tell him he was a chicken, to make her ghastly gobbling sounds when he’d said he wasn’t going to show up in the morning. He’d looked forward to arguing with her.
And she hadn’t minded at all.
Minded, hell? She’d sounded pleased!
He scuffed at the bare boards underfoot, annoyed, and worse, annoyed that he was annoyed, when he knew he should be pleased.
He didn’t want to pose nude, did he?
No, he definitely didn’t want to do that.
If he was going to be naked and there was a woman in the room—particularly if she was Fiona Dunbar—then he wanted her to be naked, too.
He’d spent a lot of time recently thinking about being naked with Fiona Dunbar. Even here and now, fourteen hours after that early-morning fiasco, his body could still grow taut with desire at the thought of the two of them naked together.
“So stop thinking about it,” he told himself.
It was, after all, what he’d intended to do by coming here. Out of sight, out of mind and all that.
But before he could forget her, he’d had to call and tell her he wasn’t going to show up in the morning. He didn’t want her thinking he’d stood her up for no reason.
He had a good reason. He was a responsible businessman with responsibilities and obligations and, apparently, a sense of prescience—because when he’d arrived at the Sandpiper this afternoon it was to have Sybil, his go-to girl come running up to tell him that Dooley the contractor had just quit.
The “emergency” he’d manufactured for Suzette’s benefit had come to pass. And he had a ton of things to do as a result—dealings with electricians and plumbers and a temperamental woodworker, not to mention the roof that had caused Dooley to throw up his hands and quit—which would make it easy to forget Fiona Dunbar. And he fully intended to take his time doing them.
He’d get the Sandpiper on track again and head back to Pelican Cay only when he was damned good and ready.
But he wanted to know why the hell she was glad he wasn’t coming tomorrow morning first!
IT DIDN’T MATTER that Lachlan wasn’t here, Fiona thought. It didn’t slow things down at all. At least that was what she tried telling herself in the morning when she worked on the terra-cotta sculpture.
But it wasn’t the same working by herself. She didn’t have that immediate point of reference for one thing. She couldn’t simply look up and study what she was working on.
Besides that, there was a sense of vitality that was missing when her model wasn’t here. There was always an energy wherever Lachlan was. Even when he wasn’t moving, you could sense it, you could feel it.
She tried to capture it in her work, tried to imbue the clay with the tension that emanated from the man. Her hands shaped and formed, molded and stroked.
Made her want. Made her ache.
She’d hoped the experience would be therapeutic or at the very least a learning experience.
She supposed it was. She learned that she wasn’t going to get Lachlan out of her system that easily.
Finally she gave up and went to work at the bakery. Tony winked at her and gave her a commiserating grin. “He’ll be back soon.”
There was no use pretending she didn’t know who he was talking about.
“Next time maybe he’ll take you with him,” Tony suggested.
Which was the same thing Miss Saffron said when Fiona was passing her house on her way from the bakery to Carin’s. And the same thing Elaine, who was working at Carin’s that afternoon, said when Fiona stopped in there.
She finally took refuge from all this commiseration by going to the cricket field, where she set up the driftwood spars, anchored them securely, then climbed to the top of The King of the Beach. No one was going to offer solace to her up there.
But even there she couldn’t get away from him—because while she worked she looked out over the cricket field which was usually no more than the pasture for a couple of local goats and horses. But this summer it had become a soccer pitch.
For the past two months it had been mowed and tended by a group of island boys. Goals had been put up at either end, and the island kids played soccer games and practiced soccer drills diligently and determinedly every afternoon because their coach told them to.
Their coach—Lachlan.
“He’s a great coach,” her nephew Tom, Mike’s oldest boy, had said just last week. His eyes