They were all joking, of course, but Samantha could see that it was one of those singles' gatherings that she had always studiously avoided, where everyone feels it necessary to get their cards out on the table before they get down to serious socialising. It was precisely the sort of group that made Samantha very uncomfortable. She didn't like to talk to strangers about herself. She didn't like the way people looked at one another with curious, avid glances. And she absolutely hated that feeling she got from them that she was part of a large shopping bazaar where each member was both a purchaser and an item up for sale.
So she was thankful for David's company, even though his attitude towards her, now that he was assured that Josh didn't matter, was a bit more proprietorial of her than she liked. As the conversation around the table jumped from topic to topic, he began to lean closer and closer to her. He draped his arm over the back of her chair, and within minutes, his hand was resting on her bare shoulder.
She was seriously considering asking him to move it, when he asked her to dance.
'I'd love to,' she said with alacrity.
The small square in front of the band was now crowded with couples swaying to the music. Samantha let David pull her close to him so that their bodies met, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh. It was silly, she supposed, that she should feel more comfortable dancing intimately with him than when she was sitting next to him and his hand had lain on her shoulder. But then dancing, no matter how close, was conventional, accepted, casual, while that hand lying on her skin had been an uncomfortable statement about possession and ownership.
A sudden jolt made her eyes fly open and she found herself looking into a pair of narrowed dark eyes.
Fortunately, David's head was turned, and the dance floor was so crowded that he didn't have the room to spin her round and find out who had bumped into them. So he was spared the sight of Samantha staring at Josh over his shoulder, and Josh staring at Samantha over the red-gold head of the woman in his arms. Samantha felt that unsmiling stare right down to her toes, and she shivered in the circle of David's arms.
David stopped humming along to the music. 'Cold?'
'No,' she said, thankful when he finally danced her into a corner where there was a slight break in the crowd. Josh disappeared from her view, and she closed her eyes once again, trying hard to erase the vision of him from her mind. He hated her, of that she was sure. That was what his look had said: that he didn't like her any more than she liked him. That he found her presence as repugnant as she found his. That he no more wanted to be her room-mate than she wanted to be his. He might have appeared to be affable and relaxed about her in front of the purser, but the truth had been laid bare in that silent look. She was an unpleasant irritation and damned annoyance, and her presence in his stateroom was going to ruin whatever plans he made. Samantha wasn't stupid, she knew very well that, if Josh had intentions of bedding the redhead in his arms, she was going to be in the way.
She discovered that she didn't like the idea of Josh sharing the stateroom with the willowy redhead. It made some part of her feel quite dreadful, angry and ... and jealous. Jealous? That was ridiculous. She couldn't possibly be jealous, because she didn't give a damn who Josh spent his time with or who he slept with. He could bed down the whole ship for all she cared. So where did all that unexpected emotion come from? Samantha shifted uneasily in David's arms and then breathed a sigh of relief as the answer came to her. She wasn't jealous of Josh at all, she was merely being possessive about the stateroom. She didn't really want another woman spending time in what should have been her own private sanctuary. That explained the anger and that awful feeling in the pit of her stomach.
The evening grew more raucous as it went on. Marybeth joined the group, and they grew ever drunker and more flirtatious. Samantha tried hard to get into the partying mood, but the longer it went on, the less she found she could join in. So she watched, smiled occasionally, danced with David when he asked her, and flinched—whenever she caught sight of Josh glancing their way. He was still with the redhead, she noticed, and they'd grown quite cosy. It was really quite nauseating the way that woman liked to encircle her arms around Josh's neck when they were dancing.
Finally, when she could take it no longer, Samantha rose and said she was tired and had to go to bed. There was a chorus of 'no' and 'please stay' and 'the best is yet to come', but she demurred and said she needed her beauty rest for tomorrow's stop at Mykonos. David insisted on walking her back to her stateroom and tucked his hand under her elbow as they wove their way through the tangle of revellers and tables. Samantha felt Josh's eyes following them, so she threw David a glittering smile and added an extra waggle to her hips. It was an adolescent thing to do, but she couldn't help herself and she'd already learned that, when it came to Josh, there seemed no point in fighting her overwhelming and often totally inexplicable impulses.
When she and David arrived at her stateroom door, she immediately realised that he wanted an invitation to go in with her, but she was quite firm about her intention of entering alone.
'Goodnight, David,' she said, opening the clasp of her bag and reaching for her key.
Fortunately, he was sensitive enough to not to push her. He merely gave a small, unconscious sigh and said, 'See you tomorrow at breakfast?'
'Fine,' she said, although her heart sank at the prospect of having to spend the whole of the next day with him. She didn't want to be paired off right away, and she was enough of a loner to look forward to sightseeing in Mykonos on her own.
'I had a great evening tonight.'
He was going to kiss her, she realised, and she gave him a wavering smile. 'I did, too.'
'We were good together.'
His mouth was drawing nearer. 'Yes, I guess we were.'
His head bent, and he began to draw her towards him. 'A little kiss to seal the evening?'
Samantha swallowed. 'Just a little one.'
He was smiling at her. 'And a promise of things to come.'
'I don't ...' But it was too late, and he was kissing her, his lips quite firm against hers, his tongue licking at her lips. Samantha endured it as best she could, feeling immense relief when he lifted his head, Jet her go and said in a low voice laced with sexual innuendo, 'Goodnight, then.'
'Goodnight.'
And then he was gone, and Samantha sagged against the door to her stateroom as his figure disappeared around the corner of the corridor. What exactly had she got herself into? A promise of things to come. She had a sinking feeling that she knew exactly what sort of things David had in mind. And it was partly her fault, too. She'd been quite agreeable to spending the evening with him; she'd liked dancing with him and she'd liked talking to him. The fact that she also didn't want to sleep with him had obviously never crossed his mind. She sighed and looked down at the key in her hand. Two minutes ago, she'd felt tired and worn out, but now her fatigue was gone. In its place was an unhappy restlessness, and she suddenly hated the idea of shutting herself into the stateroom and going to bed in that claustrophobic room with its tiny porthole. What she really wanted to do, she discovered, was go up on deck, stand at the railing and watch the stars and the Grecian moon move overhead.
Impulsively, she turned in the opposite direction to David's and climbed the stairs that led to the foredeck of the ship, taking a deep breath when the cool of the night air hit her. It was refreshing after the smoky ballroom and the air-conditioned corridors. And the quiet was lovely; she had the foredeck to herself and could only faintly hear the music from the ballroom wafting in her direction.
Samantha looked over the rail and watched the water slip under the bow. Then she gazed upward towards the stars that gleamed and the bone-white crescent of the moon and felt the tension in her muscles begin to slip away. If only life could always be like this, she thought wistfully, this moment when time is suspended, when the body becomes one with the wind and the water, when the mind can freewheel in space, shedding its cares and problems and pain.
CHAPTER FIVE
Samantha whirled around, her pulse beating wildly, screamed into the night air, tripped over her own high heel and fell directly into Josh's arms sending him staggering.
For a few seconds, they merely tried to find their breaths, then Josh demanded, 'What the hell were you trying to do? Kill me?'
Samantha stared into his face, its planes and angles emphasised by the faint rays of the moon. 'You frightened me!'
'I think that's the first time in my life I've been mistaken for a rapist!'
But now Samantha was regaining some composure. Her pulse had slowed to a less rapid rhythm and her heart, which had threatened to leap out of her throat, had subsided to its proper location in her chest.
'Well,' she said, shaking herself back to reality, 'I guess it's time to...'
But she never had a chance to finish what she was going to say, because his hand moved quickly to pinion her wrist and he said, 'Hear the music?'
'The music?'
'Listen.'
She obediently stood still and listened. Far away in the distance, the refrain of 'I Could Have Danced All Night' could be heard over the sound of her own breathing, the soft lapping of waves against the boat.
It echoed faintly over the water, rising into the night sky.
'It seems a shame to waste it, doesn't it?' He had turned to face her now, his shirt gleaming whitely in the moonlight, his eyes unreadable in the faint illumination.
'Waste what?'
'The song.'
'How can you waste a song?'
'Samantha, have you no imagination?'
'Now look,' she said, bristling, 'if this is to be a defamation of my character, then I would prefer it if you...'
'Oh, Samantha,' he said with a grin, 'has anyone ever told you that you're quite impossible?'
'Never,' she said tartly. 'In fact, I'm quite reasonable and get along with most people. I am calm and even-tempered and considered likeable by my friends and acquaintances.' She would have gone on, but now he was laughing. Despicable man She really found it very difficult to tolerate him. Even when he wasn't in one of his more infuriating moods, he seemed to know precisely how to get under her skin. And he was still holding on to her wrist. 'Will you please let go of me?' she added.
'Nope,' he said. 'Even if you don't have any imagination, I do.'
'As I said,' she began hotly, 'I really don't like it when you slander my character, and furthermore...' Oh, she was really getting into it now! She could feel her ire rising and with it her lawyer's confrontational mentality. This was one time that Joshua Sinclair was not going to win an argument with her. 'And furthermore,' she said, drawing herself up to her full height which was woefully inadequate considering the fact that he topped her by at least six inches. 'Furthermore ...'
His head inclined a bit. 'May I have this dance, Miss Lorimer of 93rd Street?'
And she found herself drawn into his arms as the saxophone picked up the melody, its sweet and languorous voice singing out into the dark of the night. She wanted to protest; she wanted to argue and battle and resist, but, for the first time that night, she found she had no more fight left in her. It was as if her conscious mind had yielded before the desires of her subconscious. Without thinking, she raised her hands to Josh's shoulders, while his hands fell gently to her waist. Her head tucked against his shoulder, his chin rested softly against her hair. Circling slowly, they moved closer and closer together until his breath lifted a strand of her hair, and her fingers linked together at the back of his neck.
Samantha would never be certain later just how long they had danced all by themselves, alone, on that deserted part of the ship's deck. She only knew that it did come to an end, a reluctant drawing apart, still without words, almost without breathing as if neither of them dared even to break, for one second, a magic that had been wrought out of nothing more substantial than the air around them. For a second they looked at one another, their faces shrouded by the darkness, and then his head bent, blocking out the stars and moon, creating even a deeper blackness before her. Lips brushed against hers, soft and yet masculine, firm and yet yielding when she moved her head slightly forward to capture that caress. But then his mouth was gone, and she had lifted her hand to her lips in the hopes of capturing its imprint, only to find that it, like the man, had vanished.
The island of Mykonos, Samantha discovered the next morning, must have been the subject of every postcard she'd ever seen of Greece. It was set like a dazzling gem in the midst of the blue Aegean, its town looking from a distance like a white, cubist sculpture set against a hillside. Every small square house was white, every wall was white, even the stone-flagged alleys were white. Only the Byzantine churches provided a touch of colour; their domes were pale blue or red, dotting the monochromatic whites like daubs of a paintbrush. Up the hill, at the side of the town, was a row of squat windmills with their white sides and dark, thatched roofs.
Samantha had spent most of the morning wandering through Mykonos and peering into some of the town's three hundred and sixty-five churches, with their small stained glass windows and gold icons on their altars. Old women dressed all in black would stare at her when she first walked in and then turn away with indifference. All the inhabitants of tiny Mykonos seemed to be like that. The sailors on the shore, the housewives hanging out their laundry, the small children dashing underfoot seemed to be completely uninterested in her or any of the other tourists that flocked the streets, looking into windows, wandering in and out of stores, or crowding the beaches. It was the shopkeepers who had the strongest investment in Mykonos' tourist trade.
Samantha glanced at the dresses pinned up to the white walls, their gauzy skirts spread out like butterfly wings, and the ornately decorated leather bags hanging from outdoor racks, but she walked quickly on. She wasn't ready to spend her drachmas yet; she was planning on doing most of her shopping in Athens, and besides, she had no real heart for it today. She was too tired from the day before and too confused by what had occurred the night before to feel very enthusiastic about shopping. She had gone back to the stateroom after Josh had disappeared into the dark. She'd undressed, washed off her make-up and gone to bed, lying awake for what seemed like hours, staring up at the ceiling and wondering.
She had tried to decipher the meaning of that silent dance. Was it just a stolen moment in time when two people who were essentially strangers joined under the moonlight—a pleasant but meaningless experience? Or was it something more? A statement of intention perhaps, of romantic interest, of emotions too fragile to bear the weight of words. But that seemed far too imaginative. Josh didn't like her; she didn't like him—they tended to rub each other up the wrong way. Which brought her to another peculiarity of the evening. Why, she wondered, hadn't she stopped the dance from happening? All it would have taken was one negative word, one gesture of refusal, one small expression of the revulsion she should have felt. But she hadn't been revolted at all—that was the odd and damning thing. She had ... well, she had quite enjoyed the sensation of being in Josh's arms.
Of course, she had explained to herself, it had nothing to do with the man involved. It was merely the result of an overdose of moonlight and music. Yes, she'd thought, turning over in the bed once again and plumping up her pillow for the umpteenth time, yes, of course, that's the answer—a softening of attitude brought about by a fatal combination of fatigue and the night air.
One would have thought that, once Samantha had decided all this to her satisfaction, she would have fallen asleep with no problem at all. But sleep had remained horribly elusive, and she'd lain awake for what seemed like hours, straining to hear the sound of Josh entering the stateroom, pulling out the sofa bed, undressing and going to sleep. But the room had remained silent, with o
nly the hum of the ship's engines filling the air, and Samantha had not been able to stop wondering where he had gone after that silent moment when his lips had met hers. He could, she had supposed as she tossed and turned, have gone back to the dance and into the arms of the lovely redhead. Or perhaps he was merely sipping at a drink at the bar or, having walked around the ship, stopped to stand at the railing, as she had done, contemplating the moonlit sea. Of course, she couldn't be sure that any of her conjectures were true, but of one thing she was absolutely positive. It was quite obvious that Josh hadn't wanted to see her again that night and was staying away from the stateroom as long as possible so that he could be sure she would be asleep when he returned.
Well, she thought, as she made her way down to the Mykonos harbour to rejoin the liner, it really doesn't matter, does it? She had no real reason to care about Josh's whereabouts, although she'd also been quite shocked to discover, the next morning, that he had come in some time during the night and had already left before she had ever risen. Not that he'd left a mess in the room; he was really quite neat, the bed had been made and rearranged as a sofa, all the clothes in his closet were neatly hung away, but the evidence that he had spent the night in the stateroom lay in his razor on the bathroom shelf and the damp towel that smelled faintly of his cologne that hung over the shower rack. Samantha could hardly believe that she'd not heard him get up and take a shower, but then she'd slept late, not rising until after ten o'clock and missing breakfast altogether. When she realised that, she'd hurriedly gathered her things together; her bag, her camera, her guide-book, pulled on a bright yellow sundress and matching sandals, run a comb through her tangle of dark curls and hurried off the ship.
Fantasy Unlimited Page 6
