скачать книгу бесплатно
‘Stay. Sit down,’ he said with a gesture at the lounger beside him.
‘Do you always issue invitations as an order?’ she asked, ignoring the invitation.
‘On the contrary, I always issue orders as an invitation.’ Then, before she could walk away—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to work this hard to keep a woman’s attention; when he’d wanted to—he said, ‘Simply?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You think delivering a wedding here will be simple?’
That earned him a smile of his own. A slightly wry one, admittedly, with one corner of her mouth doing all the work and drawing attention to soft, full lips.
‘Weddings are never simple,’ she said, perching on the edge of the lounger rather than stretching out beside him as he’d hoped. Keen to be off and conquering worlds. No prizes for guessing who that reminded him of. ‘Certainly not this one.’
‘But you’re the wedding lady,’ he reminded her. ‘It was your bright idea to have the wedding here.’
‘You don’t approve the choice of location?’ she asked, her head tilting to one side. Interested rather than offended.
He shrugged without thinking and as he caught his breath she moved swiftly to steady the cup with one hand, placing her other on his shoulder.
‘Are you all right?’ she said.
No. Actually, far from all right.
As she’d leaned forward her robe had gaped to offer him a tantalising glimpse of the delights it was supposed to conceal. Her breasts were not large, but they were smooth, invitingly creamy and, without doubt, all her own and he was getting an overload of stimulation. Pain and pleasure in equal measure.
‘A noisy celebrity wedding doesn’t seem to fit the setting,’ he said and, doing his best to ignore both, especially the warmth of her palm spreading through him, he looked up.
Her face was close enough to see the fine down that covered her fair, smooth skin. Genuine concern in those extraordinary eyes. But what held his attention was a faint white scar that ran along the edge of her jaw. It would, under normal circumstances, have been covered by make-up, but Josie had come on her errand of mercy without stopping to apply the mask that women used to conceal their true selves from the outside world.
No make-up. No designer clothes.
It left her more naked than if she’d stripped off her robe and he had to clench his hand to stop himself from reaching out, tracing the line of it from just beneath her ear to her chin as if he could somehow erase it, erase the memory of the pain it must have caused her, with his thumb.
‘What about the other guests who are here to watch the wildlife?’ he demanded, rather more sharply than he’d intended as he sought to distance himself. ‘Don’t they get any consideration?’
‘There won’t be any,’ she said, removing her hand as she sat back, distancing herself. Leaving a cold spot where it had been.
‘Exactly my point.’
‘No, I meant that there won’t be any other guests, Gideon. We’ve taken over the entire resort for the wedding so we won’t be disturbing anyone.’
‘Apart from the animals. Every room?’
‘And the rest. We’ve got a river boat coming to take the overflow.’
‘Well, I hate to be the one to say “I told you so”, but here comes your first complication. I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Then you’re going to have to bivouac in the bush because you’re certainly not staying here,’ she replied.
He didn’t bother to argue with her. She’d find out just how immovable he could be soon enough.
‘Did you get a good discount for block booking?’ he asked.
‘What?’ She shook her head. ‘There’s nothing discount about this wedding but, since I wasn’t part of the negotiations, I couldn’t say what financial arrangements were made with the owners. I was brought in at the last minute when the original wedding planner had to pull out. Not that it’s any of your business,’ she added.
‘If it had been your call?’ he pressed. ‘Would you have chosen Leopard Tree Lodge?’
‘The venue is the bride’s decision,’ she replied. Then, with the smallest of shrugs, ‘I might have tried to talk her out of it. Not that the location isn’t breathtaking,’ she assured him. ‘The drama of flying in over the desert and then suddenly seeing the green of the Okavango delta spread out below you, the gleam of water amongst the reeds. The river…’
She was going through the motions, he realised. Talking to him, but her brain was somewhere else. No doubt working out the implications of a cuckoo in the nest.
‘The photographs are going to be breathtaking,’ she said, making an effort. ‘Any special deal that Celebrity managed to hammer out of the company that owns this place is going to be cheap in return for the PR hit. Six weeks of wall-to-wall coverage in the biggest lifestyle magazine in the UK. Well, five. The first week is devoted to the hen weekend.’
Undoubtedly. A full house as well as a ton of publicity. Whoever it was on his staff who’d negotiated this deal had done a very good job. The fact that he or she hadn’t brought it to his attention in the hope of earning a bonus suggested that they knew what his reaction would have been.
Not that they had to. His role was research and development, not the day-to-day running of things. No doubt they were simply waiting for the jump in demand to prove their point for him. And earn them a bonus.
Smart thinking. It was just what he’d have done in their position.
Tf the setting is so great, what’s your problem with it?’ he asked.
It was one thing for him to hate the idea. Quite another for someone to tell him that it was all wrong for her big fancy media event.
‘In my experience there’s more than enough capacity for disaster when it comes to something in which such strong emotions are invested, without transporting bride, groom, a hundred plus guests, photographers, a journalist, hair and make-up artists, not to mention all their kit and caboodle six thousand miles via three separate aircraft. One of them so small that it’ll need a separate trip just for the wedding dress.’
‘You’re exaggerating.’
‘Probably,’ she admitted. ‘But not by much.’
‘No. And that’s another problem,’ he said, seizing the opening she’d given him. ‘It’s a gift to the green lobby. They’ll use the high profile of the event to get their own free PR ride over the carbon footprint involved in transporting everyone halfway round the world just so that two people can say “I do”.’
‘You think they should have chosen the village church?’
‘Why not?’
‘Good question,’ she said. ‘So, tell me, Gideon McGrath, how did you get here? By hot-air balloon?’
For a man who probably flew more miles in a year than most people did in a lifetime that sounded very appealing and he told her so.
‘Unfortunately, there is no way of making a balloon take you where you want to go.’
‘Maybe the trick is to want to go where the balloon takes you,’ she replied.
‘That’s a bit too philosophical for me.’
‘Really? Well, you can stop worrying. Tal Newman’s PR people have anticipated the negative reaction and he’s going to offset the air travel involved by planting a sizeable forest.’
‘Where?’ he asked, his interest instantly piqued. A lot of his clients offset their travel, but maybe he could make it easy for them by offering it as part of the package. Do more. Put something back, perhaps. Something meaningful…
‘The forest?’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry, that information is embargoed until the day before the wedding.’
‘In other words, you don’t know.’
‘No idea,’ she admitted. ‘Everything about this wedding is on a “need to know” basis. Not that you could call anyone and tell them.’ She thought about that and added, ‘You know it’s possible that the lack of communication may be one of the reasons Celebrity seized on this location. Without a signal, there’s no chance of the guests, or staff, sending illicit photographs to rival magazines and newspapers via their mobile phones so that they can run spoilers.’
‘I thought you said the location was the bride’s call?’
‘It is for my brides but this isn’t just a wedding, it’s a media event. Of course Crystal apparently loves animals so it fits the image.’
He snorted derisively.
‘Any animals she sees here are going to be wild and dangerous—especially the furry ones. She’d have done better getting married in a petting zoo.’
‘You might say that,’ she replied with a deadstraight face. ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’ Then she took out her notebook and jotted something down. ‘But thanks for the idea.’
He laughed, jerking the pain in his back into life.
Josie’s hand twitched as if to reach out again, but she closed it tight about her pen and he told himself that he was glad. He preferred his relationships physical, uncomplicated. That way, everyone knew where they were. The minute emotions, caring got involved, they became dangerous. Impossible to control. With limitless possibilities for pain.
‘You don’t believe in any of this, do you?’ he said, guarding himself against regret. ‘You provide the flowers and frills and fireworks but underneath you’re a cynic.’
‘The flowers and frills,’ she replied, ‘but it was stipulated by the resort that there should be no fireworks.’
‘Well, that’s a relief. You never know which way a startled elephant will run.’
‘That’s an image I could have done without,’ she said. ‘But, since you won’t be here, there’s no need to concern yourself. How was the coffee?’
Gideon looked at his empty cup. ‘Do you know, I was so absorbed by all this wedding talk that I scarcely noticed.’ Holding it out for a refill, he said, ‘I’ll concentrate this time.’
Josie replenished it without a word, then leaned forward to stir in another spoonful of honey.
‘Enough?’ she asked, raising long, naturally dark lashes to look questioningly at him.
‘Perfect,’ he said as he was offered a second glimpse of her entrancing cleavage. A second close-up of that faint scar.
Was it a childhood fall? A car accident? He tried to imagine what might have caused such an injury.
‘So, what have you actually done to your back?’ she asked, distracting him. ‘Did you get into a tussle with a runaway elephant? Wrestle an alligator? Total a four-by-four chasing a rhino?’
‘Actually, since we’re in Africa, that would be a crocodile,’ he pointed out, sipping more slowly at the second cup. Savouring it. Making it last. He didn’t want her to rush off. ‘The creatures you should never smile at.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s a song. Never smile at a crocodile…’ As he sang the words, he felt the tug of the past. Where the hell had that come from?
‘Peter Pan,’ she said. ‘Forgive me, but I wouldn’t have taken you for a fan.’
He shrugged without thinking, but this time it didn’t catch him so viciously. Maybe the doc was right. He just needed to relax. Spend some time talking about nothing much, to someone who didn’t want something from him.
Apart from his room.
Obviously a woman at the top of her field in the events industry—and she had to be good or she wouldn’t be in charge of Tal Newman’s high profile wedding—would have that kind of easy ability to talk to anyone, put them at their ease. He’d only been talking to her for a few minutes and already he’d had two good ideas.
Even so.
Most women he met had an agenda. Hers was to evict him and while, just an hour ago, he would have been her willing accomplice, just the thought of getting on a plane tightened the pain.
She might not be a babe, nothing like the women he dated when he could spare the time. Who never lasted more than a month or two, because he never could spare the time, refused to take the risk…
What mattered was that she had access to coffee, the little pleasures that made the wheels of life turn without squeaking, and she would have that vital contact with the outside world.
The fact that she was capable of stringing an intelligent sentence together and making him laugh—well, smile, anyway; laughing, as he’d discovered, was a very bad idea—was pure bonus.
‘My father was into amateur dramatics,’ he told her. ‘He put on a show for the local kids every Christmas.’
‘Oh, right.’ For just a moment she seemed to freeze, then she pasted on a smile that even on so short an acquaintance he knew wasn’t the real thing. ‘Well, that must have been fun. Were you Peter?’ She paused. ‘Or were you Captain Hook?’
Something about the way she said that suggested she thought Hook was more his thing.
‘My father played Hook. I didn’t get involved.’ One fantasist in the family was more than enough.
She lifted her eyebrows a fraction, but kept whatever she was thinking to herself and said, ‘So? Despite the paternal advice, did you smile at one?’
‘Nothing that exciting. Damn thing just seized up on me. I was planning to leave yesterday, but apparently I’m stuck here until it unseizes itself,’ he said, firing a shot across her assumption that he would be leaving any time soon.
‘That must hurt,’ she said, her forehead puckering in a little frown. ‘Have you seen a doctor?’
Good question.
She was going to be responsible for the health and safety of a hundred plus people. If anyone hurt themselves—and weddings were notoriously rowdy affairs—she needed to know there was help at hand.
Or maybe she was finally getting it. What his immovability meant in terms of her ‘block booking’.
‘There’s a doctor in Maun. He flew up yesterday, spoke to my doctor in London and then ordered complete rest. According to him, this little episode is my body telling me to be still.’ He made little quote marks with his fingers around the ‘be still’. He wouldn’t want her, or anyone else, thinking he said things like that.
‘It’s psychological?’
Something about the way she said that, no particular shock or surprise, suggested that it wasn’t the first time she’d encountered the condition.
‘That’s what they’re implying.’
‘My stepfather suffered from the same thing,’ she said. ‘His back seized up every time someone suggested he get a job.’
She said it with a brisk, throwaway carelessness that declared to the world that having a layabout for a stepfather mattered not one jot. But her words betrayed a world of hurt. And went a long way to explaining that very firm assertion—strange for a woman whose life revolved around it—that marriage wasn’t for her.
‘I didn’t mean to imply that that’s your problem,’ she added with a sudden rush that—however unlikely that seemed—might have been embarrassment.
‘I promise you that it’s not,’ he assured her. ‘On the contrary. It’s made worse by the fact that I’m out of touch with my office. That I’m stuck here when I should be several thousand miles away negotiating a vital contract.’
