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It was the angry metallic buzz sound of the Jet Ski that made her lift her head. If she hadn’t she wouldn’t have seen the kid who had obviously drifted out farther than he intended on an inflatable toy, and she watched in horror as he fell off into the path of the Jet Ski.
Two things became immediately obvious. One, he couldn’t swim very well and two, the driver of the Jet Ski couldn’t see him.
Her yelled warning alerted the people on the shore, several of whom entered the water shouting, but the Jet Ski rider remained oblivious and she was a hell of a lot closer than anyone else.
With a pounding front crawl that left her breathless, Angel managed to get to the child and make sure he stayed afloat. But it became harder to stay that way when the boy let go of the inflatable and transferred his hold to her neck, gripping tightly. Pulled under without a chance to fill her lungs, she surfaced a few moments later with the kid latched on like a limpet only to see the Jet Ski heading right for them.
At the last moment she pushed the kid’s face into her shoulder and closed her eyes, not perhaps the most practical response, but it worked to the extent that they were still alive when she opened them. Though this was, it turned out, less to do with her closed eyes and more to do with the Jet Ski rider seeing them at the last moment.
He swerved and didn’t quite miss them. But her shoulder only took a glancing blow, which she barely noticed, as at this point she was busy struggling to stay afloat. The kid was half strangling her with his grip, and the close encounter with the Jet Ski had seriously freaked him out so he had begun kicking out wildly with his legs.
The relief when a speedboat pulled up alongside and someone hauled him up out of her arms was intense.
‘Thank you so much.’ Her grateful waterlogged smile faded slightly when she saw the owner of the hand she had grabbed gratefully on to, his face a dark shadow against the sun shining directly into her eyes. But there was no mistaking his identity.
She landed in the boat in a staggeringly inelegant, breathless heap and crawled onto a bench seat.
‘You’re all right?’
‘Fine,’ she lied, finding herself nodding meekly in response to his stern, ‘Don’t move.’ As if she could have if she’d wanted to!
* * *
Alex didn’t trust himself to respond to this patent lie and maintained his silence on the way back to shore, choosing not to compete with the boy, who was now bawling in his ear very loudly.
‘I want my mum.’
‘She is welcome to you.’
Angel gasped. ‘Don’t be so mean. Can’t you see that the poor thing is upset?’
He was upset! Alex was pretty sure that watching her swim directly into the path of that Jet Ski had taken six months off his life. Angel, on the evidence so far, was not destined to make it to thirty!
‘I can hear that he’s upset,’ Alex retorted grimly, holding the kid with one hand and steering the boat with the other. He flashed her a look of irritation and snarled, ‘Will you sit still? Because if you fall out, so help me I’ll let you drown. In all my life I have never witnessed such a reckless, suicidal, stupid action!’ he raged. ‘Every time I see you, you are trying to kill yourself!’
Before she could defend herself against this unjust attack he cut the engine and the people who had waded out into the shallows were there, arms outstretched, to deliver the boy to his mother.
A young man wearing the logo of the hotel on his polo shirt and a label that identified him as a lifeguard on his cap climbed into the boat and, after speaking to Alex, took the wheel.
Alex himself peeled off his own shirt, dived neatly into the water from the far side of the boat and vanished under it before appearing on the shore side where the water reached his waist.
Hair slicked wetly back, looking like some impossibly perfect front cover of a men’s health magazine, he squinted up at Angel, water streaming down his brown face. ‘Do you want someone to take you to the marina or...?’ He held out a hand.
She treated his offer of assistance from the boat with a look of cold disdain, though as she lowered herself into the water the pain in her shoulder made her wish she had swallowed her pride.
He didn’t turn back once to see if she was managing so it became a matter of pride that she stay on her feet even though a delayed reaction to the drama was beginning to set in.
When she reached the shore slightly distant from the group around the child and his family, she watched Alex in action. He took charge, of course he did—it was clearly second nature to him. He was just one of those individuals people naturally turned to in times of crisis and he was good, she had to admit, as she watched him soothe, calm and casually issue instructions.
It was curious that the father of the child who had up until that moment held it together broke down and started weeping, almost as if Alex’s competence gave him permission to fall apart. At that point his wife stopped crying and began berating their son, who had been on the point of enjoying all the attention.
‘If it hadn’t been for that lady.... She’s a heroine.’
Someone clapped and someone else picked it up, then with a chain-reaction effect the ripple spread and everyone was clapping.
Angel, whose entire attention had been focused on Alex—she might even have had her mouth open—became belatedly aware of people looking in her general direction, and looked around expecting to see the heroine referred to until the penny dropped.... Oh, God!
With heaven-sent timing the shaken driver of the Jet Ski chose this moment to wade ashore and, taking advantage of the distraction afforded by his appearance, Angel headed for the rocky area that shielded the main beach from the smaller, quieter cove at the far end. She gave a quick furtive look over her shoulder before she waded through the water and then down onto the beach the other side of the rocky outcrop.
The small cove was empty, and with a sigh of relief Angel flopped down onto the sand, her closed eyelids filtering out some of the brutal midday sun. It wasn’t until she stretched out that she realised she wasn’t only shaking on the inside but on the outside too, fine tremors that shook her entire body.
She lay still and waited for it to pass, nursing her head, which, still tender from the previous night, had begun to throb gently. Great, she needed that like a... Actually a hole in the head might relieve the pressure she could feel building.
Alex was probably the only one who had seen her slip away. He was definitely the only one to follow her. The idea of her acting like some sort of injured animal, crawling away to lick its wounds, made him furious. The woman had the self-preservation instincts of a lemming.
He clambered over the rocks, not around them, to reach the empty cove. There was a very good reason it was empty at this time of day. The water Angel had waded through was already waist deep and in another ten minutes it would be cut off from the bigger beach. Swimming around or a trek through the pine-forested strip that edged the sand were the only ways back to the hotel, a fact that was written in red letters a mile high on signs along the beach.
When he spotted her stretched out on the sand he hit the ground running, then stopped as he saw her chest lift, her breasts pushing against the black fabric of her bikini top.
At the best of times—which this was not—Alex was not well schooled in compassionate concern; he lacked the finesse and the patience. Yet as he reached the spot where she lay and looked down at her he felt his anger slip away. In his head he saw her face when she had realised the applause was for her. Many people dreamed of earning such plaudits, of being hailed a hero, but she had looked...stunned, horrified. It would have been the prefect punishment to have drawn her in to take a curtain bow, but the hunted expression on her face as she had slipped away had made him repress the malicious impulse.
Lying there, she managed to simultaneously look as sexy as hell and damned, throat-achingly vulnerable.
‘Are you all right?’ Concern added a layer of gravel to his deep voice.
She didn’t leap out of her skin, but only because she had felt his shadow blocking the sun a fraction of a second before he spoke. Still stinging from his unfair comments in the boat, she imagined the expression of impatience on his lean face. In her head she could see him glancing at his watch, thinking, That bloody woman again!
She raised herself onto her elbows but didn’t lift her gaze. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, arching her foot to rub the sand off one foot with the red-painted toes of the other.
His eyes on the top of her dark head, he wondered how she managed to make the assurance sound much the same as go away—it was a talent. He was sorely tempted to do just that. If she was so determined to put herself in a hospital, who was he to stop her?
Unaware that he had chosen that moment to drop gracefully into a squatting position beside her, Angel started to sit upright. The near collision of their heads drew a tiny gasp of alarm from her throat. Rocking back on his heels, he remained, from Angel’s point of view, far too close!
He still didn’t have his shirt on, and he made her think of a particularly sexy pirate. How embarrassing that she couldn’t stop staring at his chest; her eyes were welded there.
‘I’m fine,’ she croaked, thinking this comment had rarely in her life been less true.
‘You’re working on the theory that if you say it more than once it makes it so.’ He didn’t sound amused; he sounded exasperated.
‘It is so.’ Teeth pressing into the pink softness of her full lower lip, she finally managed to drag her eyes upwards and discovered that he wasn’t looking impatient or even angry. He was looking worried and concerned, and instead of being mollified by the discovery she was thrown into an instant state of heart-pounding confusion. With Alex it seemed a condition she spent about ninety per cent of her time in.
From the tangled muddle of emotions lodged like a heavy stone in her chest, anger and resentment dissolved. Without them she felt oddly defenceless; she didn’t know how to deal with his concern. Who are you kidding, Angel? You don’t know how to deal with him full stop! The man was the father of her child and he was a total stranger—a pulse-racingly disturbing total stranger.
Well, one solution would be to get to know him, she thought. He’s right here. Stop snarling and start talking. Was picking fights with him a way that she had subconsciously adopted to delay the moment she told him about Jasmine? She tried to push the idea away but it lingered...as did the scent of his soap in her nostrils.
‘I really am all right. I was just escaping the fuss.... How about the boy?’
‘He doesn’t seem any the worse for the experience,’ Alex commented drily. ‘He was posing for photos when I left.... What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You winced.’
She expelled an exasperated sigh of surrender and snapped. ‘My head hurts. It’s nothing.’ Compared to last night it was true. She turned her head, giving a little grunt of relief when she saw that the skin on her shoulder was not broken. It was sore, though.
Growing irritation made his jaw clench again. She had managed to make it sound as if it were his fault.
‘Let me see.’
She turned her head away. ‘No, I didn’t hit it. I just have a headache.’
‘Headaches don’t leave bruises.’ His long brown fingers, their touch delicate but firm, pushed aside the saturated strands of hair from her forehead, causing her eyes to fly wide and green to his face, the frantic fluttering sensation that began in the pit of her stomach and spread hot and dangerously fast making her pull away while she could.
The subsequent jolt caused her bruised shoulder to ache.
‘Leave me alone.’
The words mocked Alex even as her belligerent emerald eyes taunted him.
Leave her alone!
That’s your problem, Alex thought grimly. You can’t.
Six years ago he hadn’t been able to and he still couldn’t. From the moment he had seen her he had wanted her and that hunger had not decreased. If anything it had grown and it didn’t matter how aggravating, how sheer bloody minded she was, no negative was negative enough to make him any less hot for her.
Around this woman his self-control was zero. Even the fact she had just been involved in an accident didn’t save her from his lust. No, lust he could cope with, but this ability she had to draw emotional responses from him was something he was not willing to recognise, let alone deal with.
‘You’re bloody lucky all you have is a headache!’
The fresh blast of disapproval hurt but at least it enabled her to throw off the weird feeling of vulnerability.
‘Do you have to yell?’ She framed a pained furrow between her darkly defined brows. ‘I’m not deaf.’ Or needy, she reminded herself.
His jaw tightened and the memory of her putting herself between the blades of the Jet Ski and the child resurfaced to increase his rage. ‘Do you ever think about the consequences of your actions?’
It was the consequences of both their actions that she had been living with for six years. ‘I accept them,’ she told him quietly. ‘How about you?’ Well, she was going to find out the answer to that one very soon.
He ignored the wry interjection and barely registered her sudden look of panic. ‘We are not talking about me. I’m talking about your publicity-seeking stunt.’
Her temper fizzed. ‘A stunt! You think I arranged that?’
Alex didn’t, but the thought had flashed through his mind. ‘No, I don’t think you’ve got the brains....’ he admitted, an edge of weariness entering his voice as he added, ‘Do you ever think before you leap or jump?’
She fixed him with an evil-eyed stare. ‘You’re right, I didn’t think. Story of my life!’ She sniffed. ‘If I had thought, do you think I’d have wasted my virginity on a selfish, lying bastard who let me think he was married just to get out the door?’
She closed her eyes to blot out the expression stamped on his face. The man didn’t just look shocked, he looked as though someone had aimed a loaded revolver at him and pulled the trigger.
The words didn’t just hang in the air, they vibrated, the volume growing with each beat of her heart. Unfortunately, there was no way she could retrieve them because, true to form, she’d done it again. She’d blurted out the truth at the worst moment imaginable. Way to go, Angel, out to personally disprove the old adage that wisdom came with age.
CHAPTER FIVE (#uf9ff38c7-3705-5089-92cf-ce5ad2294efa)
‘YOU’RE TRYING TO tell me... No... No, you were not a virgin!’ Even as Alex voiced the denial his brain was making connections that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen before.
‘’Course not. What can I say? I have a sick sense of humour.’
Angel’s eyes were closed, squeezed tight like a little kid who thought the action made her invisible.
‘You were.’ He dragged a hand through his hair and got to his feet, walking several steps away before stalking back to stand over her. ‘You were a virgin, and you acted like a damned...’
‘Damned what?’ she challenged, getting to her feet.
He just looked at her and shook his head, groaning. ‘Theos!’
She shrugged, wrapping her arms around herself, cold despite the afternoon heat. Shock, she speculated, viewing the tremors that were shaking her body with a weird objectivity. The genie was out of the bottle, the truth was out there and she couldn’t get it back, so she did the only thing possible—she downplayed it like mad!
‘Let’s not make a big deal of it. A girl’s got to lose it some time.’
‘You think this is a subject for cheap jokes? It was a big deal. It is a big deal—to me and it should be to you.’ He hadn’t even been Emma’s first lover, and it had not been important to him. For some men perhaps there was an appeal in teaching a novice the ropes, but it was a responsibility that he would have actively avoided had the opportunity ever arisen. It hadn’t—or so he had thought.
‘I’m sorry if my ability to laugh at ancient history offends you, but it was a long time ago and life moves on.’ And it also occasionally threw some surprises, and the surprise today was the strength of Alex’s reaction to the news. He was still pale beneath his tan. ‘There has to be a first time for everyone—it’s the second time that can be more problematic.’ She cleared her throat and, regretting the reference to her nonexistent sex life, hurriedly tacked on a laughing, ‘Even you.’
She lifted her eyes to his face and her smile faded. It was impossible to imagine Alex being young and inexperienced, his face smooth, his eyes without cynicism.
‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me?’ he blasted.
His indignation continued to strike her as pretty perverse. ‘I don’t recall conversation being very high on the agenda.’ She forced the words past the tight constriction in her throat. ‘Would it have made any difference if I’d told you?’
Alex opened his mouth and closed it again. It was a good question and he’d have liked to think it would, but on that day he had not been thinking with his brain.
‘I resent being made to feel like some sort of bloody predator.’
He resented! ‘Well, I’m so sorry I’ve made you feel a victim, but I guess it’s a responsibility I’ll have to live with.’
The saccharine insincerity dripping from her sarcastic retort brought a defining flash of colour to the knife-edged contours of his carved cheekbones.
‘Did you set out that day with the intention of—?’ He bit down on the question, but not soon enough to stop Angel’s eyes sparking afresh with anger.
‘Sure,’ she drawled, disguising her hurt with a sarcastic tone. ‘I engineered the whole thing.’
A muscle alongside his mouth clenched as their eyes connected, sizzling blue on flashing green. ‘You can’t leave anything, can you?’ he charged. Like the fact you acted like a total irresponsible bastard, Alex? ‘I know it wasn’t your fault,’ he gritted through clenched teeth. ‘It was my bloody...’ He stopped abruptly. ‘You said the second time was the problem.’ He shook his head, not following the crazy idea to its equally crazy conclusion.
‘Did I?’ she said, thinking did this man miss nothing? She adopted a sweetly insincere smile and hid behind the truth. ‘Oh, yes, you’ve guessed it. You spoiled me for any other man, Alex.’
Responding to her mockery with a curt, unsmiling, ‘Except for the father of your child,’ he extended a hand to her.
Staring at the hand, not the man she nodded. ‘Oh, yes, there is him.’ And there was Jasmine.
And Jasmine’s father.
