He stopped abruptly and stepped back to look at her with an expression, Erin noted, that looked a lot like disapproval.
She felt her hackles rise.
Did he imagine that he owned her? That because she’d shared something of herself with him, he could now dictate what she did while they were over here? Maybe he figured that an episode with an errant bat now warranted full protection just in case she had another Victorian-maiden-style meltdown over nothing.
‘Why not?’ she asked bluntly.
He looked away briefly and raked his fingers through his dark hair.
‘I figured that you might have been a little…nervous. I did actually make an effort to get back here so that I could be by your side when you came over to the main hotel but everything just dragged on and on with Clive and his wife getting more and more inebriated over lunch until I finally managed to escape.’
‘Oh dear. But wait…why do you think I might have been nervous? Didn’t you say that I should head over here to meet and greet and get the lay of the land if you weren’t around? Didn’t you remind me that that was something I was accustomed to doing? So why would you think that I might have been nervous?’
‘Because you’re in unfamiliar territory… It can be daunting…’
Erin’s hackles rose a little more but she wasn’t going to be drawn into self-defence.
‘We should be mingling,’ she said coolly. ‘If you like, I can see what business I can do but it doesn’t seem the right place or the right time to try to introduce profit-and-loss discussions into the conversation.’
‘Of course I don’t want you to work!’
‘Thank you. I’ll get back to the party in that case?’
‘Erin…’
‘I’ll be up first thing tomorrow morning, Raffaele, and I can meet you for breakfast at eight thirty if that suits.’
‘You’re overreacting…’
‘To what exactly?’ She sighed, banking down her annoyance, her impatience, her desire to give him a piece of her mind, because she didn’t suddenly need her handsome boss thinking that he had to look out for her. ‘Doesn’t matter, Raffaele. Let’s just drop all of this, could we? I guess we’re both adjusting to being in a different country with different customs and—’ she looked around her but had to grit her teeth to hide the resentment ‘—different scenery, not to mention the heat. Gets to a person if they’re not used to it.’
She forced a smile. He didn’t smile back and with a small shrug at his lack of response, she peeled off back to the party. Her dance partner seemed to be waiting for her, ready to pick up where they’d left off.
Left on his own, Raffaele scowled and stared at the pair of them through narrowed eyes.
Erin shimmered. The bright colours suited her, made her chestnut hair glow with different shades of auburn and brown, emphasised the gracefulness of her slender body and the slimness of her shapely legs.
She moved like a dancer.
Come to think of it, she’d always had that graceful way about her and he had always noticed it. He must have filed the observation away somewhere in his subconscious.
The rest of the evening was fun, lively, busy and he managed to work the room without being obvious.
He may have chatted with Erin a several times during the course of the evening, may have exchanged a couple of comments about the food, the music, the vibe, but whether he was talking to her not, he knew that he hadn’t let her really out of his sight and she’d been in his head even when his attention seemed to have been one hundred percent focused on whoever he happened to be talking to.
The place was thinning out by ten and when Erin and the boy—Raffaele had discovered that his name was Thompson—began moving towards the door, Raffaele was hit with a surge of…fierce possessiveness that shook him.
He dumped his conversation with two women who had managed to corner him and made for the door as well, intercepting Erin and Thompson just as they were about to head out.
‘I’ll take it from here,’ he addressed the much slighter guy with a terse smile, while lightly resting his hand on Erin’s arm. ‘Our cabins are side by side. You’re…?’
‘Gary’s my uncle.’ Thompson smiled but his big, dark, liquid eyes were fighting to look away from Erin. ‘I have a little sightseeing business. We do the coral reefs in glass-bottomed boats…’
‘Great! Sure I’ll get around to chatting with you sometime if this hotel sale goes ahead but in the meantime—’
‘Raffaele…!’
Raffaele looked at Erin blandly, hand still on her arm.
