessa had met Ruth through him. The two women had liked each other right away, and if Jenessa had a confidante it was the tall, black-haired Ruth, whose practicality was leavened with a lively dash of romanticism. Jenessa tickled Stephen under the chin, trying to get him to reveal the new tooth, and blurted, ‘Ryan thinks it’s time I got married and had a baby myself.’
‘That’s natural enough, I suppose. You are nearly twenty-six.’
‘I’m not in my coffin yet,’ Jenessa retorted. ‘Anyway, I’m not like you. I really have no desire to get married—I never have had.’
‘You spent a week with Luis, Sanchos and Miguel and didn’t even fantasize about weddings?’ Ruth had invited the three Spanish fishermen to a lobster boil in her backyard, including Jenessa in the invitation as a matter of course. Now as she folded a towel with a decisive snap she went on, ‘They were awfully sweet, Jenessa, you’ve got to admit that.’
‘I liked them. But I didn’t want to marry them.’ Jenessa managed a smile. ‘Individually or collectively.’
‘You didn’t lust after them—any of them—even the tiniest bit?’
Jenessa shook her head. ‘Nope.’
‘You could be so pretty if you just paid a bit of attention to yourself,’ Ruth mourned.
‘When you’re guiding a fisherman through a bog, mascara isn’t a top priority.’
‘You’re not in a bog now,’ Ruth snorted, giving Jenessa’s jeans and T-shirt a disparaging look. ‘Your clothes are clean, I’ll give you that. But they’re not what you’d call sexy. And I’d be willing to bet you cut your hair yourself last time.’
‘With my Swiss army knife,’ Jenessa admitted. ‘I have another client flying in tomorrow, so I won’t have time to get it cut before then, either. Anyway, Ruth, when you’re stuck in a lodge miles from anywhere with a bunch of men, which I am a fair bit of the time, it doesn’t seem appropriate or sensible to go around flaunting your sexuality. A sure way to get in trouble, thank you very much.’
‘I don’t think you know how to flaunt your sexuality,’ Ruth replied vigorously. ‘I just wish you’d go to St John’s one of these days and spend the day in a beauty salon. You wouldn’t even have to go to St John’s—Marylou, next door, has just come back from a seminar there, so she knows how to do all kinds of neat new haircuts. Your hair is such a gorgeous colour ... you know that cherrywood paddle of yours, how it shines when the sun hits it? That’s what your hair’s like—and you’re the only person I know with green eyes.’ Ruth paused, her head to one side. ‘Maybe you just haven’t met the right man.’
Jenessa didn’t think it was that simple. Touched by Ruth’s description, she said hesitantly, ‘I know I don’t fit ... I never have, really. All those women’s magazines with their advice on make-up and lovers and clothes—I can’t relate to them at all. If you want the truth, they scare me to death. I suppose it’s got something to do with never knowing my mother and growing up with my dad at Spruce Pond—no other women there. No other people, come to that.’
‘I’m not meaning to be critical,’ Ruth said hastily. ‘I like you just as you are.’
‘That’s good,’ Jenessa said with an impish grin. ‘Because I’m likely to stay this way. I’m not at all unhappy as I am, Ruth. I don’t know how to flirt, that’s true, and I’m not out plaguing some man to marry me—but I really like my life the way it is. I love my job... how could I ever give that up? Marriage and babies kind of crimp your style.’
‘They’re worth it,’ Ruth said placidly. ‘Stephen, my duckie, smile at Jenessa.’
Stephen gave a huge yawn, exposing one tiny pearlwhite tooth, and let his head plop against Jenessa’s shirt. She held him close, liking his baby-powder smell and his warm weight, yet knowing that in a few minutes she could hand him back to his mother without the slightest twinge of regret. She didn’t have any impulsion to have a baby of her own. Or to attract the man whom one required in order to produce the baby. But it was one thing to acknowledge to herself that she didn’t fit the normal societal expectations of what a woman should be like, and quite another to have both Ryan and Ruth, in one day, suggesting that she should change her ways.
She was fine as she was. Besides, the man wasn’t born for whom she would give up her job.
So why should she change?
Jenessa spent the next day washing and ironing the clothes in her backpack and helping Ryan varnish a pine bench for a customer from Massachusetts. She could have used the time to go to Marylou’s and get her hair cut, but some unacknowledged streak of stubbornness kept her from doing so.
That evening she presented herself at the airport just as the propellor-driven plane was coasting toward the terminal. The same stubbornness had caused her to dress in stone-washed jeans and a forest-green shirt with a businesslike leather belt around her waist. She knew most of the small crowd of people waiting at the gate; she was chatting to Ruth’s mother and father, who were meeting their youngest son, when the first passenger pushed open the door. While she’d been waiting, Jenessa had conjured up a mental image of the forceful Mr Marston: he’d be short—short men, in her experience, were often aggressive—greying, and would light up a very expensive cigar as soon as he entered the terminal.
She had often played this game; her record of success was interestingly high.
Ten people got off the flight from Halifax. The short ones were women, the sole man with grey hair was Tommy MacPherson from Norris Arm, and the only one smoking was Ruth’s youngest brother, a fact that would annoy Ruth considerably: Ruth was a reformed smoker and dead set against cigarettes.
A tall man with a thatch of untidy dark brown hair had halted just inside the doorway, surveying the small crowd with visible impatience. He was wearing a blue wool shirt, a well-worn pair of jeans and leather hiking boots; a haversack was slung over one broad shoulder. The only thing she had got right, Jenessa thought ruefully, was the aggression.
Quickly she walked over to him. ‘Mr Marston?’ she said with a pleasant smile.
He did not smile back. ‘I’m Finn Marston, yes.’ His voice was deep, gravelly with tiredness.
‘I’m Jenessa Reed,’ she said. ‘The guide you hired.’
His lashes flickered. ‘I’m not in the mood for jokes.’
‘Neither am I,’ she said crisply, wishing that just for once she could be taken at face value rather than having to justify her existence to her male clients. ‘I’m the person Ryan recommended to you.’
‘You’ve got that wrong. Ryan said nothing about a woman—because if he had I wouldn’t have hired you.’
‘Well, you did hire me,’ she said with another pleasant smile, although this one took more effort. ‘And I’m very good at my job. Ryan booked a room for you in the best motel in town; I’ll take you there now, if you like. Or do you have other luggage?’
He looked her up and down with an insolence that could only be deliberate, from her jagged crop of toffeecolored hair to the shiny toes of her leather loafers. ‘If I hired you, I can unhire you,’ he said. ‘I’ll get a cab to the motel—what name does it go by?’
His hair was as badly in need of cutting as her own, she thought inconsequentially; his eyes were a very dark blue, reminding her in colour, if not in expression, of Stephen’s. The stubble of beard on his chin was also dark, and there were dark shadows under his eyes. He looked, she thought with a faint stirring of compassion, truly exhausted: it was a long way from Indonesia. ‘A cab won’t be necessary; I’ll take you. Luggage?’
‘Miss Reed, I don’t think you heard me—you’ve just been fired.’
‘Mr Marston,’ she replied with rather overdone patience, ‘this is at least the fiftieth time I’ve played this little scene. Canadians, Americans, Swedes, Spaniards ... hunters, fishermen, photographers ... they all think I should be a man or they think it’s extremely funny that I’m a woman. But I can give you references from every one of them as to my competence. I do agree with you that Ryan should have told you I’m a woman. I disagree that that should make any difference to you whatsoever.’ She smiled at him again. ‘The luggage carousel’s just started up; we shouldn’t have long to wait. That’s one advantage of these short hops—the stops are brief. Have you flown far today?’
His mouth tightened. ‘Too far to get any enjoyment out of playing verbal games. The name of the motel, Miss Reed.’
She jammed her hands in the pockets of her jeans. ‘Are you Canadian, Mr Marston?’ As he nodded, she went on, ‘Then you surely must be aware that in this country you can’t fire someone because of his or her sex.’
‘So sue me. There’s my bag, and I’m sure the cabbie will know the name of the best motel in town—in a place this size there can’t be that many to choose from. Goodbye, Miss Reed.’
