him.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Next time then.”
“We’ll see.” She hugged Sparks tighter as Lachlan leaned back against the counter and made no move to leave. “Why are you doing this?” she asked him at last. “The ‘affair’ business was dying down. It was over! And now here you are again.”
“Maybe I’m hoping.”
“Well, stop hoping!”
He shook his head slowly. “No.”
Over the next week he turned up relentlessly. He stopped in at Carin’s shop when she was working. He ate at the bakery when she was waiting tables. He followed along when she was out at low tide looking for material for The King of the Beach.
Fiona did her best to remain polite but distant.
She sold him trinkets at Carin’s. She poured his coffee at the bakery and declined the offer to share his key lime pie. She said somewhat testily that if he was going to follow her while she was scavenging he could make himself useful and carry things for her.
“Sure,” he said and held out his arms.
So she loaded him down with whatever she found and worked intently in an effort not to notice him.
With water-torture-like patience Lachlan persisted.
“Don’t you have work to do?” Fiona demanded.
Lachlan nodded. “I’m doing what it takes to succeed,” he told her gravely and kept right on turning up in her life.
To succeed? At what?
The answer was obvious. He wanted her in his bed.
And every day Fiona hoped desperately that she would get word from one of the schools she’d applied to. She didn’t know how much longer she could resist.
A LESSER MAN would have thrown in the towel.
A week went by, then two, then three. He stopped by her house, invited her along to games or to dinner, made it a point to stop and watch every day as she worked on her beloved King of the Beach. He even made himself useful lugging stuff she found that washed up on the tide.
And while she never gave him any obvious encouragement, every now and then Lachlan felt a ray of hope.
He’d give her credit for stubbornness. She was doing her best to ignore him. But that was just the point. If she’d treated him with the casual ease she treated all the other guys on the island—even Lord Bloody Grantham before he’d gone back to England, thank God, last week—Lachlan might have worried.
But she didn’t.
She got a little rigid and flustered whenever he came around. And he’d seen her watching him on the beach, at the bar, playing soccer—after his needling, she had actually come to a game or two—when she thought he didn’t notice.
He noticed.
Lachlan had spent his life noticing tiny things that tipped him off to how the other team was going to play the ball. Over the years he’d honed his instincts well. Now he dared to hope she wasn’t quite as indifferent as she pretended to be.
But at the rate she was going, they’d be old and gray before he ever even managed to kiss her again!
Sometimes even the goalkeeper had to go on offense. Sometimes a guy had to make things happen, had to take a risk.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I SAW SOMETHING up at Eden Cove the other day that you might want to use for your sculpture.”
Fiona looked down from astride the driftwood spar torso of The King of the Beach to see Lachlan squinting up at her.
“Eden Cove?” Fiona echoed cautiously. She was attaching a black plastic lid eye patch that had floated in on last night’s tide. She wanted to concentrate on it. But Eden Cove was the most beautiful place she knew. A tiny perfect cove on the seaward side of nearby uninhabited Isla Seca, accessible only by boat, it was often the setting for tropical paradise photo shoots.
Deserted, it was a place for lovers.
Fiona had never been there with a lover. But she’d had her share of dreams and fantasies, many of them featuring Lachlan McGillivray and herself.
“I don’t think so,” she said after a moment’s reflection.
“Your loss.” Lachlan shrugged. He reached out and patted one of the sculpture’s driftwood legs. “Too bad, ol’ buddy.” He turned and began to walk away.
“What sort of something,” Fiona called after him before she could stop herself.
He turned back and shaded his eyes with his hand as he looked up again. “Fishing net.”
Fiona couldn’t stop her eyes growing round and eager. A fishing net would be a perfect addition, the finishing touch bringing it all together. There was so much she could do with a fishing net.
She’d been tempted more than