Page 15 of One Forbidden Night In Paradise (Hot Winter Escapes)

Bathroom.

She swung round, mouth dropping as she stared into the bathroom or what was left of it. Everything was gone. The sink. The toilet. The shower. All that remained were some pipes sticking forlornly out of the wall.

Breathing shakily, she leaned against the doorframe to steady herself. How was this happening? Not just happening, it had already happened, she thought, her eyes darting around the devastated bathroom again. ‘How long will it take to make it good again?’

The man rubbed his hand across his jaw. ‘About a week. It’s not just the fixtures. A lot of the pipes need replacing.’

‘A week.’ Jem stared at him in horror. ‘And what am I supposed to do?’ Her gaze swung back to the bathroom, panic swamping her. She couldn’t stay here without a toilet or running water, but she didn’t have the money to stay in a hotel or a B & B.

‘No, that isn’t going to work for me. Look, you’re going to have to put it back,’ she said firmly.

‘Put it back?’

As three men stood and stared at her with a mixture of disbelief and bemusement, the last of her endorphins drained away and she felt suddenly exhausted and exasperated. This was her holiday. She hadn’t asked to have the beach house refurbished so why was it suddenly her problem to solve?

‘Yes, put it back,’ she repeated.

One of the other men shook his head. ‘Boss ain’t going to like this,’ he muttered.

‘I don’t care what your boss likes or doesn’t like,’ she said stiffly. ‘He is irrelevant.’

‘I’m not sure that’s either fair or true but I’ve been called worse.’ A deep, oddly familiar voice resonated around the tiny house and they all turned as one towards its owner.

A man was standing in the doorway, sunlight framing his muscular body as if he were some celestial deity come to earth to intervene in mortal matters.No, not just a man, Jem thought, shock pounding through her in a clattering drum roll. It was Chase.

She suddenly couldn’t breathe. But what was he doing here? She watched dazedly as he shook hands with each of the men before turning towards her. ‘Chase Farrar,’ he said, his green eyes flicking to her face as if he’d heard her question even though she hadn’t asked it. ‘I’m the irrelevant boss and your proxy landlord.’

Her heart was banging like a gong.Farrar.She’d heard that name before. Her brain lit up like a fruit machine hitting the jackpot. This was Farrar’s Cove. But surely it was just a coincidence.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said slowly. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means what it says. I’m the landlord, so, as you can see, I am perhaps a little more relevant than you thought.’

There was a slight edge to his voice. But why? He wasn’t the one who had come back to find his house being ripped apart by strangers.

She gestured towards the wreckage of the bathroom. ‘I can’t live like this—’

‘Of course not,’ he cut her off smoothly. ‘But as far as I was aware Ms Santos had made arrangements to stay somewhere else while the work was being done. I only found out she had someone staying here when I emailed her this morning to confirm the schedule of work and she said you were doing a house swap with her.’ His eyes locked with hers and her heart thudded hard and she felt something stir inside her, her body betraying her. ‘I thought I’d better come over and see how things were going.’

‘Well, I don’t have a bathroom or a kitchen so I would say they were going badly.’ Her voice sounded shrill and she knew that it was revealing more than she wanted about how she was feeling, but she couldn’t seem to do anything about it.

She felt a prickle of frustration. It was bad enough that her holiday home was now a building site, but that she had to be dealing with the one man on the island she most wanted to avoid seemed just too unfair, not to say unbelievable, to be true.

And yet here he was.

‘I would have to agree with you.’

Chase was staring down at her, his green eyes steady on her face, that mouth of his flickering at one corner. And just like that she remembered how he had kissed her, remembered the feel of his lips on her and the rough urgency of his hands.

Her pulse leaped in her veins and, terrified that he might be able to read her mind, she batted away the memory and lifted her chin. ‘Good, then it seems like we’re all in agreement.’

The man who had spoken to her before cleared his throat. ‘The lady wants us to put it all back, boss.’

She watched as Chase turned towards him and smiled. ‘Thanks, Marcus, but I think I can take it from here. Why don’t you and the guys take an early lunch while I sort things out with Ms Friday?’

He phrased it as a question, as if it were optional, but there was no mistaking the commanding note in his voice. What had possessed her to think that this man was a simple fisherman? Jem thought as the men shuffled out of the door. As she stood here in the shell of the beach-house kitchen it felt utterly obvious that Chase Farrar was not simply a fisherman. It wasn’t just his manner. Now that she looked more closely, she could tell that his boat shoes were not the kind you picked up at the local sailing outfitters. Only she had ignored the signs because that was what she always did.

Like with Nick.

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