McGillivray's Mistress - By Anne McAllister Page 0,5

you’ve kept a clean sheet.”

“We’ll see about that,” Lachlan muttered.

He hadn’t had time then. But when he came back this past winter, sailing over on the boat he’d bought in Nassau, making plans to move to the island permanently that spring, he’d taken another shot.

Hugh had been going out with a model he’d met who was doing a honeymoon photo shoot, so Lachlan had suggested a double date—a blind double date.

“Why not?” He’d made the suggestion casually. “Just ask Fiona Whatshername along.”

Hugh had raised his eyebrows. “She’s busy with her dad.”

“I’ll get someone to stay with her dad,” Lachlan had said. “It will be good for her.” He arranged for Maurice to go by and play dominos with Tom Dunbar and Hugh did the asking.

To say that Fiona had been surprised when Lachlan had been the one to pick her up would have been putting it mildly. She looked stricken when he turned up on the doorstep. Then she said, relieved, “Oh, you must have come to see my dad—”

“No. I’m here for you.”

“But—”

She looked like she might protest. But in the end, she’d let herself be drawn out on to the porch and down the steps. “We’re meeting Hugh and his girl at Beaches.”

“Beaches?” Fiona’s eyes widened.

Beaches was the nicest place on the island. Not a place Hugh could afford.

“I’ll pay,” Lachlan had told him. “You want to impress this girl, don’t you?”

“Yeah. But…” Hugh had shaken his head. “Do you want to impress Fiona Dunbar?”

Lachlan hadn’t known what he wanted to do with Fiona Dunbar. Then. Later that night he’d known exactly what he wanted—

He hadn’t got it.

She’d damned near drowned him instead.

These days he wasn’t touching Fiona Dunbar with a ten-foot pole!

Other than the sympathy note he’d sent when Hugh had told him of her father’s death in March, he’d had no communication with her at all. In fact, ever since he’d moved into the Moonstone a month ago, he’d done his best to avoid her.

Of course he still noticed her. Hard not to when the island wasn’t that big and she was still the most gorgeous woman around. But he didn’t have to have anything to do with her. Pelican Cay was big enough for both of them.

Try telling Fiona Dunbar that.

Less than a week after he’d opened the Moonstone, a letter to the editor had appeared in the local paper decrying the “standard branding” of the island. Fiona Dunbar, signing herself “a concerned citizen” made it sound like he was singlehandedly trying to undermine local culture.

For God’s sake, he was trying to salvage an abandoned architectural treasure and turn it into something tasteful and profitable before time and the weather reduced it to kindling—out of which the artistic Ms. Dunbar would doubtless construct one of her bloody sculptures!

Tactfully as possible, he had attempted a letter to the editor of his own in reply.

A week later there had been another letter, this time about the local youth soccer team.

“People who are going to take advantage of local amenities,” the perennially concerned Ms. Dunbar had written, “should be willing to contribute their skills—however meager—to the betterment of the island’s children.”

Him, she meant. Teach them soccer, she meant.

“Well, it is how you made your millions,” Hugh pointed out.

“It would be such a great thing for the kids,” Carin Campbell agreed.

So did Maurice and Estelle. Their grandsons would love a soccer team with a real coach for a change.

“Or don’t you think you can?” Molly had said in that baiting little-sisterly way she could still dredge up in a pinch.

Of course he damned well could.

And so he had. For the past month Lachlan had spent hours with a rag-tag bunch of ten- to fifteen-year-old kids who called themselves the Pelicans. The Pelicans were never going to win the World Cup, but they were a lot more capable now than they had been when he’d started working with them. Marcus Cash was turning into a pretty decent striker, Tom Dunbar, Fiona’s nephew, was a good defender, and Maurice’s grandson, Lorenzo, had the makings of a born goalkeeper.

Lachlan was proud of them. He was proud of himself as their coach. He was a damned good teacher, and he’d have liked Fiona the ferret to see that—but she’d never once come to watch them play.

She never said a word to him.

She didn’t have to. Her sculpture said it all.

Lachlan shoved himself up from his chair and stalked across the room to glare once again at her message.

And as the full morning sun