by Annie West
She was more than a sexy bed partner. She was an enigma he was determined to crack.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE deck shifted beneath Callie’s feet. Automatically she adjusted her stance to its gentle roll. It was second nature, like riding a bicycle.
That didn’t stop the frisson of panic sliding down her spine. She fought to suppress it.
Damon thought her shallow and unprincipled. She refused to let him think her a coward too. Surely she could conquer this phobia till they reached the mainland.
Once she’d have revelled in being aboard a sleek beauty like Circe. She slid her hand along a lovingly polished surface. It felt familiar. Smelled like memories of long-lost summer afternoons. Nostalgia welled and with it piercing memories of a simpler time. When she had been loved and loving. When the future had seemed bright and beckoning. Before she’d learned about cruel obsession and manipulation.
‘Alone at last.’
Callie jumped and swung round to see Damon watching her. Reflective sunglasses hid his expression.
Her uncle’s staff were heading ashore after depositing their luggage and supplies.
‘Wishing you were with them?’ His voice was sardonic.
How she did! Instead she confronted twin horrors: her phobia of small vessels and giving herself to the cold demands of a man bent on stripping her pride and self-esteem.
Her lips tightened in a mirthless grimace. If this didn’t kill her she must emerge stronger.
‘Why don’t you show me around?’ If she kept busy maybe she could conquer the worst of her fear.
His eyebrows rose. ‘Of course. Follow me.’ He led the way to the stairs, peeling off his shirt. Bare-chested, he looked the way he had the first time she’d seen him. The sun lovingly glinted off toned olive skin that rippled with strength.
Callie’s throat dried as she followed. If only he was the sort of man she’d first thought him—generous, teasing and tender. A man she could trust.
‘Do you usually sail alone?’ She forced the question, refusing to dwell on fantasy.
‘No. Usually the Circe is full to the brim with family.’
‘Your family?’ Callie froze on the top step. He couldn’t be married!
He turned but in the gloom at the bottom of the stairs she couldn’t read his expression.
‘I’m the eldest of five and the last to hold out against matrimony. There’s usually someone wanting to come out with me. I’m even adept at stopping toddlers falling overboard.’
The ripple of unexpected amusement in his tone sent heat slanting through her. Callie had a vision of Damon wearing nothing but long swim shorts, cradling a dark-haired child in his arms. The image was unaccountably appealing. Maybe he was different with his family. Less driven, able to trust.
That was none of her business. Callie firmed her jaw and followed him, eyes widening at the luxury she found.
‘It’s stunning,’ she breathed, pivoting to take in the elegant furnishings and state-of-the-art equipment. The interior was a stylist’s dream, a harmonious marriage of old-world charm and modern functionality.
‘I’m glad you approve.’ Strangely, she detected no sarcasm. He’d removed his sunglasses and scrutinised her through narrowed eyes. She allowed herself the pleasure of absorbing her surroundings. How she’d love to be commissioned to fit out a yacht like this. Maybe one day, if her home-furnishing business really took off…
‘The only complaint so far is my mother’s. That I didn’t put in an oven large enough for a triple batch of moussaka.’
‘Your mother sails with you?’ That didn’t fit her perception of him as a ruthless tycoon, isolated by his self-importance, busy with business and seductions.
He shrugged and smiled. The first real smile she’d seen since the day they’d come together down by the shore. Its impact was like an incendiary flare deep inside.
‘It’s in the blood. I come from a long line of fishermen.’
‘Then your father must enjoy sailing too.’
A stiffening of his body warned her she’d overstepped the mark. ‘My father is dead.’ The words rang with a cool finality that didn’t brook further questions. ‘Come. I’ll show you the rest.’
Their few moments of unexpected truce were at an end. And with it Callie’s momentary ease. Tension gripped her shoulders as she followed Damon.
Several hours later, watching the sun set across the liquid-silk Aegean, Damon was puzzled.
Callie had confounded his expectations. No sooner had she climbed aboard than she’d slipped off her sandals, obviously aware of the need to respect Circe’s timber decking. She seemed completely at home on board. He’d seen her slide her hand along the timber and brass fittings as if she too relished the vessel’s superb craftsmanship.
He’d put her to work and she’d anticipated his instructions. She was no stranger to sailing. Real sailing. Not lounging on a floating resort.
Yet her usual grace was lacking, her movements cramped and stiff.
Unease tugged his conscience but he’d stifled it, suspecting some new trick.
Now, with the yacht anchored in the lee of a tiny island, Damon stretched. He hadn’t seen her in an hour. She was below, preparing their meal.
Heat coiled in his belly as he strode across the deck.
The cabin was dim. She hadn’t put on a light. He catapulted downstairs and strode through the lounge, intent on finding her.
His body thrummed a heavy, urgent beat. Food could wait.
No sound of her in the galley. Damon paused, frowning as he took in the food on the counter. She hadn’t got far with her preparations. Would she insist they make for port so someone else could deal with the chore of cooking?
He stalked towards the other cabins and almost tripped.
She was huddled on the floor in the semi-darkness, her back braced against one wall, her arms wrapped around knees drawn hard into her chest.
‘Callie?’ His voice was a hoarse croak of surprise as fear spiralled through his gut.
Not by a flicker did she register his presence. Her eyes stared but she didn’t see him. She seemed…cut-off. Foreboding speared him as he saw her faint rocking movement.
Something was very wrong.
He hunkered beside her, touching her hand. It was icy.
‘Callie, what happened?’ Urgency welled. That sightless stare worried him.
He raised his hand to her face. Her cheek was too cool, and wet with the tears that dripped unheeded from her chin.
Damon’s chest clamped at the sight of such patent distress. This was no act.
Warmth. That was what she felt. Heat enveloping her.
She’d been so cold. From the moment Damon had casually declared they’d travel on his yacht. The chill crept in, spreading like a frost till finally she hadn’t been able to pretend to be strong. Till icy fingers of fear and ancient pain wrapped around her heart and squeezed tight.
Callie had tried to be brave, forcing herself to climb on deck and appear unaffected. Each movement had tested her determination as she obeyed Damon’s instructions and tried to douse her rising panic at being aboard.
She hadn’t set foot on a yacht since she was fourteen. Not since…
Callie burrowed closer to the wondrous heat, needing it as a starving man craved sustenance. If only she could blank out the memories.
Vaguely she realised the cold had started long before the sight of the yacht moored and ready to carry her onto the treacherous sea. It had sunk into her bones years ago. When Petro had used and betrayed her.
When Alkis had kept her in a travesty of marriage that excluded normal human interaction.
She shuddered as pain ripped through her. The pain of loss and betrayal. The hurt she’d bottled up so long.
‘You’re safe now. You’re all right.’ The low burr of words penetrated the fog of her distress.
Safe. It sounded wonderful. The heat intensified, curling around her. She sank into it gratefully.
A rhythmic movement lulled her body. Gradually her muscles eased, leaving a dull ache in place of screaming tension. She felt heavy.
Exhausted.
It took a long time for her to realise the soothing rhythm was the caress of a hand, rubbing up and down her back. That it echoed the thudding near her ear. A muffled heartbeat.
Damon.
With an enormous effort, like a half-drowned diver struggling to the surface, Callie broke through the enveloping stupor. She began to take note of sensations.
She was cradled in his arms, surrounded by the living heat of solid muscle and bone. Her head was tucked in under his chin. To her horror she realised she never wanted to move from this cushioned comfort.
He smelt of sunshine and the sea, of the potent salty tang of a virile male.
Callie sucked in a breath. He must have found her huddled where she’d cowered as her defences crumbled. She’d needed to catch her breath, regroup and strengthen herself to ignore the distress that had sideswiped her so devastatingly.
Nothing like this had ever happened before, even in her darkest days.
Her pulse thundered at the idea of him finding her.
‘Callie?’ The hand at her back halted. After a pause it resumed its soothing motion.
She considered pretending not to hear. But she couldn’t play the coward.
‘Yes?’ she whispered, her voice raw and thick.
A silent shudder rippled through his big frame and she heard him exhale. In relief or annoyance?
No doubt he’d come below anticipating their next bout of verbal sparring. Or perhaps the surrender of her body.
Dread carved a hollow inside her. She wasn’t ready for that.
‘What happened?’ His voice was surprisingly gentle.
Reluctantly Callie opened her eyes. They were in the master cabin. She recognised the wide fitted berth they sat on and the brass-edged portholes high in the walls.
Her breath stopped and she jerked back in his arms, realising the implications.
His bed. His mistress. His pleasure.
That was why he’d come to find her, to consummate their arrangement.
Despite her determination to deliver what she’d promised, Callie couldn’t stop the instinctive kick of repugnance at the idea of a cold-blooded coupling as he’d demanded last night.
One long arm roped round her shoulders and hauled her close, fitting her to him again. His heat enveloped her, from his steely thighs beneath her legs to his powerful chest and shoulders supporting her.
‘Nothing happened.’ The words were slurred, her voice unfamiliar. She had the oddest sensation of distance, even from her own body.
‘You usually sit on the floor for a good cry, do you?’
Sarcastic wretch! She hadn’t cried in years. Callie searched for a tart rejoinder but her brain was too muzzy.
‘What is it, Callie? What’s wrong?’ One large hand cupped her jaw, his thumb swiping tears from her chin, across her cheek. But there was nothing sexual about his gesture. It was simply…comforting. Her eyes flickered and her head lolled. His heart beating beneath her ear mesmerised her.
‘Don’t go to sleep on me now.’ His hand firmed on her jaw.
‘I’m not sleepy.’ But she felt strangely lethargic. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ she blurted out. The wobble inher voice horrified her and she tried to rise. He held her still with an ease that would have frightened her if she’d been thinking clearly.
‘Did you injure yourself?’ He paused, letting the words sink in. ‘I couldn’t find a wound.’
She found it easier to respond to his brisk, impersonal tone. ‘No.
Nothing like that. I just…’
‘You just…?’
‘You’re going to have to tell me,’ he added in a conversational tone when she said nothing. ‘I’m not going anywhere till I get the truth.’
Callie’s lips twisted. Much he cared for the truth. He preferred his own skewed view of people.
‘Callie…’ No mistaking the warning in his tone as he tilted her chin up.
She jerked her face free, letting her hair, loose now round her shoulders, curtain her features. She stared across the cabin, fixing her gaze on a porthole.
‘I…don’t like yachts.’ Callie felt a sliver of grim amusement at that bland explanation. She just had to get close to a vessel like this to become queasy with terror.
‘You don’t like them?’ His voice gave nothing away. At least he’d dropped the sarcasm.
‘I…avoid them.’ Understatement of the century. For eleven years she hadn’t been on anything smaller than a massive, multilevel inter-island ferry. Even that was a test of her nerves, leaving her shaken and sick to her stomach.
‘You get seasick?’
She shook her head.
‘Not seasick. So it’s something else.’ He wasn’t going to let up till he’d prised the whole story from her. ‘But you’re a sailor, a good one.’ Callie blinked in surprise at his praise. ‘You didn’t learn your way around a yacht by staying ashore.’
She hitched her shoulders. ‘I used to sail as a kid.’ Some summers she’d spent more hours on the water than ashore.
‘And then?’
She dragged in a breath, knowing she couldn’t escape this. He wouldn’t let her go and he wouldn’t settle for prevarication.
‘My parents died when their yacht foundered in a storm off the coast north of Sydney.’ Callie’s view of the porthole misted but she kept her voice more or less steady. ‘They’d gone to assist another craft in distress.
In the end both yachts were lost.’ A lump the size of the acropolis rose in her throat and she had to pause before continuing. ‘There weren’t any survivors.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Fourteen.’ So long ago yet right now, aboard the gently swaying yacht so much like the one her dad had refurbished, the grief was as fresh as it had been then.
Maybe if their bodies had been recovered, if she’d been able to say her goodbyes instead of being whisked off to Greece by her uncle, who’d decreed that attending a memorial service would only upset her further…
‘I’m sorry.’ The simple, apparently sincere words, sliced through the silence. Callie turned to meet his eyes.
She’d expected impatience, derision even, at the childish fear she’d been unable to shake. Her uncle had no patience with her phobia. She was just thankful Alkis hadn’t been aware of it, as he’d preferred flight to sea travel. Callie could imagine the vicious delight he’d have taken in exploiting her weakness.
But Damon’s eyes held nothing but regret. She blinked, absorbing his sympathy.
‘Thank you.’ Callie tugged her gaze away, her breath an uneven gulp in her raw throat. She was perturbed at the illusion of warmth, of connection that sparked between them. Her emotional meltdown must have shorted something in her brain, making her imagine things.
‘You should have told me before we came aboard.’
She shrugged. It hadn’t occurred to her. Men, in her experience, didn’t let a little thing like female nerves stand in the way of their plans.
How could she have known she’d react like this?
She’d thought she could master her fear. But the feel of the yacht beneath her feet had been the last straw after days strung out with tension. Damon’s demands and manipulative methods had resurrected memories she’d worked hard to repress, of Alkis and their awful sham of a marriage. Of a misery so intense she’d thought she might die of it.
The extremity of her grief, welling up through her very pores, had stunned her.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
She turned. He looked sincere. But that meant nothing. She raised an unsteady hand, swiping tears from her cheeks.
Callie hated that he’d seen her so vulnerable.
‘Why hand you one more weapon to use against me?’
Damon’s lungs constricted as he read the sincerity in her drowned eyes.
She meant it!
A splinter of pain pierced his chest as he watched her withdraw into herself again.
She thought he’d stoop so low? To use her genuine fear, her grief over her parents’ death, to his own ends? It was one thing to play on her desire to keep her cousin from him, another to plumb such depths.
Shock tore through him.
He remembered the loss of his own father. Remembered too well its impact on his mother and siblings. The desolation and the grief. No decent man would use such emotions for his own gain.
Damon was a hard man in business, but honest. With women he was generous.
Pride revolted that Callie thought so little of him.
Suddenly this wasn’t about the give-and-take game of awareness between a man and a woman. Callie referred to a different sort of battle.
An ugly one with no holds barred.
What sort of men had she mixed with to make her believe he’d use her grief against her?
Her uncle was a selfish opportunist, but she’d faced him down only this morning.
Who else? Her husband? Men she’d known during her marriage? Had her lovers been so unsavoury? Had they used her in some way, rather than being fodder for her rapacious desires as he’d assumed? The notion stirred protective anger.
A sliver of doubt stabbed him as he thought of his ultimatum. The power he’d wielded to make her come with him.
It was something he’d never done before—threaten a woman into his bed. Logic told him he was simply turning the tables on her. She’d connived and now it was his turn. She was facing her just deserts.
Yet he couldn’t repress a shiver that felt like guilt as she huddled in on herself.
‘Come here.’ His voice was rougher than he intended as he stripped the covers and lifted her onto the bed.
Wide eyes met his before she jerked her head away. Her mouth compressed in such misery his chest squeezed.
He swung her legs up so she lay in the bed. Seconds later he’d shucked off his shoes and lay beside her, drawing the covers over her. He slid his arms around her and pulled her close so her head rested on his collarbone.
