The Barons of Texas: Jill (10 page)

“If at any time you decide you want to leave, just tell me.”

She nodded. Once again he had read her mind, which by now she had come to consider almost normal. Maybe it was because he had told her they could leave any time she wanted, but all of a sudden she didn’t feel trapped anymore. And strangely, anticipation bubbled through her like champagne. The question was,
what
was she anticipating?

“Are you and Des planning on developing the island?”

“It’s as developed as it’s likely to get. We love it just as it is, though someday we may build another residence for those times when we both might like to bring our families here at the same time.”

She had been about to point out the money they could make if they did decide to develop it, but the thought of Colin with a family constricted her throat to the point that she doubted she could even make a sound.

Colin with a wife and children
.

Troubled by the idea, she frowned. But after all, she reasoned, just because he hadn’t yet married and started a family, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t in the future. And the fact that he had even brought up the possibility of building another residence meant that marriage and a family were something he hoped to have.

“While your breakfast settles, I thought I might take you on a mini tour of the island. Or, if you’d rather, we can go straight into the swimming pool.”

The hand holding her orange juice halted halfway between the table and her lips. “Swimming pool? There’s a swimming pool on the island?”

He nodded. “Within walking distance, though you can’t see it until you get there.”

“Isn’t a pool redundant here?”

He chuckled. “I think so, but Des and I decided to go ahead and put one in. Apparently there are some people who want to be able to see what’s under them when they swim at night—therefore, the pool.”

“I bet you’re not one of those people.”

“You’re right. The ocean is wonderful at night.”

She found herself tangled up in the depths of his eyes. Lord, it was no wonder women fell for him left, right and center. “You mean you’re going to teach me how to snorkel in a pool? Colin,
I
have a swimming pool in my own backyard. For that matter, so do you. We could have just stayed home.”

“I want to go over the basics in the pool first, so I know you’ll be able to handle it out there.” He nodded in the direction of the sea. “Once you’ve got it down, then we’ll head for the reef I’ve got picked out for you.”

“Oh.” She sipped at her orange juice, then decided to go back to the coffee. “I suppose that’s a good idea. But tell me something. From what little I know about snorkeling, it looks relatively easy.”

“Once you learn the basics, it is.”

“Okay, so I don’t see you—or Des, for that matter—being content to merely swim along on the surface of the water. If you two do anything, it would be scuba diving.”

His dimple appeared. “You’re right, but there are two reasons I decided to bring you down here and teach you how to snorkel. First, you can learn it much faster than you can learn to scuba. And after your first snorkeling trip, it will whet your appetite for scuba diving.” He paused and eyed her speculatively. “And if you do convince Des to marry you, that would be something he could teach you.”

Once again his answer made sense. But what
didn’t
make sense was that she hated the answer.

“By the way, can you swim?”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Do you honestly think I would consider snorkeling if I couldn’t?”

“Okay, but how
well
do you swim?”

She thought over his question. “I used to be pretty good, but I haven’t been swimming since I was in high school. My father made sure my sisters and I could swim.”

“Considering there’s an enormous lake at the edge of the Double B, I can see why. He wouldn’t have wanted any of you to fall in and accidentally drown.”

“I doubt if he would have blinked an eye if one of us had drowned.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“I guarantee you, the day after the funeral, he would be back to business as usual.”

“People grieve in different ways, Jill.”

“It’s not important.” She waved the issue aside. “But the reason he made sure we could swim was so that we could race against each other. It was all part of his teaching us to be competitive. It was also the reason he taught us to play golf, tennis, baseball, horseshoes and any other sport he could come up with. It’s the reason I stopped swimming as soon as possible, and as a result, truthfully, I’m not sure how far I can swim now.”

He stared at her for several moments as if he was contemplating saying something—no doubt something about her father—but then he seemed to change his mind.

“You won’t have to worry. You’ll be wearing a belt that will keep you buoyant, and a vest if you still don’t feel secure, plus the saltwater helps. However, I would never take out someone who didn’t know how to swim at all.”

“Then why didn’t you ask me before now?”

He smiled. “Because if you couldn’t swim, I figured I’d just teach you.”

“Teach me to swim, huh? As easy as that. You know, you missed your calling. You should have been a teacher.”

“You think?”

She nodded. “I’m sure teaching history and mathematics couldn’t be that much different from teaching a woman how to accept a man’s touch, or teaching her how to dance close to a man, or even teaching her snorkeling. Just another lesson in a long line of them, right?”

He smiled. “Right.” He looked up. “Ah, here’s our breakfast. Thank you, Liana.”

Jill untied the pink wrap and draped it over a lounge chair by the pool. Colin let out a long wolf whistle. “I’ve got to say that I have excellent taste.”

She shrugged, self-conscious. Colin was standing with his hands on his hips, staring at her with open appreciation.

“I did one hell of a job picking out that suit, but then, you’ve got a great body to show it off.”

Annoyingly, unnervingly, his compliment sent heat to every part of her body. “Oh, quit congratulating yourself and let’s get on with it.”

“Come here.”

Irritated more by the way he was making her feel than his words, she pointed to the underwater steps she was standing by. “This is where we go in.”

“Not yet. Come here.”

The huskiness she heard in his voice caused her irritation to melt away. And just so she didn’t do the same, she stiffened her spine and quickly walked to him. She didn’t want him to have a chance to study her body too closely, nor did she want the opportunity
to do the same to him. As it was, she was having an extremely difficult time keeping her eyes
above
the line where his swim briefs ended.

When she reached him, he grasped her shoulders and turned her around.

“What …?” Suddenly she felt his hands smooth over her back, spreading lotion.

“No one should go anywhere on this island without having sunscreen on, but especially you, with your fair skin.”

She tried to reach around to get the bottle. “Okay, but I can put it on myself.”

“Not on your back, you can’t. This suit exposes too much skin.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“The designer’s, I suppose.”

She rolled her eyes in exasperation, but since he couldn’t see her face, the effort was lost on him. Thank heavens, because in the next moment, her exasperation turned to pleasure.

As he rubbed the lotion onto her shoulders, he gave her a light massage. Then he continued slowly downward in a very thorough and sensuous manner. His long fingers didn’t miss an inch of her, even slipping beneath the string that held the bikini top around her, slowly sliding toward the sides of her breasts, coming breathtakingly close to the fullness, lingering there, caressing, stroking.

The air blocked up in her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. If he reached just a little farther…just a little farther…his fingertips would brush her nipples.

She closed her eyes and felt herself sway. She wanted to ask him to stop but couldn’t find the words.
She wanted to walk away, but her legs would not obey.

Now he was below her bra line, to her waist, still caressing here, massaging there. When he reached the line of the suit’s bottom, his fingers dipped beneath its edge, not far, but just enough to make her hold her breath.

Then he was on his knees, rubbing oil into her upper thighs, delving beneath the high cut of the suit’s legs, then around to the sides of her buttocks.

She reached out for the support of a lounge chair. “I—I can do the rest,” she said, though her voice was only a whisper.

Without answering, he simply continued down her legs to her calves and ankles. Then he was in front of her, and she hadn’t even seen him move.

She couldn’t see. She could only feel his hands stroking lotion on her ankles, her shins, her knees and up. He was using both hands, one on each leg, and the concentration he was giving to the task had to be the same as the concentration Leonardo da Vinci must have brought to the task of painting the
Mona Lisa
.

She cleared her throat. “I really think—”

At the tops of her thighs, his fingers slipped beneath the suit, deep enough to feel the tightly curling hair there.

She gasped.

He stopped, froze, but he didn’t move his fingers. His breathing was ragged. He stared at the place where her thighs joined.

Suddenly he stood, took several steps and dived cleanly into the pool. And as his body arced against the blue sky into the crystalline water, she caught a glimpse of his hard, full arousal straining against the material of his swimsuit.

S
he faked a headache. As soon as Colin surfaced in the pool, Jill claimed that a sudden, excruciating pain had struck one-half of her head. And all the time she was doing it, she called herself ten different kinds of coward.

But she didn’t care. There was no way she could get into the pool with Colin now, be close to him and bear having his hands on her again—not after he had just stroked and rubbed most of her body in an intimate sensual manner that had left her knees weak and her limbs shaking.

What was more, the sight of him as he dived into the water had been proof positive that he had also been affected, though she knew it was in a different way than she.

She understood that men didn’t need to feel all the things women did to get sexually excited. All it took
for them was the most minor stimuli, which made it all the worse for her. What he could make her feel with a mere twinkle of his eyes meant nothing to him. As for her…she would think about it later.

She grabbed the cover-up, wrapped and tied it around her, then started back up the path to the house. He quickly caught up with her, lifted her into his arms and carried her the last half of the way.

There was no way she could protest. After all, he had helped her through the real thing and was concerned. As soon as she had told him she had a headache, he had surged out of the pool and headed after her. He hadn’t even bothered to dry off.

Instinctively, it seemed, she rested her head on his shoulder and wound her arms around his neck. His skin was still wet and slick. She tried not to feel anything, but her effort was doomed. Just the contact of her skin against his was enough to bring back the heat and the memory of his fingers inside her bikini bottom.

Blessedly, Colin walked fast, and soon he was gently laying her on the bed. “What medication do you want?” he whispered.

She closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see his concern for her. She didn’t want to see the masculine bulge in his swim briefs. Though his arousal had disappeared, no doubt due to his anxiety over her, just the outline of his sex through the spandex was enough to make her mouth water. “Don’t bother with it. I’ll get up in a minute.”

“Just tell me, Jill.”

This was going to be tricky. She needed to get rid of him as fast as possible, but based on how he had acted the other night when her pain had been very
real, he wasn’t going to leave until he was satisfied he had done everything for her that he could. “Bring me the bag.”

He did, along with a glass of water. He helped her sit up and opened the bag for her. She picked one of the milder prescriptions, opened the cap and shook one into her hand. “Would you please get me a washcloth for my eyes? A cool, wet one?”

He frowned down at her. “Take the pill first.”

She had no recourse. She put the pill into her mouth, surreptitiously maneuvered it under her tongue and took a swallow of water. Satisfied, he returned to the bathroom. She had just enough time to replace the pill in its container before he reappeared with the cloth.

“Thank you.”

She lay back amidst the pillows and covered her eyes with the cloth.

“What else can I do? Do you want me to close the shutters to make it darker in here?”

“No, I want to feel the breeze. The cloth will keep the light from my eyes.” It suddenly hit her that she was talking in complete sentences, even communicating with the proper words. She was lousy at deception, she reflected ruefully, or at least she was when it came to Colin. She hoped he hadn’t noticed, but just in case, she slurred her next words. “Leave. I’ll sleep.”

She felt him sit down on the bed beside her and take her hand. “Are you sure? Last time…”

“Last time I didn’t catch—” she took a breath, reminding herself to slow down and slur the words “—the headache in time. This won’t be as bad.” She
gently pulled her hand from his. “All I need is to sleep it off.”

“Listen, Jill. There’s a clear button on the phone, here on the table to your immediate left. It’s within easy reach for you. If you need something,
anything
, all you have to do is push it, okay?”

“Yes…but I won’t have to.”

She waited, but he didn’t move. For a while she thought he was going to stay, as he had the other night. The fact that his concern was genuine made her feel horrible. And strange. Other than Molly, there was no one who worried about her. Yet Colin obviously did. Why? she wondered, and received no answer.

She forced her mind back to the problem at hand—getting rid of him. Little by little she managed to relax and to check her breathing until it was even and slow. Finally he eased off the bed and quietly left by the terrace door.

And at last she was alone, but any coherent line of thought continued to elude her, so, falling into an old habit, she went over the few things she knew for a fact.

She had agreed to come to the island because she had felt it would give her the opportunity to figure out what the changes she was feeling were and why they were happening. She also knew that, so far, she hadn’t had the time or the opportunity. Colin had been all-pervasive in both her waking and sleeping hours.

She had the time now, though. Yet the harder she tried, the more confused she became. Her thoughts were too scrambled, too tangled up with sensations and emotions that, in one way or another, all had to do with Colin.

Des
, she told herself sternly.
Des. Des
.

She repeated the name over and over in her head, trying to get herself back on track to her original goal.

Three days ago, she had agreed to cancel all her appointments for the next few days. She had even taken the unprecedented step of agreeing to a partnership with Colin to develop their adjoining parcels of land. And she was putting herself through an emotional and physical ringer by taking these lessons from him.

But her problem was, she kept forgetting why she had agreed to Colin’s plan in the first place. Everything she had done in the past few days had supposedly been to help her win Des’s attention as a woman and not as a stepcousin to whom he had never been particularly close, anyway. Yet all she could think about was Colin.

She took a deep breath. Her brain obviously needed oxygen, although heaven knew, the island had a surplus of fresh air.

She supposed it was inevitable that she hadn’t been able to think clearly. If these lessons had taught her nothing else, it was why her female acquaintances lost their heads and hearts to Colin. He was a virile, deeply sexual, wildly attractive man.

And the lessons he was giving her provided a full dose of all those elements. To get her accustomed to a man’s touch, he’d had to stroke and caress her. To teach her how to dance with a man, he’d had to demonstrate. She understood. Some things simply couldn’t be told. They had to be shown.

But as a result, her mind and body were reacting to Colin, when she was sure that was the last thing
he wanted. From his viewpoint, she was sure he saw himself as merely a substitute for Des.

And the changes she felt inside her? Maybe it was as simple as the fact that Colin’s lessons were working—that in some indecipherable way they were making her softer, more open to loving a man.

Des
. Of course she had meant that Colin’s lessons were making her more open to loving
Des
.

She barely managed to stifle a groan. The answers she had come up with all made perfect sense, yet for some unfathomable reason, she couldn’t accept them.

The afternoon wore on. Hard as it was to believe that she might still be sleep deprived, she actually managed to doze on and off. But even with the cloth over her eyes, she was always aware when Colin came to check on her. He would stand at the end of the bed, watch her for a few minutes, then leave again.

By five o’clock, she was bored. Her faked headache had accomplished what she had hoped. It had enabled her to regain her equilibrium and put what was happening to her into a context. If she couldn’t accept the explanation one hundred percent, at least it made sense. Sort of.

Plus, if she tried to analyze what was going on with her any more than she already had, she would get a
real
headache. She wasn’t used to inactivity, and there was a paradise right outside her door.

She got up and went in search of Colin. She now felt strong enough for that snorkeling lesson.

On the terrace, just outside the open doors of the house’s enormous main room, their dinner had been served on a round table. Surrounded by freshly picked
red hibiscus, a candle burned in the center of the table. Soft, romantic music floated in the air around them. Small white lights in cleverly placed, hollowed-out spaces of the terrace had come alive. Exotic night-blooming flowers perfumed the gentle breeze. A full moon laid a shimmering silver path across the now dark sea.

Jill had never been given to flights of fancy, but she could truly say that tonight had an almost magical quality about it.

To top it off, Colin sat across from her, looking like every woman’s dream of a man, dressed with casual elegance in an open-necked, light-green silk shirt and tailored tan slacks.

They had finished their dinner, and Liana had cleared the table. When she had inquired if there was anything else they would like, Jill had decided on a glass of champagne, instead of dessert, and Colin had ordered a cognac.

After Liana had served them their drinks, she said good-night. Colin had told Jill that Liana and her family lived in a compound of homes built on a private section of the island that offered them their own beach.

Which meant that she and Colin were now completely alone.

Jill sat back and took another sip of her champagne, aware that she was experiencing yet another new feeling—contentment. It wouldn’t last of course, but while it did, she planned to savor it. “You know, if you and Des could somehow bottle up nights like this one and sell them, you could each make a fortune. Or perhaps I should say
another
fortune.”

Colin’s dimple appeared as he gave her a lazy
smile. “I know what you mean. Nights like this are just one of the many reasons I’ve come to love this island so much.”

“I can see why. I’ve always loved dawn, not only because of the colors of sunrise, but because the sight of it offers the promise of a fresh new day. But with nights like this, I could change my mind.”

“Ah, but you haven’t yet seen one of our dawns.”

She nodded. “I plan to do that very thing in the morning. I’m looking forward to our snorkeling trip.”

“I’m really glad. There’s unbelievable beauty beneath the sea. The place I’ve chosen for your first snorkeling trip tomorrow is extraordinary. The reef has grown up to around fifteen to twenty feet below the surface in that area, and you’ll easily be able to see it all.”

Anticipation rippled through her at the idea. “How are we going to get there?”

“By boat.”

“I can’t wait.”

He grinned wryly. “Even though you haven’t yet entirely mastered the art of clearing the snorkel tube?”

She shook her head. “I still don’t understand how you expected me to do that. When the tube fills with water, what good is blowing three times in quick succession?”

“That’s how you clear out the water.”

“Uh-uh. Not if the water comes in at the exact same time you’ve breathed out and your lungs are empty.”

He laughed. “That’s why I wanted you to practice in the pool today. At least now you’re familiar with what to expect once we’re in the sea tomorrow.”

She grinned. “It’s just a shame that you don’t have a glass-bottom boat.”

He tilted his head, looking at her with an amused expression. “Oh, come on. You’re not going to let a little water in your snorkel scare you off, are you?”

“No way.”

“That’s my girl. All you need is a little more experience and it will start to come naturally. You’ll see.”

Her pulse quickened. He’d called her his girl. Naturally it was just one of those casual phrases that people throw out on occasion. She wasn’t even sure he knew he had said it. But she did.

Yet more changes in her. Four days ago, if someone had told her she would actually be looking forward to a snorkeling trip, she would have told them they were crazy. And if a man had called her his girl, she would have verbally cut him off at the knees. But now… “I’m not overly concerned. If the snorkel fills with water, or if I forget to breathe through my mouth, instead of through my nose, I’ll simply lift my head out of the water.”

“And I’ll be right there beside you in case you get into any serious trouble.”

She nodded.

This afternoon, in the pool, he had given her his instructions without once unnecessarily touching her. She had solved the problem of having him apply sunscreen to her by borrowing one of his T-shirts to cover her. Then she had been able to easily apply the sunscreen to the rest of her body.

And if her heart had given an occasional thud at what she had perceived to be a heated look in his eyes or an expression of desire on his face, it was
simply because her body hadn’t caught up with her mind’s new rational line of thought.

“Have I told you how beautiful you look tonight?”

Her heart gave another thud. At this rate, she reflected ruefully, she might want to consider having a thorough cardiological exam when she returned home.

“Thank you.”

She had chosen a long, cool sundress made of silk-lined voile in blues and greens. It had been the colors that had made her reach for it earlier this evening, plus its modest neckline, along with a skirt that consisted of separate pieces that tended to drift outward when she walked. Small straps spanned her shoulders, then crisscrossed her back to about three inches above her waist.

Since the bodice was lined, she hadn’t felt the need to wear a bra, which made the dress even more comfortable. Yet one more sign of change in her. Their “date” at the Midnight Blues Club had been the first time she had ever gone outside her home without a bra. Then, she remembered, she had felt naked. Tonight she hadn’t thought twice about it.