The Devil and the Deep - By Amy Andrews Page 0,29

at night? The Stella who hated carrots and could almost hold her breath as long as he could?

The one who had been devastated when her parents had divorced and had made him promise that whatever happened in their lives they would always be friends.

Of course that Stella had been ten years old.

Just the way he liked her.

Because otherwise he had to think of her as a very different Stella.

A grown-up Stella. Who got engaged.

Who had sex.

Who was twenty-seven and not the virgin her father had hoped she would be for ever.

Not if Pleasure Hunt was anything to go by anyway.

God, she probably didn’t even hate carrots any more.

Rick threw the covers off. This was ridiculous. And not helping his situation down below.

He cut straight to the crux of the issue, or one aspect of it anyway.

She was not Lady Mary.

He let it reverberate around his head for good measure. Lady Mary was a character she’d made up. In that vivid, hot, lustrous, dirty—God, so dirty—imagination of hers.

Just because Vasco was him, didn’t mean that Lady Mary was her.

It didn’t mean she’d been fantasising about him sexually. Or that she’d put herself into a character whose lust for his character bordered on pornographic obsession.

That was just plain crazy.

There was nothing remotely similar about Lady Mary and Stella—nothing.

So he needed to get over himself.

He needed to go and take a shower—a cold one—and get the bloody boat moving.

* * *

He was on deck twenty minutes later. And he was in big, big trouble. Suddenly the filter that had always been in place where she was concerned had been stripped away. Those teenage dreams he’d had about her and refused to let himself dwell upon were front and centre.

She was in teeny tiny denim shorts with a frayed edge and a shirt that barely met in the middle. A straw cowboy-style hat, the edges curled up, sat low over her eyes and held her tucked-up hair in place save for a few haphazard wisps that had escaped and brushed her nape.

The girl he always saw, the one he’d trained himself to see, ever since Nathan had sprung them about to kiss, was gone for ever.

Now he saw the ripe bulge of her breasts as the bra he could clearly see through the thin fabric of her shirt pushed and lifted in all the right ways. The wink of her belly button taunting him from the strip of bare skin at her midriff. The killer curve where her hip flared from the tiny line of her waist.

He’d never noticed how curvy she was before. Not consciously anyway. Consciously he’d always thought of her as short and cute.

Like an elf or maybe a munchkin.

But there was nothing cute about those curves—they should come with a yellow warning sign.

And he was stuck on board with them for the next few weeks.

‘Well, about time,’ Stella said as she caught Rick’s advance in her peripheral vision. ‘Another gorgeous day for sailing.’

Rick smiled, his gaze drawn to her mouth. The mouth that was nowhere near as innocent as he’d always thought. A mouth he tried and failed not to think about on his body the way Lady Mary’s had been on Vasco’s.

Stella popped the lid on a bottle of sunscreen and squirted some into her palm. ‘If you get us under way,’ she said, slapping it on her chest, ‘I’ll cook some bacon and eggs.’

Rick swallowed as Stella distributed the white liquid to her shoulders and upper arms and across the swell of her cleavage, dipping her fingers beneath the fabric a little.

Do not look at her breasts. Do not look at her breasts.

Too late.

He looked at her breasts.

‘Sure,’ he said distractedly as her hands continued to massage the crème until her cleavage glistened in the sun.

Stella frowned at him as he stood there looking at her. Was he...was he perving at her chest? There were times when they’d been younger, pre her sweet-sixteen debacle, when she’d caught him looking at her, when their gazes had locked and he’d smile at her with wolfish appreciation, but that had been a long time ago.

‘Rick?’

Her voice brought him back from the fantasy of licking every inch of the crème off her. He blinked and quickly donned his sunglasses. ‘Yes, absolutely, getting under way.’ He saluted, turning from her gratefully, his hands trembling as if he were fifteen years old again and trying to undo Sharon Morgan’s bra.

He really needed to get a grip.

By the time the sun was high in the