The Morning After

An hour after that she found herself standing in the shimmering heat of her third airport of the day, where a beautiful young woman with perfect brown skin and a gentle smile was trying to usher her towards a waiting helicopter!

‘But where am I supposed to be going to?’ she demanded irritably, growing tired of all this cloak-and-dagger stuff.

‘To one of our beautiful smaller islands, privately leased from our government by your host,’ the young woman informed her smoothly, and strode off in the wake of Annie’s luggage, which was being carried by an airport lackey.

‘Host,’ she muttered tetchily. Did anyone know the actual name of the great Adamas? Or did his desire for privacy mean that even his name was a carefully guarded secret?

Her luggage had been stowed by the time she reached the helicopter, its lethal blades already rotating impatiently. She was instructed to duck her head a little as she ran beneath them, then was helped to clamber in beside the pilot.

With a smile and a gesture of farewell the young woman closed the door, and the sudden change from deafening noise to near silence was a shock. Annie straightened in her seat, smoothed down the soft folds of her skirt, blinked a couple of times in an effort to clear her bewildered head, then turned to look at the pilot.

And almost fainted in surprise.

Long black hair, tied back at the tanned nape by a thin black strip of ribbon, lean dark face with green eyes smiling sardonically at her.

It was her rescuer from the night before.

And the man she had let seduce her all night long in her dreams.

‘You!’ she gasped, feeling an upsurge of guilty heat burn her insides when her eyes automatically dropped to his shockingly familiar mouth.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Lacey,’ he drawled, enjoying the reaction he was having on her.

‘But—what are you doing here?’

‘Why, I live here,’ he smoothly replied, and touched something that sent a burst of power into the engines. ‘Please fasten yourself in; we are about to take off.’

‘But…’ She couldn’t move for the shock of it. ‘You’re a helicopter pilot?’ she choked out eventually.

‘Among other things.’ He smiled, humour leaping to that magnetically attractive mouth at what, Annie realised almost as soon as she’d said it, was about the most stupid thing she had ever said. ‘Your belt,’ he prompted. ‘We will talk later.’

Then he was flicking the headset he had resting around his neck up over his ears and dismissing her as he turned his attention to the task in hand, leaving her to fumble numbly with her belt while he spoke smoothly to air-traffic control. Then, without warning, they were up in the air.

Annie gasped at the unexpectedness of it, staring with wide eyes as the ground simply dropped away beneath them. Her heart leapt into her mouth, her lungs refused to function, and, of course, the slight numbing effect of jet lag was not helping her discern what the heck was going on here.

They paused, hovering like a hawk about to swoop, then shot forwards in a way that threw her back into her seat. He glanced at her sharply, then away again, a small smile playing about his lips which seemed to err more towards satisfaction than anything else.

Then suddenly she was covering her eyes as they seemed to shoot directly towards the bright orange ball of sun hanging low in the sky.

Something dropped on her lap. Peering down, she saw a pair of gold-rimmed sunglasses and gratefully pushed them on. Able to see again without suffering for it, she turned to look curiously at him.

He too had donned a pair of sunglasses; gold-rimmed like her own pair, they sat neatly across the bridge of his long, thin nose, seeming to add a certain pizzazz to an already rivetingly attractive face.

Last time she’d seen him he had been standing at her front door wearing a severely conventional black dinner suit and bow-tie. He had seemed alarmingly daunting to her fanciful mind then.

Now those same sparks of alarm came back to worry her, darting across her skin, because here in this contraption, with the full blast of the Caribbean sun shining on his face, he had taken on a far more dangerously appealing appearance. His skin looked richer, his features more keenly etched. The thin cream shirt he was wearing was tucked into the pleated waist of a pair of wheat-coloured linen slacks, offering a more casual view of him that made her want to back off even while she was drawn towards it.

‘Why are you here?’ she asked as her nerves began to steady. ‘Or—’ she then clarified that ‘—why am I here with you?’

‘You do not know?’ He flicked her a glance before returning his attention to what he was doing, but the look had been enough to make her stupid mind click into action, and she sat there staring at him in utter disbelief.

‘You—are Adamas?’ she gasped.

He didn’t answer—didn’t need to. It was written in that small smile that touched briefly at the corner of his mouth. ‘We are going to my island,’ he informed her smoothly instead. ‘It sits just beyond the main string of islands, lapped by the Caribbean on one side and the Atlantic on the other…’

Annie was barely listening; she was still staring un-blinkingly at him, trying to fit her impression of what the Adamas man should look like to the one he actually was!

An eccentric recluse? This—Adonis of a man with more muscle than fat and an air about him that still made her think more of the Spanish Inquisition than an artistic genius. Blinking, she found herself staring at his hands—long hands, strong hands with the signs of manual labour scored into the supple palms, long fingers, blunt-ended, with neatly shorn nails. The hands of a man who worked fine metal into those intricate designs that she had been privileged to glimpse once around the neck of a very wealthy woman?

‘I don’t believe it,’ she muttered, more to herself than to him.

But he shrugged carelessly, as if her opinion did not bother him. ‘I am what I am, Miss Lacey,’ he drawled indifferently. Then almost too casually he went on, ‘As you are what you undoubtedly are.’

An insult—Annie didn’t even try to mistake it for anything but what it was. But before she could challenge him about it again they veered sharply to one side, sending her heart leaping into her mouth again when she found herself staring sideways out of the helicopter onto a half-moon stretch of glistening silver sand.

‘My home,’ he announced. ‘Or one of them,’ he then added coolly. ‘The island is a quarter of a mile wide and half a mile long. It has a shape like a hooked nose which is where it gets its name—Hook-nose Island. My villa sits in the hook—see?’

Dipping the helicopter, he swooped down towards the island, bringing the two-storey white plantation-style house swinging dizzyingly up towards them. Then, before she had time to catch her breath at that little bit of showmanship, he levelled the helicopter off and hovered so that she could focus on the palm-tree-lined lawns that swept down from the house to the silver beach she had seen first.