Ellie felt a spurt of unaccustomed anger. Had he expected her to be seated with her notebook and pencil? Slapping down anyone who spoke out of turn? Maybe banishing them to the naughty corner?
Yes, he had! Because she was the efficient PA, never flustered, never out of her depth, always available.
She was swamped with a mixture of simmering rebellion and uncharacteristic recklessness brought on by her slinky clothes and the complimentary looks from the young lads. They were looking at her with the sort of male appreciation of which she had been starved for longer than she cared to remember, and she refused to fade into the background as usual.
She chatted and laughed and helped herself to another bottle of the local lager when it was offered. She knew her stuff and she knew exactly when to focus the minute the conversation turned to work. All the information she had meticulously filed in her head was at her fingertips, and she could deal with facts and figures even after her two beers.
For the first time in ages, Ellie threw herself into having fun. They had hired a skipper for the day, and she felt a burst of freedom as the Catamaran took on the wide blue sea.
A little while later up on deck, with conversation swirling around her, she sat with her knees drawn up and gazed at the limitless horizon. The yacht was moving at a rate of knots and the wind blew her hair around her face. The sky was the purest of dazzling blues and, as the boat left shallow water for deeper ocean, the sea was a dark navy, broken by the white froth of ripples from the wind and the ocean currents.
Victor perched next to her, bare-backed and with no thought whatsoever about sun block, and chatted to her about the turtles you could swim with, and the sting rays you could spot shimmering like pancakes in the sand, if you decided to go snorkelling. He gave her more information about the ins and outs of cricket than her brain could hold, and told her that she had to try Mount Gay rum, which was the best in the world.
At some point, when she had moved on from beer to bottled water, the skipper dropped anchor and everyone except her took the plunge into the bottomless sea.
Antony... Victor... Sol...and James.
Sitting and watching from the deck, hiding behind the sunglasses she had thankfully brought with her, Ellie looked at her boss, so much taller and so much more muscular than the other three. His body was a work of art. Solid packed muscle and a six-pack that was testament to power sessions at the gym. The sun would lighten his hair. It was already deepening his colour.
His trunks, black and halfway down his thighs, were hardly the stuff to fire the imagination, yet she felt weak at the sight of them and the heavy bulge of what was underneath.
The sun was setting by the time the skipper lifted anchor and they began heading back to the marina. Darkness was settling fast. One minute the glare of the sun had mellowed and then the orange orb began to sink on the horizon, turning the skies first indigo, then velvet-black.
High spirits had given way to mellow, serious conversation, and she had taken a lot of notes by the time the yacht drew up to its mooring, working on her iPad and storing up an equal amount to transcribe later.
‘I’ll take it from here,’ James told the skipper. When Ellie made to follow the guys off the yacht, he stretched out one arm, a signal for her to stay put.
‘What...what’s going on?’ she asked as the last of the guys hopped ashore and James, to her consternation, kicked the yacht back into life, nudging it expertly into open water.
Of course he could skipper a yacht, she thought, compulsively looking at his strong, veined forearms as he guided it with one hand. If it came to it, he could probably fly a plane through the eye of a hurricane.
‘We need to talk.’
‘Perhaps it could wait until tomorrow morning?’ She glanced over her shoulder to where the twinkling lights and safety of crowds on the promenade were being left behind.
The pleasant effect of beer was beginning to wear off, and as the yacht picked up speed, heading in the same direction along the west coast as earlier, she felt a shiver of forbidden excitement.
She didn’t want this! Hadn’t she already made it clear that her time would not be consumed with work-related issues simply because they weren’t in an office?
And yet...
There was a sense of simmering danger in the air that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. They were so far away fromnormal. Now, cruising along the shoreline, the panorama was quite different, everything plunged into inky shadows and distant, looming shapes. Yet it was barely any cooler than it had been during the day, with just the faintest of cooling breezes as he slowed the yacht to a soft stop, where it bobbed lazily on the calm water.
When he turned to her, she could only make out his shadowy outline. The angles of his beautiful face were hidden and she couldn’t read the expression in his eyes.
‘This is a bit dramatic, isn’t it?’ She laughed a little nervously because it was hard to get a grip on his mood. ‘I mean, if you want to talk about what was said about the prospective deal, then we could have...um...caught up in the morning. I may have had a couple of beers, but I remember every word that was said.’
‘I would expect nothing less.’
‘Then...what’s the problem? Why are we out here?’
James thought that that was an excellent question. Unfortunately, he couldn’t quite find as excellent an answer, because the hell he knew why he was out here. He just knew that the past few hours on this Catamaran had been a hellish ordeal mentally, trying to channel her back into the predictable box from which she had unexpectedly sprung. Astonishment at what she’d been wearing, at her drinking and at her easy, sexy confidence with those guys had kick-started all sorts of shocking, taboo urges inside him. He had to get it out of his system, and that was frustrating, because he wasn’t surewhat exactly it washe had to get out of his system.
‘You... I wasn’t expecting to find you dressed in a sarong and a tiny top,’ he opened, and was immediately appalled at the censorious tone of his voice. Since when had he become a feudal overlord?
‘Sorry?’
He raked his fingers through his hair and looked uncomfortably at the slight figure in front of him.
