by Jessica Hart
The next three weeks were going to be awkward if she was going to feel stupidly shy like this the whole time. She wanted to treat Tom exactly the same as always, but how could she when he was sitting there with that body? She wished he would go and put his suit back on. It might not be very practical for the beach, but at least she would feel as if she knew where she was.
The silence lengthened uncomfortably. Imogen was still searching desperately for a neutral topic of conversation when a flash of light beneath the water caught her eye and she leant forward to see another, and then another. ‘Look!’ she cried, pointing at the tiny fish that darted over the sand and heartily relieved at the distraction. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’
‘There’ll be a lot more out there.’ Tom seized gratefully on the conversational gambit. Narrowing his eyes against the glare, he nodded towards the reef. ‘I hear the snorkelling is spectacular.’
‘I’d love to do that,’ she said wistfully.
‘You could get out there easily enough. I noticed a boat earlier.’
Imogen looked doubtful. ‘I wouldn’t know one end of a boat from another. I think I’d be better off swimming! Is snorkelling easy? I’ve never done it before.’
‘I’ll teach you if you like,’ said Tom, who only moments before had decided that the only way to get through three weeks of Imogen in a bikini was to go their separate ways as much as possible.
‘Really?’
So much for keeping his distance! Tom cursed himself for a fool. He couldn’t have found a surer way to get close to her in that damned bikini if he’d tried. He was supposed to be getting back to a work relationship, not fooling around in the water.
‘We’ll have a go tomorrow. After we’ve done some work,’ he added.
‘I’d like that,’ said Imogen, brightening. Perhaps it would be easier if they did something together. At least then they would have something to talk about.
She leant back on her elbows and looked at him curiously. There was little money in snorkelling, few deals to be negotiated on a coral reef. It seemed an unlikely activity for Tom to take part in. ‘Where did you learn to snorkel?’
‘In the Caribbean. I had a girlfriend once who went on and on about having a holiday together,’ Tom remembered. ‘I only went to shut her up, but it wasn’t a success. We’d got on fine in London, but I suppose the truth was that we hadn’t seen that much of each other. As soon as we got out there, we realised that we had nothing to say to each other. She lay on the beach and I went snorkelling, and once we got back to London I never saw her again!’
Imogen spread her hands, sliding them beneath the silvery sand. ‘They say holidays are a real test of a relationship.’
‘It certainly was for Helena and I, although according to Helena it was all my fault. She complained I didn’t know how to relax, and there’s some truth in that. I never know what to do with myself on holiday. I don’t think I ever learnt. We never had holidays when we were growing up.’
‘What, never?’
‘Not the kind of holiday where you go away somewhere different, anyway. I had school holidays, of course, but my mother died when I was small and my father was always working, so I was pretty much left to my own devices.’
‘Poor little boy,’ said Imogen, but he shrugged off her sympathy.
‘I liked it. I started my first business at the age of ten. I used to knock on neighbours’ doors and offer to wash cars for a quid, until I realised that I was undercharging!’ He smiled wryly at the memory.
‘What did you do with your earnings?’ she asked, intrigued by the idea of him as a little boy.
‘I bought some extra buckets and some more cloths, and gave them to friends in exchange for a percentage of their earnings. By the end of the summer, I had quite a team!’
Imogen laughed. She was feeling better now that they were actually having a conversation. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad after all. ‘It sounds like you were always an entrepreneur!’
‘I learnt early on that if I wanted anything, I had to get it for myself,’ said Tom. ‘Even at ten I could work out the laws of supply and demand. To get what I wanted, I needed money, but to get money all I had to do was work out what everyone else wanted and then make it easy for them to have it.’
‘You make it sound so simple,’ said Imogen with a touch of bitterness, and he raised his brows.
‘It is simple.’
‘Working out what people want? Not in my experience!’
He shrugged. ‘I never had any trouble knowing what I wanted. It seems to me a lot of people don’t know what they want. Once you do, you’ve got a clear objective, and then it’s just a matter of working towards it. All you need is a strategy and be prepared to stick with it.’
‘That might work in business, but strategies are no use when emotions are involved.’
‘No.’ Tom thought about Julia and how messy everything had become once he had forgotten just that. ‘That’s why I stick to business as much as possible. Whenever I venture into emotional territory, it turns into a disaster.’
He hadn’t meant to sound bitter, but Imogen shot him a quick glance of concern.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to remind you of Julia. I was thinking of myself.’
‘Oh?’ Tom was glad to turn the conversation away from his inadequacies on the emotional front.
‘I always knew what I wanted too, but much good it did me.’
‘What did you want?’
Imogen sighed and clasped her arms around her knees. ‘I wanted my boyfriend to love me again, that was all. I even had a strategy, as you call it. I was going to give him time, and then he’d realise that he missed me.’
‘And he didn’t?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He married someone else.’
Tom studied her profile. She had pushed her wet hair behind her ears and she was staring out to the horizon, lost in memories.
‘There’s no point in wanting something that depends on someone else,’ he said after a moment. ‘You can only succeed if you want things that you can achieve by yourself.’
Something he should have remembered before he’d asked Julia to marry him.
‘But what if what you want is not to be by yourself?’ asked Imogen, turning her head to look at him, and Tom found himself trapped by the directness of her gaze.
Had her eyes always been that blue? he wondered, almost startled by the depth of colour. Surely he would have noticed them before if they had?
It must be just the sea and the sky making them look so blue, he decided. A trick of the light.
‘Then you probably won’t succeed,’ he said.
‘Success isn’t everything,’ she pointed out.
‘It is to me.’
Imogen didn’t answer directly. To Tom’s secret relief, she looked away once more to where the ocean surged and sighed beyond the reef.
‘I remember in my last year at school, an older girl came to give us a talk,’ she said eventually. ‘I thought it was going to be really boring. She was a high-flying lawyer, very glamorous, and she seemed to have everything. We were all expecting her to tell us how we had to work hard to succeed, but she said something completely different.
‘I’ve never forgotten,’ Imogen remembered. ‘She told us that the most important lesson we had to learn was how to fail. She said that we all fail at some time in our lives, and that what counted was not how much money we earned or how much status we had, but how we responded to failure. It was a test of character, she said. Did we let ourselves be beaten, or did we pick ourselves up and start again?’
Tom frowned. He had never let himself consider failure at all.
‘And you bought this?’
‘Well, it was very uplifting at the time,’ said Imogen, almost apologetically. ‘Especially for those of us who were more used to failing than succeeding. But I’ve got plenty of experience of failure now. I have to admit it would be nice to try success some time for a change!’
‘That depends on your goals, doesn’t it? You can’t make someone else love you,’ she said a little sadly. ‘You can’t control how other people will react. If you’re going to have any kind of relationship at all, you have to accept that you’re not always going to succeed. There’s no other option.’
‘Unless you give up on relationships altogether.’
‘But that’s a failure too, isn’t it?’ said Imogen.
Her words seemed to reverberate over the shimmering lagoon. Failure…failure…failure…
Tom stirred uneasily. He wasn’t used to failure. He didn’t like it. He didn’t know what to do with it.
But he had to face it. His relationship with Julia had been a failure. He knew it. Imogen knew it. Everyone knew it.
Humiliation burned in the pit of his stomach and he glared out at the horizon, his shoulders tense and hunched.
‘So what did you learn from not getting your boyfriend back?’
Imogen didn’t appear to notice the harshness in his voice. ‘I learned that I don’t want to compromise,’ she said. ‘I’ve accepted that Andrew doesn’t love me any more. My friends have been telling me that I should get out there again and meet someone else, so I’ve been trying. I go out on dates, and I really do try to be positive, but I haven’t met anyone who could even begin to make me feel the way I felt about Andrew. Every date feels like yet another failure now, so I’ve decided to stop looking.’
‘You’re giving up on men?’
‘No. I’m giving up thinking that I might settle for something less than perfect.’
There was another long silence, broken only by the rippling of the lagoon and the faint sough of the wind in the coconut palms and, from somewhere in the island, the harsh screech of a bird.
Tom was thinking about what Imogen had said. Julia had tried to settle, he realised. He had only ever been second-best for her. The thought was bitter. Julia had made the right decision in the end, but it had left him feeling a failure.
That was how Imogen said she felt after every disastrous date. Funny, he had never thought of her as having a life of her own before. She had just been a PA and now…
Tom glanced at her. Her eyes were on the horizon, her expression dreamy or perhaps just wistful. She wasn’t classically beautiful, like Julia, but there was something appealing about her. Tom couldn’t put his finger on it. It might be that lovely lush skin, or the generous curve to her mouth, or perhaps the blueness and brightness of her eyes.
Now…now she was more than just a PA. Tom didn’t know exactly what she was, but she was more than that.
Almost as if she could hear him thinking, Imogen turned her head to find him watching her and, as her clear, lovely blue eyes looked into his, Tom found himself struggling to breathe normally.
This was ridiculous, he told himself crossly. It was only Imogen.
‘You’re getting burnt.’ He said the first thing that came into his mind, and touched a finger to her shoulder where her skin was pink. ‘Sorry,’ he said as she flinched.
Imogen swallowed. ‘It’s just a bit sore,’ she said, not wanting to admit how aware she was of his touch. ‘You’re right, I’d better go into the shade for a while.’
Clambering inelegantly to her feet, she brushed the sand from her legs and pretended not to notice as Tom straightened beside her. Suddenly, he seemed very close, his chest broad, his shoulders powerfully muscled, his hips lean in the plain swimming shorts he wore, and her mouth dried.
‘I might have a snooze,’ she said, stepping back as if it would help her suck more oxygen into her lungs. ‘It’s all catching up with me now.’
‘Why don’t you go to bed for a couple of hours?’
Imogen managed to shake her head. She would never be able to relax in that bed, imagining what it would be like if things were different, if she could stretch out and wait for Tom to join her underneath that fine sheet, if he were to pull off those shorts and let her run her hands over that smooth, muscled body…
With some difficulty, she wrenched her mind away. ‘I like it down here,’ she said.
‘Up to you.’ Tom shrugged, plainly unbothered. ‘I’ll see you later, in that case.’
Imogen’s body was buzzing with a mixture of exhaustion and a prickly awareness, so she didn’t really expect to sleep when she lay on the lounger in the deep shade, but tiredness rolled over her like a wave the moment she closed her eyes, and when she opened them again it was to discover that it was nearly two hours later.
Groggily, she got to her feet, still squinting at her watch in case she had made a mistake, but the lengthening shadows told their own story. It looked as if she had had that snooze after all.
Vaguely aware of a lingering embarrassment, without really remembering why, Imogen made her way back to the house. The sun was low on the horizon and the sea lay flat and still while in the undergrowth unseen insects were warming up for a rasping, sawing, shrilling concert to mark the end of the day.
Tom had moved his laptop to the dining table and she could see him studying the screen intently. How many times had she seen him wear exactly that focused expression? Imogen wondered. The line between his brows, the pugnacious set of his jaw, the stern line of his mouth…they were all completely familiar to her after working with him for the last few months.
So why did the sight of him feel like a fist colliding with her stomach, driving the air out of her lungs and leaving her jolted and jarred with the sudden shock of it?
It must be the jet lag catching up on her, Imogen decided, and drew a steadying breath as she put a foot on the veranda steps.
Tom looked up when she appeared in the doorway.
‘That was a long snooze.’
‘I didn’t mean to sleep that long.’ Imogen was glad to see he had put on a shirt and shorts. He looked cool and comfortable while she felt hot and drowsy and crumpled after her sleep. At least discomfort helped her shake aside that odd feeling of shocking familiarity.
‘I think I’ll have a shower,’ she said. ‘I’m still feeling a bit dopey.’
‘You look it.’
His voice was cool, his glance faintly disapproving, and Imogen let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. It was a relief to realise that he was once more Tom, her irascible boss, a man impatient of weakness or frivolity.
So they had chatted in the shallows for a bit? What else were they supposed to do when they were all alone on a tropical island? Tom might have told her more about himself than she had ever known before, but he had just been making conversation and that wasn’t the same as being intimate, no matter what it had felt like.
She certainly wasn’t going to start being silly just because she had seen what a good body lurked beneath those suits he always wore. It had just been tiredness making her uncomfortably aware of him as a man rather than a boss, Imogen told herself. She would just have a cool shower and change into something sensible, and they would be back to their normal professional relationship in no time.
The light was fading rapidly as she made her way out to the bathroom. It was open to the sky and the subdued lights made the curving walls and clever tiling look wonderfully romantic. The lack of a door made Imogen a little uncomfortable, but Tom knew where she was, she reasoned. He was hardly likely to come barging in on her and, with no one else on the island, she could hardly ask for more privacy.
She turned her attention to the shower, peering at the controls in the dim light. There were no screens, no panels, just an enormous shower head that stuck out over the tiled floor that sloped slightly to drain. It would be like standing under a waterfall.
Imogen’s skin was hot and gritty, and her hair was full of sand. It was going to be wonderful, she told herself as she turned the controls and pulled off her bikini.
With a sigh of relief, she stepped under the cascade of wate
r, only to feel something scuttle horribly underfoot. Something she hadn’t seen in the stupid lighting, which was suddenly not romantic at all, but downright dangerous.
Something that had a friend to scrabble over her foot as she jerked it away.
Imogen couldn’t help herself. She screamed and leapt out of the water, bolting to the other side of the bathroom without even stopping to grab a towel.
The next moment Tom came skidding round the curving bathroom wall. ‘What’s the ma-oh!’
He stopped dead at the realisation that Imogen was stark naked.
Imogen’s heart was galloping with a mixture of fright and the sheer shock of seeing Tom charge into the room, but for a long, excruciating moment she could only stare back at him from behind the Jacuzzi.
He wondered if she had any idea how she looked, with her hair damp and her skin wet and her eyes wide and dark with fright. Her hand was pressed to her throat where a pulse jumped wildly, and her breasts were rising and falling rapidly as she struggled for breath.
That bikini hadn’t left much to the imagination, but Tom was still unprepared for the glorious lushness of her body, and even though his brain was yelling at him to keep his eyes firmly on her face while he backed out, it didn’t stand a chance against the pull of instinct which dropped his gaze to skim over those lovely curves.
Imogen saw his eyes drop and, far too late, humiliation jerked her out of her paralysis.
‘God, I’m sorry,’ Tom managed as she snatched at a towel.
Of course it was far too small, and she had to hold it ridiculously in front of her while she pulled at one that looked big enough to wrap round her, her cheeks burning with embarrassment.
‘I heard you scream,’ he tried to explain, backing out. ‘I thought something was wrong.’
‘I trod on something when I got in the shower.’ Imogen shuddered at the memory. ‘You can’t see a thing in this stupid light,’ she complained, forgetting how she had gasped at how pretty the room looked at first. ‘It was revolting.’
