Anything but Vanilla(23)

Not his fault, she reminded herself.

‘Marginally.’ Muscles rippled under his T-shirt as he rotated his right shoulder to ease the muscles. ‘It’s going to take a couple of days for my body to catch up with this time zone.’

‘Really?’ Her mouth was unaccountably dry. She ran her tongue over her teeth, a trick Graeme had told her was used by nervous speakers to help her with early client presentations. ‘What time zone is your body loitering in?’

Well, it would have been rude not to ask.

‘Somewhere around the international date line,’ he said. ‘On an island you won’t have heard of.’

‘One with long white beaches, coconut-shell cocktails and dusky maidens in grass skirts?’ she suggested. Well, she’d seen the postcards. ‘Far too many distractions to waste time writing home, obviously.’

‘Thick jungle. Mosquitoes as big as bats, bats as big as cats,’ he countered, ‘and no corner shops selling postcards or stamps.’

‘Well, that doesn’t sound like much fun,’ she replied, covering her surprise pretty well, considering. Because it didn’t. Sound like fun. ‘You need to have a serious talk with your travel agent.’

‘I don’t think Pantabalik has made it onto this year’s must-visit list of tourist venues.’

‘I can see why,’ she said, her irritation evaporating in the unexpected warmth of his smile. Apparently ‘exploring’ wasn’t, as she’d assumed, a euphemism for living the life of a lotus-eater, but something rather more taxing. ‘So where did that last postcard come from?’

‘An airport transit lounge.’

‘You have been having a bad time. Maybe you should give your body a break and go home to bed.’

‘Thanks for your concern, but my body is used to surviving on catnaps.’ He rotated his left shoulder.

‘Don’t...’ The word slipped out.

‘What?’

‘Do that.’ The tongue-teeth thing was working overtime. ‘Your T-shirt won’t stand the strain.’

Forget his T-shirt, it was her blood pressure that was about to blow...

He turned his head and looked down at his shoulder, poking at the split with his finger, and shrugged. ‘Sweat rots the cotton.’

‘Too much information,’ she said, tearing her eyes away as the gap lengthened, grabbing the heavy jug of puréed cucumber to mix it with measured amounts of crème fraîche, lime juice and salt.

She needed two hands to lift it and he said, ‘Let me do that.’

She didn’t argue as he took it from her, not meeting his eyes as she stepped back out of the forbidden zone of warm male flesh, disintegrating clothing, a ripple of heat that lapped against her, disturbing the order of the universe whenever he was too close.

‘Thank you,’ she said, concentrating very hard on the mixture, determined to block out the thought of him sliding naked between Ria’s lavender-scented sheets, only to be assailed by the image of him stretched out in a hammock slung between trees hung with lianas, his golden body glistening with sweat beneath a gauzy mosquito net...

Whatever was the matter with her?

Her universe was fixed. Centred. Planned out to the last detail. For the moment her focus was Scoop! In a year or two she’d marry Graeme in the village church, live in the Georgian rectory next door that he’d recently bought. It would take that long to renovate it to his exacting standards. Which not only covered stationary but signalled his intention of settling down in the vicinity of her office, her family. It was solid, real...

‘I wouldn’t sleep much with oversized mosquitoes and bats flying around, either,’ she said. Concentrate on the bats... ‘What were you doing there? In Pan...?’

‘Pantabalik.’

‘Pantabalik. You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’ She glanced at him. Geography was a safe subject.

‘I was on a plant-hunting expedition.’

‘Plant hunting?’ she repeated, startled. ‘How very...’

Unlikely... Unpredictable... Unexpected...

‘How very what?’ His eyebrows invited all kinds of indiscretions.

‘How very Victorian,’ she said, primly, turning off the machine and, reaching for a plastic spoon from a pot on the work surface, she dipped it into the mixture and tasted it. Creamy, with a big hit of cucumber, but something was missing... ‘I have this image of you wearing a pith helmet as you hack your way through the undergrowth hunting for a fabled species of orchid.’