man to embarrass her like that, to ruin her pleasant mood... She’d buy a towel, a big beach towel, at her earliest opportunity, that was for sure.
She dragged up a heavy lounge chair and dropped her towel and hotel key on it, leaving the chair under one of the palm-tiled roof shelters that were scattered around the hotel’s private beach.
She dragged the green patterned caftan over her head and tossed it on top of the heap, leaving only the low-cut white swimsuit on her softly tanned body. It was a good figure, even if a bit thin. Her breasts were high and firm, if small; her waist flared out into full, rounded hips; and her legs were long, shapely and tanned.
She walked carefully in the thick sand past the other sunbathers to the water’s edge, wary of those dangerous pull tabs from canned soft drinks. There were infrequent ones underfoot, despite the valiant efforts of hotel employees who raked the sand constantly to keep it clean.
The water was surprisingly warm, smooth and silky against the skin, like those constant breezes near the water that made the sultry heat bearable. Nikki had learned that an hour of walking up and down the streets called for something cold and wet pretty fast. She was constantly scouring the malls and arcades for tall, glass-chunked containers of yellow goombay punch. And she found that she needed to spend an hour at midday lying down in her hotel room with the air conditioner on full. That was something else Nassau boasted—air conditioners at every window. Apparently everyone was vulnerable to the summer heat, not just tourists who were unaccustomed to the subtropical environment.
She moved out into the glorious aqua water with smooth, sure strokes, savoring the sound of it, the sight of tall casuarina pines across the bay, the huge passenger ships docked nearby. The salt stung her eyes with a vengeance and nagged at a cut on one finger, but it was all so gloriously new and the pace of life was so much slower, that she felt like a small child at a state fair. It seemed odd for her to choose a watery place to relax, after the tragedy that had forced her to take a leave of absence from the paper. But then, the Caribbean wasn’t a river, after all, and the whole environment was so different that she didn’t think about anything except the present and the pleasure of new experiences.
Her hair was soaked when her strength gave out, and she dragged herself out of the water and back to the yellow plastic-covered lounger to collapse contentedly onto it. She eased up her hips long enough to move the towel, room key and caftan from under her before she stretched back and closed her eyes.
The peace was something she’d never experienced before. Her life at home was full, and hectic most of the time. But this was incredible. To be totally alone in a foreign place, where she neither knew nor was known by anyone. To have dared the trip by herself, to spend two weeks away from her familiar environment and depend only on herself—she knew already that the experience would last her a lifetime.
All her life Nikki had been told what to do. By her parents until their untimely deaths, then by her aunt and uncle. Even by Leda until her marriage.
Nikki sighed. Leda had been her best friend, and she’d wanted Leda to like Ralley Hall. It had been so important that the two people she loved most would get along. And, of course, they had. A month before Nikki and Ralley were to be married, he and Leda had eloped. They’d been married a year and were planning to move back to Ashton when the flood went tearing through the small house they’d bought...
She was suddenly aware of eyes watching her and she opened her own, turning her head lazily on the chair to find the unpleasant stranger from the elevator standing just at the edge of the sidewalk near the swimming pool, looking out over the bay. He was still wearing his suit trousers, but he’d exchanged his expensive shoes for sandals, and doffed his jacket and tie. He looked relaxed, urbane and more than a little intimidating to Nikki, whose experience hadn’t included high-powered businessmen. She was used to politicians and city officials, because that was her beat on the paper’s staff. But she knew the trappings of high finance, and this man had