Escapade

She flushed, glad he couldn’t see the color in her face. “Why do you always put me in the room next to the main guest room? The last couple you entertained kept me awake all night. She was a redhead, too. And she screamed,” she muttered.

“And that brings back a memory, doesn’t it?”

She hadn’t expected him to bring it up. In eight years they’d never talked about it. She shifted her stance, trying not to let him see her face.

“Aren’t you going to answer?” he chided.

“There’s nothing to say. What I saw happened a long time ago.”

He put his smoldering cigar in his mouth and forced the broad tip back into bright orange life. “It isn’t a memory I like,” he said gruffly. “It shamed me to know you’d seen me with Terri on the beach. I was aroused enough to be careless.”

“I didn’t even realize you were out there with her,” she replied tersely. She tried to blot out the memory of Josh’s aroused, nude body poised over Terri’s writhing form, but it was impossible.

She looked away, shivering with reaction. How that memory had haunted her, the sight of his big hand on Terri’s hips as he’d jerked her up to him in a sharp rhythm. When she’d cried out and convulsed, Amanda had been horrified. Then Josh had found his own satisfaction and the sight had burned into her brain like acid. She’d run away, so fast, trying to escape the erotic images.

She closed her mind to the rest of it. Turning, she walked along the beach. Her body felt oddly on fire.

“I know it was traumatic for you,” he said quietly, falling easily into step beside her. “Maybe I should have brought this all up at the time, but you were pretty naive at fifteen.”

She wrapped her arms across her chest, trying to forget the memory of his face as he’d suddenly given in to his own pleasure. In all her life she’d never seen anything like it.

“There’s no need to explain it all, Josh,” she whispered in anguish, turning her head away. “I understand now what was happening.”

He took a sharp breath and jammed one hand into his pocket. “All right,” he said angrily. “We’ll skirt around it some more, just as we have for the past eight years. I just wanted to clear the air. You brought up the noisy, amorous guests next door to you, so, it seemed like the right time. But I guess you’ve had enough to deal with lately without my bringing up embarrassing memories.”

She stopped walking and turned to him, her face shadowed as she looked up. “Dad protected me so,” she began slowly. “I’d...never even seen a naked man.”

“Your father sheltered you too damned much,” he said.

She lifted her hair away from her hot face without looking at him. Her body felt funny. Hot. Clammy. Throbbing with some sensation she couldn’t understand.

Josh paused in front of her and reached out and touched her shoulder. His fingers fell lightly on her heated flesh. She caught her breath. His touch was the most erotic she’d ever felt, and she couldn’t hide her reaction.

His dark eyes slid down to her thin gown, to the small, hard peaks that betrayed what she was feeling. That, and her ragged breathing and the set of her exquisite body, told him things he didn’t really want to know just yet.

“You’re vulnerable,” he said curtly. “The night, the strain of the past week, the excitement tonight...maybe even the memory we share, it’s all knocked the pins out from under you.”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes wide as they searched his in the flood of light that came from the house.

His fingers trailed along the throbbing pulse in her throat, and further, to the faint outline of her collarbone. Her breath caught, but she didn’t protest or push at his hand.

His lips parted as he watched her face. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew this was dangerous. She was unguarded, and he was aroused. It had been a long time since he’d been with a woman. Just after Terri had left, there had been a Latin heiress with whom he’d conducted a very lukewarm, long-distance affair. And yet the tiny sound that suddenly escaped Amanda’s throat aroused him more than Louisa Valdez’s naked body in a bed ever had.

Amanda shivered. In one moment she’d recognized the years of frustrated longing she’d felt for him, and suddenly she needed him more than ever.

He couldn’t quite believe the look of desire he saw on her face. It unsettled him. The cigar dangled in his free hand, and he fought the sudden shift in his perception of her.

She still hadn’t moved, but his mind had. His fingers lifted as if her soft skin were white fire. He didn’t dare touch her again. He didn’t move. His face poised above hers as if it had been carved from stone.

“Joshua?” Was that husky whisper her voice?

His gaze fell to the taut thrust of her breasts against her bodice, down to her smooth hips and her long, elegant legs, to her pretty bare feet. Her silver shoes lay scattered on the white sand, the foaming surf just touching them. He had to remember why he couldn’t get involved with a woman, especially not with Amanda.

With a soft curse, he moved away from her all at once. “Here,” he said gruffly, “you’ve left your shoes in the surf. They’ll be soaked.”

His words brought Amanda back to reality.

“They’re old,” she said. “I touched them up with some of Harriet’s silver hairspray.”

He looked for his cigar and found it lying in the water. He sighed and shoved his hands in his pockets. He smoked too much, anyway. “Harriet’s hairspray?!” he replied suddenly.

She laughed. He sometimes seemed to be listening when really he was miles away. “That will teach you to pay attention when I talk to you,” she said, and in seconds he was smiling and everything was back to normal.

Afterward Amanda could hardly remember when or how they’d gone inside. But once she was upstairs, she almost collapsed with burning heat on her bed. Her head was really splitting now, and she was feeling particularly vulnerable.

She wanted Josh. She could no longer deny the sensations she felt. But she’d make sure that she stayed in control from now on. Having only just escaped her father’s domination, she was in no hurry to rush back into emotional slavery.

At least Josh wasn’t going to take advantage of her weakness. He’d rejected her, but not unkindly. She’d heard some of the rumors about his lovers. A lot about Terri, the woman she’d seen him with on the beach so long ago. She knew he didn’t want to get married, but that he was an honorable man. He knew Amanda too well to lure her into his bed for a few minutes of pleasure. Maybe that was a good thing, but all the same her body throbbed until dawn. The worst thing was that she hadn’t even had the presence of mind to mention the job press at the newspaper office to him.

* * *

JOSH GAVE UP on the idea of sleeping when his company finally departed. He’d won his deal with the oil sheik, and he should have felt satisfied. But he didn’t.

He felt as restless as ever. Imbued with an ongoing urgency about life, he often wore out employees who simply couldn’t meet the demands he placed on them. Like many overachievers, he was impatient with people who lived at a normal pace.

“Go to bed, for God’s sake,” Josh said to Ted. “You’re asleep on your feet.”

Ted chuckled as he rose from his comfortable chair. “I don’t mind keeping you company,” he said. “But a few hours of sleep sounds great. You seem to live on catnaps.”

Josh shrugged. “In the early days it was the only way I could manage to save the company. Now, it’s a habit.” He frowned. That wasn’t quite true. What he’d felt with Amanda bothered him. He lit a cigar impatiently.

“That will kill you,” Ted remarked at the door.

“Life kills people, too,” came the sardonic reply. “Dina’s enrolled me in a stop smoking seminar,” he added. “I’ll kick the habit. But not tonight.”

Ted shrugged. “Suit yourself. See you in the morning.”

The door closed, and he was alone with his thoughts, his memories.

He was going to miss Harrison Todd. Amanda’s father had not been a perfect human being, but Joshua had learned a lot from him in the early days. Knowing he wouldn’t have Harrison around had been a blow. Brad was a good salesman, but Harrison had years of experience neither Lawson brother had had a chance to accumulate.

Business, he mused. Even when he was alone, it dominated his mind. Better that than Amanda’s soft, pretty body, he reminded himself. His young life had been a kaleidoscope of affairs not unlike his parents’ adulterous adventures. He could remember his father flirting openly with other women, and it wasn’t a rare occurrence. His mother had been a little more discreet, but there were always men half her age traveling with her, helping her spend her money.

Sent off to school at the age of six, Josh had never known a family environment or honest love. Amanda’s tender concern for him over the cactus so many years earlier had surprised him. He wasn’t accustomed to people caring about him more than his money.

Amanda stayed near him at the worst times of his life. When he’d broken his leg on a skiing trip, it had been Amanda who’d come to see him in the hospital with potted plants and sympathy. She’d fussed over him when he was sick, teased him when he was well, become an integral part of his life. But in all that time he’d never touched her. Not even under the mistletoe at Christmas.

Everything had changed a few hours earlier on the beach. Now he didn’t recall her nurturing ways. He wanted her, but he didn’t know how to reconcile that with his affection for her, with their friendship.