In her short-sleeved lemon blouse and neat cotton skirt and with her laptop firmly tucked under her arm, she felt inappropriately stuffy.
‘So?’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Sleep all right for the remainder of the night—or should I say morning? I stayed on for about an hour then went to check on you and you were fast asleep.’
‘Thank you for…the babysitting duties,’ Erin said politely.
‘It was no bother,’ Raffaele returned with equal politeness but with a wicked glint in his eyes. ‘As babysitting duties go, it was stress free. In fact, all I did was remove the socks and throw a blanket over you.’
Erin gritted her teeth as the very subject she’d hoped to dodge was flung at her with an amused smile and raised eyebrows.
‘Won’t happen again. I can already see how ridiculous and misplaced my brief panic was. Everything always looks so much less threatening in the daylight. What will we be covering in this morning’s meeting? I’ve brought my laptop so that we can maybe have a look at how the costs of running the place are broken down?’
‘Excellent. Let me grab mine and we can go have some breakfast in the restaurant. Unless you’d rather we stay here? Have someone deliver something for us?’
‘No! The restaurant will be fine.’
Raffaele smiled and shrugged.
Erin was as formally dressed as it was humanly possible to be given the heat and the humidity. Unassuming flowered skirt, loosely falling to mid-calf, and a neat shirt with tiny buttons. Very impractical, he decided. She would be drenched in sweat within the hour.
He knew just what that was about. She was desperate to put distance between the woman he had seen in the early hours of the morning. The woman half scared to death, wearing the sexiest little vest and shorts imaginable. The woman who had banged on his door looking tousled and pink faced and very, very cute. The woman who had painted toenails—a sweet pale pink that somehow gave the lie to her being the ultimate professional with all girlie traits stamped into oblivion. She was as slender as a ballet dancer and, having seen her in her nightwear, he could now attest that she had the shapeliest legs he’d seen on a woman in a long time.
The woman with the background he’d never have guessed who had roused his curiosity to the point where his curiosity had no intention of being put to bed, at least not just yet.
The restaurant was a charming wooden pavilion attached to the side of the main hotel, open to the birds which flitted in and out, pecking whatever scraps had been left on plates before they were cleared away. Their plumage was bright—blue and yellow and orange—and they filled the air with song.
‘This place is amazing,’ Erin admitted as they were shown to a table. Around them various other couples were having breakfast and poring over maps and making plans. Shorts and T-shirts with beach bags on the ground. She fidgeted uncomfortably in her more formal gear.
‘Yes, it is but there’s a lot of work that would have to be done to get it up and running. I was out and about at six thirty and the only real thing it’s got going for it is its location, which is stunning. There’s a waterfall about twenty minutes’ walk away. Beautiful. Very private. These are the sort of things I’ll want us to check out because it’s the added bonuses that can sell a hotel like this and my feeling is those have been bypassed as Archer’s goals have shifted away from his hotel business.’
Erin was busy taking in the birds and the flowers curling on green tendrils over the white wooden railings of the sitting area, where the tables were arranged in no particular order.
She nodded absently and only surfaced when breakfast began appearing.
‘Did I order?’ She frowned.
‘No menu. You get what’s freshly baked.’
‘That’s something else that could be used as a selling point. A lot of people like the idea of the food being locally sourced on a daily basis.’
‘So youwerelistening to what I was saying.’
‘I always listen to what you say. I’m your secretary. That’s what I’m paid to do.’
‘Ah…because for a while there you were a million miles away.’
‘I was admiring all the birds,’ Erin admitted. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’ She thought of the life she’d led, which she’d always considered eccentric and ridiculously adventurous compared to everyone else she had known along the way, the other pre-teens and the teenagers who had passed in and out of her life like whispers. For a while ithadbeen both those things but being here…
It was in places like this, she thought, that the adventure really started. It was here with all the new sights and smells and tastes, where nothing was like anything else that had gone before, that the imagination could take flight.
The predictability of her life at home hit her like a sledgehammer. After her break-up a million years ago, she had retreated into the safety of her carefully curated comfort zone, the very one that had become part and parcel of her life from as far back as she could remember.
She had putadventurein a box that wasn’t for her and that had included adventures with men.
She’d been moulded by her wandering parents and hurt by her ex-boyfriend, hurt by the things he had casually thrown at her. Protecting herself had become the most important goal in her life.
They were disturbing thoughts and it was easier, surrounded by all this untamed beauty, to shove them aside.
‘And this breakfast is delicious. The bread…is there coconut in it?’ Their eyes collided and Erin blushed. ‘This is what I meant when I said that the food could be a pulling point here.’ She cleared her throat and looked away.
