Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,66

robbed. The only thing stopping that thing falling apart is rust and dirt.’

There was an amused glint in his dark eyes as they swept the length of her dishevelled figure. ‘You’re no oil painting yourself, cara.’

Erin’s lips tightened as the dull colour ran up under her fair skin. It was always ego-enhancing to have an incrediblelooking man tell you that you looked a wreck.

His narrowed gaze lingered on her flushed face. ‘And that,’ he said, casually flicking her nose with his forefinger, ‘is going to peel.’

Erin started and pressed her hand to her face. Even if his olive-toned skin had been exposed to the sun it wasn’t going to burn, just acquire a deeper glow.

‘I hadn’t planned on getting lost.’ The antagonism died from her flushed face as her dreamily speculative glance drifted to the vee of exposed flesh at the base of his throat.

Was the skin on the rest of his body a similar warm shade? Erin blinked and released a horrified gasp as she realised she had been mentally undressing the man!

Not even sunstroke could excuse that!

‘And I hadn’t planned on running into you, but life,’ he reflected with a sardonic inflection in his deep voice, ‘is full of surprises. Some more pleasing than others.’

He didn’t specify which category she came into, but Erin could only assume that he had other things he’d prefer to be doing rather than offering assistance to an ungrateful tourist with a red nose.

He walked across to the truck and opened the passenger door. ‘Are you getting in?’

Erin’s glance slid from the door to his face. She released a sigh and nodded her head. ‘I suppose I don’t have much choice.’

‘There’s always a choice.’

Which was exactly what the rational voice in her head, which she had been studiously ignoring, had been telling her. It had also told her that relying on instinct when it came to assessing a man’s character was not exactly scientific.

But short of demanding a character reference gut instinct was all she had to go on and she needed to get back to her hotel somehow.

Approaching the truck, she frowned. The cab seemed to be feet off the ground and there were no steps. ‘How am I meant to get up there?’

‘Like this,’ he said, placing both hands around her waist and swinging her off the ground.

Erin let out a startled squeal as she found herself unceremoniously dumped in the passenger seat. She sat there trying to recover her badly dented composure while he picked up her bike and slung it in the open rear of the truck before walking around to the driver’s side and climbing in beside her.

‘You could have been more careful. The people I hired the bike from are going to charge me if—’ She stopped gave a horrified wail and yelled, ‘Wait! My camera!’

It was only his restraining hand on her shoulder that stopped her leaping out again.

‘Be still.’

Despite her distress at the thought of the camera she could not easily afford to replace being ruined, Erin responded to the calm air of command in his voice and leaned back in her seat.

‘Now tell me what is wrong.’

‘My camera is in the pannier on the bike.’

‘Camera?’

She could tell from his expression that he thought she was making a lot of fuss over a few holiday snaps.

‘I’m a photographer and I—’

‘Stay there,’ he said, opening the door.

Erin stuck her head out of the open window and craned her neck while he climbed into the rear of the truck. A few moments later he returned with her precious camera in his hand. ‘Here,’ he said, passing it in to her through the open window before going around to the driver’s side.

Erin turned her head as he climbed in.

‘So you are a photographer?’ He didn’t sound impressed.

She nodded. ‘Nothing grand,’ she said, in case he got the wrong idea. ‘I do weddings, christenings, family portraits, that sort of thing … bread-and-butter stuff.’

‘So you are not one of that breed who chase celebrities?’

‘God, no, nothing like that. I did think once I might like to do more …’ She heard the wistful enthusiasm in her voice and stopped. ‘Family circumstances keep me close to home.’

‘You have a dependent family?’

‘Not the way you mean,’ she said, thinking that, even had she wanted to, it would have been hard to explain the set-up at home.

Erin had been in her teens before she had realised that other people’s fathers did not regularly leave home. She believed the generic term for men like