Propositioned in Paradise

by Penny Jordan

  ‘Well, there’s no need to worry about it,’ she told her mother calmly now. ‘Simon is hardly likely to want me as his research assistant. Why settle for a person who can combine all three roles in one, when he can have the variety of three separate females to choose from. You know Simon; he always did prefer variety.’

  ‘I’m afraid on this occasion it seems that he doesn’t,’ Georgina replied quietly. ‘He wants you to work for him, Christy. In fact he made a point of telling me so. Apparently, the timing of the diving is very important…the weather will only be suitable for a very short span of time.’

  ‘Tell him I can’t swim,’ Christy retorted curtly, ‘I don’t want the job Mum…I’m looking forward to my summer off.’

  ‘Christy…’ Georgina looked at her daughter helplessly. How could she trespass into her daughter’s privacy when she was the one who had taught her to respect it in herself and others? ‘My dear, I’m afraid he’s determined to have you…’

  It was an unfortunate choice of words, and one that made Christy’s grey eyes glitter.

  ‘He intends to come down here to see you. I simply could not put him off…If you refuse to see him he’ll…’

  ‘Assume that I’m still suffering from a massive adolescent crush,’ Christy supplied bitterly. ‘Well, I can’t see why I should allow myself to be pressurised into accepting a job I don’t want, simply to prove something I don’t care about to someone I’m not interested in.’

  ‘Well if that’s how you feel…’

  Georgina sounded so helpless and vague that Christy stared at her suspiciously. She knew her mother when she used that tone of voice, it meant she was concealing something.

  ‘Obviously you don’t agree with my decision.’

  ‘My dear, it isn’t a matter of not agreeing,’ Georgina said gently, ‘it’s more a matter of why you’re so determined not to agree. If you really do feel nothing towards Simon I can’t see why you’re refusing to accept the job. Only the other month you were saying you’d love to go to the Caribbean, but you couldn’t see how you could afford it.’

  ‘That was for a holiday—not to work, and you’re right, I’m not indifferent to Simon,’ she said crisply. ‘I dislike him. We wouldn’t work in harmony together.’

  ‘Well, you know your own mind, but I suspect that Simon will try to change it for you. This book means a lot to him, Christy. He’s done all the ground work and all he needs to do now is to make this trip out to the Caribbean.’

  ‘And of course nothing must stand in the way of what the great Simon Jardine wants,’ Christie said bitterly. ‘I’ve been used as a sacrifice on the altar of his ambition once Mum, I’m not letting it happen again.’

  After that the subject was allowed to drop. Her mother went upstairs to unpack and Christy wandered back into the garden to enjoy the last of the afternoon sun, but found that she could not settle or relax. Of course she had made the right decision, Simon Jardine had hurt her badly once, so badly that the scars still had the power to ache, but she wasn’t vulnerable to him any longer. So why was she refusing? Forcing herself to be honest with herself, she acknowledged that if the job had meant working with someone else, Miles for instance, she would have jumped at it. Was she indifferent to Simon? Of course not; how could she be? He had hurt her deeply and of course she was wary, but that didn’t mean she still had a crush on him—far from it. She mulled the matter over in her mind, convinced that she had made the right decision. In that summer she was eighteen she had lived on the edge of her emotions all the time. She didn’t want that again. She was safe now and she enjoyed her safety, she didn’t want to have to be constantly on edge, constantly reinforcing her immunity to him. And Simon himself would never accept her indifference; he was the sort of man who demanded by right the interest of every woman who crossed his path, no matter whether he was prepared to return that interest or not.

  Forget about him, she scolded herself, put him out of your mind…concentrate instead on the summer ahead. She closed her eyes, letting her thoughts drift, but annoyingly they drifted back in time not forward. At last unable to fight the crushing pressure of her memories any longer she gave up the battle. Oh very well…perhaps she ought to remember…perhaps she ought to relive those days again, if only mentally…a sort of mental spring-cleaning in effect.

  She had been just eighteen and attending secretarial college, looking much as she did now, although then her movements had been coltish and uncertain, her face eager, mobile, all her emotions visible in her eyes.

  Her mother had been in London for over a week and she had telephoned to say she was bringing guests back with her—her publisher and a new writer who was joining the firm. Christy hadn’t been particularly concerned. She had known Jeremy Thomas since she was five years old and this wasn’t the first time Georgina had brought visitors down to the vicarage.

  She had been in the orchard when they arrived, deeply engrossed in a book. She hadn’t bothered to get up, knowing that Mrs Carver, who came in from the village once a week to clean, was there, on hand to offer the arrivals a welcome and sustenance. She would go in later when the bustle was over. She would have had to change to meet them anyway, and she wasn’t in the mood. Her shorts were grubby with grass stains, white and brief, a sign that at eighteen she was still growing; her T-shirt clinging to her taut breasts. At eighteen she was vaguely embarrassed by her body; so alien to her after years spent looking at the petite femininity of her mother. Voluptuous and sexy was how her mother described her, slightly teasingly, and at eighteen she was too young to feel entirely at home with a body that drew admiring male eyes of all ages. She squirmed a little in the long grass remembering the overt stares of the few boys she knew. Always slightly shy she had made few friends at college; most of the other girls were slightly withdrawn, as unable to cope with her open sexuality as she was herself.

  She was lying on her stomach, too deeply engrossed in her book to be aware of anything else, when someone bent over her to read the printed page, his voice husky, and entirely male, infusing the words she was reading with a sexuality that her own unawakened mind had not entirely absorbed. Her immediate reaction had been to snap the book closed and roll over to glare angrily at the intruder. She hated anyone coming between her and her involvement with whatever she was reading. She was still at an age where it was easy to cast aside her own person a and slip into that of the heroine and by reading as he had done the intruder had taken on the role of hero, and his voice had stroked her skin as dexterously as the hand of any lover, causing a reaction inside her that made her tense and coil, like a wary cat.

  ‘At your age you should be experiencing romance, not reading about it,’ he had mocked, his clever, masculine mouth curling faintly. Tall, taller by far than most of the men she knew, he seemed to blot out the sun with shoulders so powerfully broad that she automatically flinched away from the sheer sexuality of him. Dressed in faded jeans and a checked shirt, he was so intensely masculine that Christy, unused to such maleness, automatically recoiled from it.

  His eyes had gone from her face to her body, studying her in a way that brought a wave of hot colour to her skin. Where his glance lingered, it seemed almost physically to touch. She could almost feel the explorative drift of his fingers against her skin, and she had shivered violently, hearing his soft laugh.

  ‘So you are Georgina’s “gypsy”,’ he had said slowly, ‘a wild and passionate little savage indeed…I wonder how long it would take to tame you.’

  She had stood up almost violently; angry at his intrusion and yet strangely excited by him. His hair was even darker than hers, blue black with a silky sheen, his skin faintly olive. His eyes which she had expected to be dark were a strange metallic gold; amber almost and she had stared curiously into them, forgetting her anger as she registered their slow appraisal.

  ‘Definitely not your mother’s daughter,’ he had said at last. And for some curious reason she had felt intensely hurt; as though in some way she did not measu
re up to a standard he had set her. It was the first time she had ever wished she was like Georgina. Was this man her mother’s lover?

  He was younger than Georgina, perhaps somewhere in his mid-twenties, although it was hard to tell, and yet even her innocence could not protect her from being aware of his intense sexuality. It wasn’t that he was outstandingly good looking; his features were almost too hard for that, his jaw and chin stubbornly unyielding; his cheekbones high, thrusting against his tanned skin, his nose faintly crooked as though it might have once been broken; but there was something about him that made her want to stare and go on staring. He stretched his hand out to her, grasping her wrist with lean fingers. Their touch was cool and yet where they circled her skin it seemed to burn like fire.

  ‘Georgina sent me to get you…It seems you and I are to play together like good children while she and Jeremy discuss work. Do you think we can do that, Christy?’ he had asked her mockingly, ‘Do you think we can play nicely together?’

  She had known instinctively then that he and her mother were not lovers, and in her pitiable innocence had not realised the danger the joy that knowledge brought, represented. She had looked into his amber eyes and had felt suddenly as though for the first time in her life she was truly alive. He had smiled down at her, a curious smile tinged with a knowledge she could only guess at. And that was how it had started.

  ‘Christy?’

  Hearing her mother call her name brought her out of the past, so abruptly that she still carried its residue of pain with her as she made her way back to the house. She had thought reliving what had happened might have a cathartic effect, but perhaps for that she needed to relive every event…every moment of that brief summer.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘I’M going up now, how about you?’

  Christy shook her head lightly, ‘I’m not tired enough yet.’

  She wasn’t relaxed enough to sleep; that was the truth of the matter. Although it had not been mentioned during dinner, she knew her mother still felt she should accept the job with Simon. Sighing, Christy went over to the record cabinet and selected a recording of some Handel. His music, always so relaxing, would surely help to unravel her knotted muscles and induce a desire to sleep.

  Curling up in an armchair, she closed her eyes and let the sounds wash over her. Her mother’s room wasn’t directly above the sitting room and so it wouldn’t disturb her.

  Simon had been faintly mocking about her love of classical music. ‘You want everything to be so romantic, don’t you?’ he had taunted her…‘but life isn’t like that, gypsy.’ He had bought her other records; some pop, some classical…all of them containing the message that life comprised pain as well as pleasure. Her mother and Jeremy had been deeply involved in working out the details of her schedule for the coming autumn; there was an American tour to be fitted in as well as two new books, and there were also several other matters they had to discuss, so that Simon and Christy were thrown very much into one another’s company. She had finished at college for the summer, and in the early days she and Simon had made good use of the Vicarage’s rather ancient tennis court.

  He was a demanding opponent, who never willingly let her win, and sometimes his driving desire to win angered her. She herself cared little about winning or losing and somehow he made her feel that this was a lack in her.

  ‘So unambitious,’ he had taunted her one day. ‘What do you plan to do with your life, Christy? Fall in love, get married and live happily ever after?’

  He had laughed at her scarlet cheeks but his laughter had not held any amusement, rather it had had the hard edge of a man made bitter by contempt.

  ‘What a trap for my sex, Mother Nature has designed in you. Your looks and your body promise so much…offer so much enticement, and yet they cannot be had without the payment of a price can they, my gypsy? And that price is marriage.’

  She hadn’t understood his anger; not then. She had simply thought he was mocking her and had not understood why. The frustration which someone with more experience might have recognised, was hidden from her by her own innocence.

  She could vividly remember the first time he kissed her. He had taken her out for the day in his car—a small sports model; brightly scarlet. When she had admired it, he had laughed, faintly disparagingly.

  ‘It’s a young man’s car, something he buys before he commits himself to marriage and a family, and the inevitable saloon, but that’s not for me, Christy,’ he had told her, ‘my choice of car will always only have room for the one passenger.’

  He had taken her down to the coast, and with her directions had found the sheltered, almost secret little beach she often went to with her mother. She had been wearing her swimsuit under her jeans but had felt shiveringly self-conscious about taking them off, sitting tense and curiously breathless as he removed his shirt and his own jeans. Her lack of father or brothers had not left her with any particular curiosity about the male form. There had been all the usual girlish giggled confidences at school, and her mother had matter-of-factly outlined the intimacies shared by male and female when she was old enough to understand them. There had never been any undue embarrassment between mother and daughter, and Georgina had been frank and explicit with her in their discussions about sex. Even so there was something vastly different about knowing what went to make up the male anatomy and then seeing the reality of it, barely concealed by brief black swimming shorts. Simon’s soft laugh when he realised she was looking at him had reduced her to a mass of guilty blushes, quickly turning her head aside, but not quickly enough apparently. He had turned it back, holding her face between his hands, his palms hard and warm against her skin.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong in wanting to look at me, Christy,’ he told her then. ‘I enjoy looking at you you know…I do it all the time…in fact, I want to do more than look at you. Much more,’ Christy had thought she heard him mutter thickly under his breath as his head descended, blotting out the sun, his mouth moving slowly over hers until her lips lost their stiffness and clung softly to his with shy eagerness.

  He had groaned slightly as he ended the kiss, still holding her face as he asked in a rasping voice, ‘I suppose you’re still a virgin?’

  Christy had nodded her head, worried because her confirmation did not seem to please him. Surely all men wanted the girl they fell in love with to be virginal…untouched…and Simon must love her, even though he hadn’t said so…otherwise why would he have kissed her? Made suddenly brave by the heady pleasure of knowing he cared about her, she had reached out and traced the line of his mouth with her fingers, and had said softly, ‘Don’t let it worry you…it isn’t important.’

  What she had meant was that it wasn’t important to her…She didn’t mind being virginal; in fact there was no one she would rather have to initiate her into the mysteries of love than Simon. Strange, how she had known the moment he kissed her that she loved him and that he returned her love; and how knowing that had made everything else drop into place…Now she could understand why her pulses thudded every time she saw him; why her stomach tensed and her skin coloured hotly.

  She hadn’t said anything else, simply smiling shyly at Simon, but his topaz eyes had glittered over her face and then her body and she had felt the tension in his fingers, threatening to crush the fragile bones of her face before he released her to say huskily, ‘Come on, race you into the water.’

  Christy was a strong swimmer. It was her favourite sport and she had learned to dive very young. During her final two years at school she had taken advantage of living near the coast to join a sea-diving school, quickly learning to love exploring the underwater environment.

  Simon, too, was a strong swimmer, and when she realised that she was not going to be able to beat him she dived quickly, swimming underwater, holding her breath. She was almost at the limit of her lung power when Simon dived down alongside her, grasping her roughly and hauling her to the surface. They broke the water together, mischief darkening her
eyes, fury darkening his, as he grasped her, treading water as he shook her roughly.

  ‘Just what the hell were you playing at?’ he demanded thickly, ‘when I looked round and couldn’t see you…’ One hand was curled through her wet hair, imprisoning her, the other round her waist and she could feel the hectic thud of his heart. He was angry because he loved her, she marvelled, almost giddy with the sudden sensation of joy. It made her brave—and foolish. Pressing herself against him, she kissed his wet throat. ‘I’m sorry…’

  His skin pulsed beneath her mouth, a fierce tension emanating from him, his voice unexpectedly rough as he said thickly, ‘So you damned well ought to be. I’m not a man who likes to be teased, Christy,’ he warned her, disengaging himself from her. Tawny lights flickered in his eyes, inciting a fierce heat in her veins, as she sensed that he wasn’t simply talking about her dive.

  ‘You’re the one who teases me.’ She made a small mou, touching her tongue to her salt-encrusted lips. ‘I wouldn’t know how to tease you even if I wanted to.’

  She knew that she was lying, and the delicious, heady feeling of power racing through her body ensured that she didn’t care.

  ‘You’re a woman, aren’t you?’ Simon’s voice was still thick, but now it was underlined with a vague derision that chilled her. As they swam back to shore she pushed it aside. Simon loved her; she knew that…It could only be a matter of time before he asked her to marry him. As she walked across the hot sand she remembered that she had heard him say on more than one occasion that he had no intention of tying himself down, but that was before he had fallen in love with her, she had assured herself comfortably. Of course he would want to marry her. They could find somewhere to live locally; Simon would write, and she would be his devoted wife. She preened herself mentally, seeing herself in three or four years to come…a baby…perhaps even two…Simon…and a placid, happy existence…