Falling for the Rebel Heir

And she was trespassing on his land and, by the looks of the place, had been for some time.

Kendall yanked her towel to cover her bare legs in a movement that was pure instinct as her scream echoed around the lofty room, bouncing off the glass and back again before sighing to an embarrassing memory.

Unfortunately it hadn’t sent the intruder running for his life. He simply continued staring back at her. Tall, swarthy, fully dressed and all male.

As his eyes glanced from one end of her body to the other, she realised that clutching her towel like some maiden wasn’t going to help at all. She turned her left side away from him and swirled the towel around her body. Naturally it fought against her, wanting to ebb when she wanted it to flow, but eventually she managed to cover the bits that needed covering.

She then took a deep shaky breath before calmly informing the man to, ‘Get the hell out of here and right now, or I’ll scream again, this time so loud the whole town will come running.’

His dark eyes lifted to hers. Connected across fifteen metres of cool dark water. Every inch of skin his gaze touched vibrated as though he’d made actual physical contact. She decided it was a side effect of the shock of being half naked before a complete stranger. Nothing more.

‘Don’t scream again, please,’ he said, his mouth kicking into a pleasant kind of smile. He didn’t raise his voice, but he didn’t need to. The deep rumble carried easily across the wide space. ‘One perforated eardrum is quite enough excitement for one day.’

‘So leave, now, and you can save the other one.’ She spat a clump of wet hair from her mouth. ‘If you’re lost I can point you the way back to the main road or through the pine forest back into town.’ She glanced over her shoulder in that direction and when she looked back she could have sworn he’d moved closer.

‘I’m not lost,’ he said.

‘Well, you’re sure not where you’re meant to be. Everything within one hundred metres in each direction of this place is part of a private estate.’

He simply smiled some more, making her wonder if he knew that already. Everybody in Saffron knew. Claudel was owned by the descendants of Lady Fay Bennington, who hadn’t bothered with upkeep on the beautiful place since Fay had died a decade earlier. But everybody in Saffron also knew everybody else from Saffron, and she’d never seen this guy before. He was the kind of man one wouldn’t easily forget.

Tall and broad, with the kind of physique that could block out the sun. And dark. Dark clothes. Dark eyes. Dark curling hair in need of a cut. Dark stubble on his face that had gone past a shadow but had not quite been tamed into anything resembling a civilised beard. She would have thought him homeless in his battered coat, tattered jeans and scuffed boots but there was something in his bearing that made that seem a non sequitur. A kind of shoulders back, elegant stance, glint in the eye thing he had going on that negated every other potent signal bombarding her senses.

She tugged her towel tighter.

He sunk his hands into the pockets of an unseasonably heavy brown coat and definitely moved closer. ‘I’m thinking you’re the one who ought not to be in here, Miss…’

‘My name is none of your damn business, buddy.’

She’d taken self-defence classes since she’d come to town and moved in with Taffy. Two single girls living together, she’d figured better safe than sorry. So she knew it was better to run than to try to make an assailant see reason.

She dropped the towel in order to grab her clothes and then realised she was naked bar a sliver of Lycra covering not all that much skin. So she grabbed the towel again, then used it as a makeshift screen as she hurriedly pulled her long red sundress on over her swimsuit.

It wasn’t until her head popped through the neck hole and the dress dragged and twisted uncomfortably against her wet bathing suit that she realised it was inside out and back to front. Too bad. Too late. He was getting nearer.

She grabbed her wet hair and tossed it over her back and it instantly soaked right through to her skin, making her feel clammy as well as anxious and embarrassed and just a little bit intimidated.

‘Now, don’t come any closer,’ she insisted, grabbing her Doc Marten boots and holding them in front of her as if they were some kind of lethal weapon.

For whatever reason that seemed to work. The guy stopped. He held out his hands in front of him. Long-fingered hands. Clean hands. The hands of a gentleman, not a drifter.

‘There’s no need for any of that,’ he said. ‘Before you do anything foolish like knock me out with a flying shoe, you should know something.’

She wondered if perhaps he couldn’t swim and was worried about falling unconscious into the pool. She didn’t want him to come any closer, she didn’t want him to tell on her, but she also didn’t want to kill the guy. He was far too good-looking to die.

Feeling ridiculous for even thinking such a thing, she lifted her boots an inch higher. ‘And what’s that?’

‘This,’ he said, waving his arm to his left and taking another couple of slow steps her way, ‘is all mine.’

Her shoes dropped an inch. ‘Yours?’

He nodded. And came nearer. He was close enough now for her to notice a thin scar slicing through his stubble from the edge of his nose to his top lip. She knew about scars and the fact that it was still pink meant it was fairly recent.

Apart from that one flaw, it turned out he had a lovely straight nose and a strong jaw, like one of the statues to be found hidden beneath the dense foliage in Claudel’s grounds. Up close his dark hair curled with a delectable just-out-of-bed look. Like some sort of modern day Lord Byron.

But all that was swept aside when she glanced back into his eyes. They were hazel. Deep, dark, enigmatic hazel clashing against the whitest of whites she’d ever seen, framed by long dark lashes. And all that’s best of dark and bright meet in his aspect and his eyes, she thought.

The guy was in need of a shave and haircut and a shopping expedition, but he was utterly gorgeous. So gorgeous she realised she had spent the past twenty seconds staring, and paraphrasing Byron, as if she hadn’t seen a man this beautiful before. Up close. In the flesh.

A low, lazy hum of awareness settled in her belly.

No, she thought, feeling more panicky at that thought than any other so far, not now. Not like this. I’m not ready. Her mind shook back and forth vehemently, which her head would have done if she hadn’t wanted to keep both eyes on every move of Mr Tall, Dark and Dangerous-To-Her-Equilibrium.

She blinked and thought back to what they had been arguing about. Had he really just suggested…? She raised her shoes to a battle ready position again. ‘What do you mean it’s all yours?’

His enigmatic eyes narrowed slightly and she bit her lip, hoping he had no clue of the thoughts streaming unchecked through her obviously chlorine-addled head.

‘My name is Hudson Bennington III. Everyone just calls me Hud,’ he said, holding out his right hand and continuing to close in on her. ‘My Aunt Fay once lived here. I summered here as a child. And she left it all to me when she died. Ask in town if you don’t believe me. I’m certain there will be those who remember.’

She stared at his outstretched hand, then into his eyes, but she found them far too unsettling so she ignored both and bent to quickly pull her heavy boots on instead, the sudden movement jarring at the rigid muscles in her bad leg. She winced and straightened. She didn’t dare waste further time lacing them up.

‘Well then, I’d better head back to town right now and double-check,’ she said. ‘A girl can’t be too careful.’

She grabbed her towel and moved around the other side of the pool, away from Hudson Bennington III and his dark eyes, and bedroom hair, and rugged elegance, and gentleman’s hands, and disturbing Byronesque handsomeness, towards the exit.

If this guy was who he said he was, if he was back to claim the land as his own, her daily swims would be no more. No more revelling in the bliss of floating, of feeling unencumbered, light and vigorous. And if she’d felt panic earlier, it was nothing compared with the all-encompassing dread that filled her at that thought.

‘You don’t have to run off just yet,’ he said, his deep voice calling after her.

But Kendall spilled out into the bright light and walked as fast as her shaking legs would carry her.

She ducked into the pine forest and looked over her shoulder just the once to find Hud standing outside the pool house looking for her, hands on hips, eyes straining. But she knew this part of the world too well and by now she would be no more than one of a thousand shadows between the trunks.

As she picked up her pace, her persistent limp became more pronounced with each step back to town.

Hud ran a hand over his face and stared into the tree line. He had been hot on her heels as she’d left the pool house and then suddenly…she was gone.

A woman who lived locally. A woman with a mouth and an attitude pluckier than he would have expected in a mermaid if he’d ever given it any thought. A woman who up close had skin like porcelain, eyes the colour of the sky before a storm and hair the colour of red wine.

And a woman who, for the too few minutes she’d been near him, had put out of his mind every single thing he’d come back to Claudel in order to forget.

Kendall hit the edge of the pine forest and stopped to check if anybody was out in the main street of Saffron. She didn’t want anyone to see her in an inside out, back to front dress, unlaced shoes and sopping wet hair.

It had taken almost all of the three years she’d lived in Saffron for the locals to look past the limp and get over whispering behind their hands about how it had happened. The car accident. A young man’s death. Her missing months afterwards. Now she had become the steady, dependable, sensible fact checker for the local newspaper. And she was determined to keep it that way.

When she spotted a break in the dawdling morning traffic she looked right, then left, then right again, before darting across Peach Street, through the garden gate and into the two-storey cottage she shared with Taffy.

The noise she made kicking off her shoes and throwing her wet towel over the back of a chair in the hall was enough for Taffy to look up from her spot at the kitchen table. Her Sunday newspaper dropped in a show of slow motion dawning, her eyes grew wide as saucers and she coughed on her honey-covered English muffin. ‘What on earth happened to you?’