by Miranda Lee
‘What about down there?’ he suggested, pointing through the windscreen at the tiny rocky cove which lay straight ahead. ‘I could still get the cliff in the background if I angled things right. What do you think?’
‘I think that would be much better. Not as uncomfortable or as cold either. By the way, where am I supposed to change into the swimsuits?’
Luke almost swore. He hadn’t thought of that. ‘You’ll have to do it in the back of the car,’ he said. ‘Sorry, I’m a bit out of practice at organising this type of shoot. Most of my photography these days is done inside.’
‘And what type of photography is that?’ she asked, her dry tone accompanied by a suspicious look.
Luke laughed. ‘No, not that type. I specialise in portraiture.’
‘And you make a good living from that?’
‘I’ve done quite well out of it, actually.’ Luke despised himself for suddenly wanting to brag. Where had his idea gone about her not knowing that he was well-off? Luke appreciated that his male ego could work against him at times, but the last thing he wanted was for Rachel to pay attention to him because she thought he was filthy rich.
He wished he knew what the circumstances of her marriage had been. How old her husband had actually been, and whether he had been wealthy to begin with. It would be naive of him to discount her being a gold-digger, or even to assume that she hadn’t come out of her marriage with the proverbial pot of gold.
She might not have come back to work out of financial difficulty at all. She might have merely wanted to put herself back into circulation. Hard to meet prospective lovers and husbands if one stayed at home with one’s mother-in-law.
‘Tell me, Luke, are you famous or something?’ she asked. ‘The agency implied you were very well known worldwide, but I thought they might be exaggerating. They have a tendency to do that sometimes.’
‘I’m quite well known in California,’ he admitted carefully, ‘but I doubt too many people in Australia would even recognise my name.’
‘I certainly didn’t,’ she said, and there was a wry note in the words.
‘I wouldn’t have expected you to. Now, why don’t you slip into the back seat while I get the cameras and bikinis out of the boot?’
‘Only bikinis?’
‘You have some objection to that?’
‘No. I just ... I just...’
‘Just what?’
‘Nothing,’ she muttered. ‘I guess I’ve got out of the habit of freezing to death. This is my first outdoor assignment since coming back to modelling.’
‘You can wear your jacket till I’m ready to shoot. Hopefully, when we get to the beaches, there’ll be proper dressing-rooms for you to change in.’
‘Which one do you want me to wear first?’ she asked when he handed the costumes through the back window a couple of minutes later.
Luke had gone to a local boutique when he’d arrived the previous afternoon, and had bought several assorted bikinis in the size the agency had given him. All were colourful and depressingly minute, he recalled ruefully.
‘Makes no difference,’ he returned, truthfully enough. Luke suspected that he was in trouble no matter which one she wore. ‘Whatever one you fancy.’
‘Stand with your back against the window,’ she ordered. ‘And no peeking!’
Luke had to work hard to keep a straight face as he did as he was told. Good God, there wasn’t an inch of her that he hadn’t seen—and at very close hand.
Still, the knowledge that she was taking off her clothes right behind him was tantalising in the extreme. He tried to keep his mind off the fact, aware of the discomfort that being turned on would cause him.
And he was marginally successful till the moment she climbed out of the car and that damned black jacket of hers flapped wide open for a few seconds.
Luke grimaced.
God, her body was even better! Her breasts looked fuller, and infinitely more lush, squashed as they were into the colourful half-cup bra. He decided that she must have put on a little weight, because her hips seemed curvier and her stomach rounder. The only things which looked exactly the same were her legs—those long, endless legs, whose firm honey-coloured thighs made him think of things that a man in tight jeans should never have thought of for more than a moment.
Luke suppressed a tortured groan and wrenched his eyes away, pretending to adjust the distance and light meters on the two cameras hanging around his neck.
Actually, Theo had already set them perfectly for him, giving him easy instructions for the odd possible adjustment and at the same time telling him that even a fool couldn’t make a mistake taking photographs with his two beauties.
Luke began to appreciate that he was a fool, to think he could look at this particular woman all day, dressed in next to nothing, and not become a quivering wreck. His plan to question her at the same time, cleverly extracting the information he wanted before setting about as callous and calculating a seduction as she had perpetrated on him, now seemed ludicrous. He would be lucky if he was bloody sane by the end of this day!
‘Having trouble with the camera?’ she asked, with a seemingly ingenuous innocence.
‘Just a little.’ Luke stopped fiddling with the Nikon and looked up again. Thank God the blazer was now firmly wrapped around her, and thank God he could keep his sunglasses on. His eyes had a habit of betraying him when he wanted a woman. They sort of blazed away, with pinpoints of light glittering wildly within their darkened depths.
Or so he’d been told.
In a way, he was sorry she’d had to take her sunglasses off, for those big, beautiful green eyes gazing unguardedly at him were almost as disturbing as her unclad body.
‘Both these cameras belong to a friend of mine,’ he explained rather sharply. ‘All my equipment is still in America.’ Except the equipment I had to bring with me, he thought with rueful savagery. Pity I couldn’t have left some of that behind as well!
Damn, but he hated being a man sometimes. Women had by far the best deal sexually. They could hide how they felt, or fake it splendidly, and no one was any the wiser. Whereas men’s responses were brutally on display for all the world to see.
Gritting his teeth; he willed his body to a modicum of comfort and strode over to find the best way down to the rocky cove. There were several pathways between the rocks, which didn’t look all that dangerous till he began following one and his foot slipped on a patch of loose gravelly dirt.
‘Watch your step,’ he ordered, glancing back up at her as she moved to follow him down the path he’d chosen. ‘It’s a bit slippery in parts, and we wouldn’t want you falling and hurting yourself.’
He might have taken her hand and helped her down, but he suspected that that was not a good idea—either for his immediate peace of mind or the future success of his mission. After what had happened earlier, back in the hotel, he didn’t think it was a good idea to touch her at all... till the moment was right.
The photograph session down on the rocks went surprisingly well—Luke managing temporarily to put his desire aside by concentrating on making each shot the very best he could take. It was an automatic response to what had been his profession for many years. A pride thing, really. If he was going to take photographs, he was going to take damned good ones. Unfortunately, to do so, he had to take his sunglasses off, for it really was impossible with them on. Sunglasses distorted one’s sense of light and colour.
Fifteen minutes into the shoot, Luke realised that Rachel Manning was an exceptionally good model. A gem, in fact. Not only did the camera love her, she was also a true professional. She adopted the exact poses he was looking for with little prompting, her attitude and expression immediately echoing whatever image he wanted. Natural. Athletic. Girlnext-door. Bright and breezy. Dreamy.
It was the dreamy one that began his undoing. The way she arched her spine and dropped her head back, closing her eyes and smiling—so softly, and yet so...so...
‘Now sexy,’ he ordered, hi
s voice thick and husky. ‘Give me sexy.’
She shot him a startled glance before turning her eyes away and immediately giving him exactly what he’d stupidly asked for.
She lay back down on the smooth grey rock she’d been sitting on, her arms lifting up over her head to splay the long fair strands out with her fingers. Her back arched a little away from the rock and she bent her left knee slightly. It was then that she turned towards the camera, half opened her eyes and parted her lips in a pose so provocatively sensual that Luke’s blood went from zero to boiling point in two seconds flat.
He swore under his breath and pressed his eye harder against the viewfinder, which didn’t improve things at all. His trembling finger moved and the camera clicked, not once but several times, before he got a hold of himself.
‘That’s great,’ he complimented curtly. ‘But that’s enough for here. We’ll move on to another spot. I’ll just walk up the Skillion and get some postcard-style shots of the surrounding area before we do. You can pop yourself back into the car and warm up. Change costumes while you’re waiting, if you like.’
Luke was scrambling back up the path when he heard her cry out. It was not a loud cry, but his heart leapt with alarm at the pained sound, and he whipped around to find her still sitting on the edge of the rock and frowning down at the small rock pool in which her feet were resting.
Thoughts of the deadly blue ringed octopus which could lurk in such pools had the blood draining from Luke’s face. ‘What is it?’ he called out. ‘You haven’t been bitten, have you?’
Had his panic sounded in his voice? It must have, for her eyes widened on him as though she was thoroughly taken aback by his burst of fierce concern. As was Luke. He hadn’t realised till that moment how much she meant to him—however perverse that meaning was.
‘No,’ she said, peering down into the pool. ‘Some fool’s been drinking down here and smashed a beer bottle against this rock. This pool’s full of broken glass and I think I just stood on a bit. Don’t worry, it’s only a little piece by the feel of things. I’ll just pull it out and wash my foot in the salt water. That should kill any germs.’
‘No, don’t touch it!’ he said sharply. ‘I’ll come and look and make sure that’s all it is.’
Luke hurried back down the path and over to where she was still looking at him with a bewildered expression on her lovely face. ‘Truly, there’s no need to fuss,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly all right.’
‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ Luke said, sitting down beside her on the rock and lifting her dripping feet gently up into his lap. ‘Better to be safe than sorry,’ he muttered.
She was right, however. It was a piece of broken beer bottle, speared right in the middle of the big toe of her left foot.
‘Does it hurt much?’ he asked her as he examined it to see if there was enough sticking out for him to pull it out with his fingers, turning her foot this way and that to catch the sunlight against the glass.
‘N-no.’
Her stammering was so unlike her cool self that he snapped his eyes up, thinking that she might have gone into some kind of shock.
But it wasn’t shock he saw in her face. It was tension. A blindingly electric sexual tension.
His fingers grew hotly aware of the frozen stillness in the foot he was holding, then of the sudden pounding of his own heart. The temptation to slide a hand up her calf was enormous.
‘There’s enough glass sticking out for me to pull it out without tweezers,’ he said, finding some satisfaction in the fact that his voice remained cool and controlled.
‘Do it, then,’ she said thickly.
He did, and for a split-second there was nothing to show where it had been. But then the blood began to ooze from her skin, and before Luke could appreciate what he was doing he’d lifted her foot and bent his mouth at the same time, pressing his lips against the cut and sucking it clean.
The primitive intimacy of his instinctive action was slow to sink in, but when it did Luke’s stomach contracted fiercely. He raised his head to look at her, and found that she was staring at him with wide green eyes, her lips parting softly under her fast, shallow breathing.
Seeing her arousal did terrible things to Luke. He’d spent eighteen months fantasising about having her in his sexual power. Now that he did, all hell broke loose.
That old dark fury welled up within him, and it was with deliberately wicked intent that he straightened and lifted her foot higher, then higher, till she was tipped back against the gentle incline of the rock. This time he took her whole toe into his mouth.
He sucked on it slowly, revelling in the way her eyes gradually went from round frightened orbs to narrow slits of desire, their green colour darkening to a smoky grey, her lips falling further apart under the ragged panting sounds that were coming from her lips.
Luke stared at those lips, remembering how they had felt when she’d done the same to his desirefilled flesh, and knowing that he would not rest till he thrilled to that experience again. But at his behest this time—not hers. He wanted her to be at his mercy, not the other way around.
Hearing distant laughter reminded him starkly of where they were, in full view of anyone and everyone walking up the Skillion. Hardly the place for a proper seduction.
The realisation that she was beyond hearing or seeing anything brought a swift jab of savage satisfaction. It was so different from his previous experience with her, where in the end she’d taken control of the lovemaking while he’d been totally off the planet—oblivious to everything but his own pleasure. Luke sensed that the boot was on the other foot at this moment, so to speak.
When he abruptly plucked her toe from his mouth she gasped, her stunned eyes showing him that she could hardly believe she’d allowed herself to get so carried away. Luke decided to salvage her pride temporarily, by pretending that he hadn’t even noticed her sexual response to his ministrations and giving all his attention to her cut toe and not to her anguished face.
‘That seems to have stopped the bleeding,’ he said off-handedly. ‘But we wouldn’t want any dirt getting in there, so I’ll carry you up to the car.’
‘No!’ she immediately blurted out, whereat he lifted a mock-innocent gaze.
‘But why not? I assure you I can manage. I’m stronger than I look.’
‘I never said you didn’t look strong,’ she bit out. ‘But I prefer to go under my own steam, thank you. I... I’ll hop.’
‘Suit yourself.’ When Luke felt the beginnings of a darkly smug smile tug at his mouth, he stood up quickly and turned away.
But his thoughts stayed with her. I’ve got you where I want you now, Miss Rachel Manning. You’ve just shown me that the cool, professional persona you’ve been projecting today is just a sham. Underneath you’re still the same woman who picked me up that night. Your sexuality still simmers just beneath the surface, ready to be tapped by any man who has the right tools.
And that man is going to be me tonight, lady, Luke vowed as he made his way to the car. And for as many nights as it will take to rid you from my body and my mind! For I can’t go on as I’ve been going on. I have to free myself of you... or make you mine forever.
Luke ground to a halt, disturbed by this last tacked-on thought. He recalled Theo’s accusation that he had fallen in love and that he wanted to get married.
Luke whirled to glare at the woman who was the root cause of all his confusion, only to melt at the sight of her struggling to hop between the rocks. Furious with himself, and her, he covered the ground which separated them with angry strides, and before she could do more than squeal he swept her up into his arms.
‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand,’ he growled, ‘it’s a woman who won’t ask a man for help when she needs it. You need me, Rachel. Why don’t you just admit it?’
Their eyes locked—his blazing with frustration and hers bewildered. They searched his face, as though looking for something, till finally her chin tilted up proudly and her ey
es cleared as she nodded slowly up and down.
‘All right, Luke,’ she said, her voice husky, yet quite composed. ‘I’ll admit it. I need you.’
A tremor raced through him, and he knew that once again the control had somehow slipped from his hands to hers.
Damn it all, he raged privately. Damn it!
The struggle to regroup his emotions was not easy. But he managed it, a cool smile masking any lingering exasperation.
‘I’m glad to hear that, Rachel,’ he said smoothly. ‘A man likes to be needed. It makes him feel good. Now, let’s get you up to the car and find a Bandaid,’ he went on, adopting a very businesslike attitude. ‘We have a long day ahead of us and a lot of work to be done.’
CHAPTER SIX
LUKE made it through the day.
Just.
His pride and ego came to the rescue—to a degree. Theo had magnanimously offered to develop all the films when he returned the cameras, so Luke’s aversion to making a fool of himself—personally and photographically speaking—gave him the motivation to focus on what he was doing.
His aversion to making a fool of himself with women in general—and Rachel Manning in particular—also kept him safe during the moments when he wasn’t taking photographs.
Not that he allowed too many of those. He swept her from Terrigal Beach straight to Wamberal; from there north to Forrester’s Beach then on to Shelley’s. A quick takeaway lunch at the Entrance was followed by further lengthy and quite gruelling sessions around the Entrance area and the surrounding lakes.
Conversation was kept to a minimum and was strictly professionally based. Luke had abandoned any idea of trying to worm out the personal and private details of Rachel’s life and marriage while photographing her semi-naked.
He knew that it would be a waste of time and potentially hazardous to his razor-edge composure. He ruefully resolved to wait till dinner that night, when she would be fully dressed and hopefully under the influence of some relaxing glasses of wine.
