Page 38 of One Forbidden Night In Paradise (Hot Winter Escapes)

‘What’s up?’

As Chase pulled her closer, she tilted her head back to meet his gaze. ‘Nothing.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘I lost you there. Where’d you go?’

She reached up to touch his face, marvelling at the perfection of his bone structure and the smoothness of his skin.

‘I was just thinking about those two divers you told me about. They were so lucky.’

Something flickered across his eyes like water moving beneath ice. ‘What they were was arrogant and careless. They thought they were different. That those bad things they saw on the news only happened to other people. Bad things can happen to anyone given the right set of the wrong conditions.’

Like alcoholism crossed with pneumonia and a sudden, unseasonal but vicious drop in temperature, she thought, no longer on a superyacht but standing on a rainy London street near Piccadilly Circus where the lights were always on and you felt as if you were walking through a dream. But it was real. All of it was real.

Her chest tightened. Her father was a careless drunk. He forgot to eat. He had fallen and hurt himself multiple times. On one terrible occasion he had been beaten up and robbed on his way home.

And yet his death had been avoidable.

‘You disagree?’

‘No, you’re right,’ she said slowly. ‘Bad things can happen to anyone, anywhere.’ Especially when you did nothing to stop them from happening.

Glancing up, she found Chase watching her closely, his beautiful green eyes narrowed on her face as if he was trying to see inside her head. And she felt a sudden overwhelming urge to tell him the truth, to lay out her secrets before him, which wasn’t just a bad idea, it basically was the very essence of a bad idea.

It was true that, since she had agreed to stay, they had talked about lots of things. But it was as if there were an electric fence humming between them. Aside from her telling him about her exes, any time anything got too deep or personal, they both backed away. And it didn’t get any deeper or more personal than telling someone how you walked out on your alcoholic father. It was certainly too deep and personal for a holiday romance.

‘Was it near here?’ she said quietly. ‘Where you found them?’

She felt the muscles in his arms tense and he stared down at her blankly, almost as if he were surprised to see her there, and then he shook his head. ‘You don’t need to worry. A lot of the crew are locals. They know where most of the strong currents are.’ He said it casually, but there was an edge to his voice and she knew that as far as he was concerned the conversation was over even before he lowered his mouth to hers.

His hands were moving across her hips, now they were slipping between her thighs, his touch light, teasing, persuasive. In a moment, her skin would grow warm and she would start to melt, to dissolve into pure need.

Maybe she was reading too much into it. Maybe it was just that brush with almost-tragedy that had caught him off guard and reminded him of the power and unpredictability of the sea; the way a flat, calm surface could hide a riptide.

She caught his fingers, twisting them around her own. ‘But shouldn’t I know?’

There was a small, taut pause. His eyes narrowed a fraction. ‘I thought you said you trusted me.’

‘I do, but—’

‘So trust me when I say that we won’t be diving anywhere close to that site.’

He was right; she could trust him.So row back,she told herself. And yet—

Trust me.

She’d lost count of the number of times people had said that to her, and always they’d been lying. And with all those other people, it had mattered. The whole point of this fling with Chase was that it didn’t need to matter. It was different. She was supposed to be different with him.

But this was her being different.

The old Jemima, the one she’d left back in England, would never be thinking like this. She would have looked the other way, and kept looking until she found her boyfriend having sex with a stranger in their bed.

Behind him, she could see the ocean rippling in the sunlight. It all looked so calm and welcoming, but sometimes the currents pulled you into dangerous waters anyway.

‘It must have been horrible,’ she said slowly. ‘Stumbling across something like that.’

‘Like what?’ But he knew what. There was a wariness in his voice that hadn’t been there before, the same rigidity in his body.

‘Divers lost at sea. I can’t stop thinking about it and I wasn’t even there.’

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