Chapter Six #3
‘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.
‘In the meantime,’ he continued, returning his gaze to Thompson, who was beginning to get the hint and good-naturedly backing away from a potentially awkward situation, ‘Erin and I are going to be wrapped up with work 24/7…’
‘Sure, man!’ He grinned, then looked at Erin and winked. ‘You know where to find me,’ he said, ‘and I’d love to show you around our island, take you to have some real local food at one of the villages you probably would never get around to visiting…’
‘I’ll call…’
‘I’ll be waiting!’
Raffaele watched this little exchange with frowning displeasure and as soon as the other guy had been eaten up in the darkness outside, Erin turned to him, hands on her hips.
‘What was that about?’
‘Come again?’
‘You know what I’m talking about, Raffaele!’
Heading back to the cabins, they soon left the thick of the departing crowd.
The music had wound down and now the night noises were forming their own symphony.
The sound of the crickets, the frogs and the screech owls mingled with the music of the brightly coloured birds they’d seen at breakfast, still singing mournful songs in the darkness.
There was a slight breeze but not enough to sweep away the heat and the humidity. The lanterns and fairy lights that had been strung between the trees for additional light sparkled against the inky blackness.
‘Let’s sit for a bit…’
‘Sit?’
‘We’ve barely spoken this evening. I’d like to get your thoughts on anything helpful you might have picked up…from any of the people there. You know how it is…music, alcohol loosens tongues…’
‘Raffaele, surely that can wait until tomorrow? Especially,’ she added with biting sarcasm, ‘as I’m sure you’ll have me working flat out 24/7, just in case I might be tempted to see Thompson.’
In the darkness, Raffaele flushed darkly. He felt edgy and restless and unwilling to cut short a conversation that he wanted to have without quite understanding why.
‘I may have slightly over-egged the pudding on that front.’
He’d led her to one of the many benches scattered in little clearings in the forest for tourists to sit and appreciate the scenery and watched as she hesitated before sitting down.
‘Why? Why would you over-egg the pudding? You made such a song and dance of telling me that this wasn’t going to be a work, work, work busman’s holiday.’
‘Because…’
Raffaele raked his fingers through this hair and hesitated as his normally very logical, very precise, analytical mind became fuzzy and soft focused.
‘Believe it or not, while you’re over here I feel that you’re my responsibility,’ he said gruffly.
‘Your responsibility?’
‘Call me a dinosaur.’
‘I can think of other words,’ Erin muttered under her breath.
‘That guy you were flirting with…’
‘I was having a conversation with him,’ Erin corrected impatiently. ‘I wasn’t flirting.’
‘He was all over you like a rash.’
‘Raffaele, are you jealous?’
For a few seconds, the silence stretched like elastic between them and Erin felt her heart in her mouth, felt her pulse race with treacherous desire.
‘Of course I’m not jealous,’ Raffaele gritted.
‘I’ve never been jealous in my entire life.
Have I ever said anything to you that would indicate that I’m the sort of guy who gets jealous?
’ He laughed shortly. ‘Just because I’m telling you that you should be careful, it doesn’t mean that I’m jealous. ’
‘“Be careful”?’
He was jealous. Erin could sense it in her bones, somewhere deep inside her. She had no idea why. Did he think that she was his possession because over the years he had never known her to be distracted by another man? Have a social life? Because, from his perspective, her life was devoted to him?
Her blood boiled and yet there was a treacherous thrill in thinking of herself as his possession.
She was a feminist through and through and had always been proud of her determination and her drive and her independence and yet…
right now in the heat of the tropical night, excitement threaded through her veins like quicksilver.
‘What do you think I should be careful about?’ she queried. ‘Did you think that Thompson might have made a pass at me and I wouldn’t have known what to do about it? That it might have been another bat-flying-in-the-cabin scenario, demanding an urgent rescue from you?’
‘Who knows?’
‘Well, believe it or not, I know.’
‘I wouldn’t want you to find yourself in an awkward situation,’ Raffaele said heavily, his voice laced with discomfort as she continued to look at him, steely eyed.
‘Well, thank you very much for your concern, Raffaele. That said, it was misplaced.’
‘I’m not sure you were aware of just how…how…’
‘How what?’
‘How beautiful you looked tonight, Erin. There wasn’t a man in that room who wasn’t staring at you.’
In the sultry heat, with the rustle of trees around them and the darkness turning everything into shadows and shifting angles, Erin stared at him and was ensnared by the glitter in his eyes.
Her heart skipped a beat.
She wondered whether she’d misheard what he had said. Was her mind playing tricks on her? Was she feverishly hallucinating that he had said the very thing she’d always imagined him saying in those wild fantasies she’d had about him?
‘I… I…’ she stammered. ‘S-sorry? I’m not…uh…following you…’
‘Okay, then I guess there’s no harm in making it clearer. You looked amazing tonight, Erin. Stunning…beautiful…sexy. Any more descriptions you might need to get the picture? Every eye in that room was on you, including mine.’
The silence lengthened between them, stretched to breaking point.
‘I could see what that guy wanted to do from a mile away. He wanted to touch what he was staring at. Maybe you didn’t see that but I did. He wanted to do…exactly what I wanted to do…’