She looked at her hand resting easily on his arm, with his hand lightly covering it. The offering of help she had furiously scorned at sixteen she had accepted the other day. And she wondered suddenly if anything would have been different had she accepted the first time.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
Michele sighed. “What else?”
“It’s never far away, is it?”
“It’s not something either of us can forget. Ian, you said you wouldn’t fight Jon. But have you? In the past, I mean?”
In a deliberate tone, Ian said, “I’ve never done anything against your father, your brother, or their company, Michele. I’ve never used an unfair business tactic to gain an advantage over them. Never.”
“I had to ask,” she said quietly.
“I know.” His hand tightened over hers. “Let’s make a bargain. No more talk about the feud, or our families for a while. We’re two people getting to know each other, and that’s all that matters now.”
“I’ll try.”
“Good enough,” he murmured.
—
They spent the entire day exploring the island. With all the caution of people walking a tightrope, they steered a careful course between the attraction they felt and the conflict of who they were. In getting to know each other, they discovered a surprising amount of common ground as well as a peculiar bond of understanding.
The latter, Michele thought, was certainly due to who they were. It was ironic, but the very threat to their relationship was also what enabled them to so quickly gain a sense of each other. They shared a unique background, a history linking their families for five centuries, and no matter how negative that link was, it was a powerful bond.
Michele was thinking of that as she unlocked her door that evening. She and Ian had eaten lunch and dinner away from the hotel, not returning until late, and she wondered what Jackie had made of their extended absence.
The worst, no doubt.
The connecting door was closed on Jackie’s side. Michele sighed but made no attempt to open it. Given her friend’s present state of mind, there was really very little for them to say to each other. She went to take a shower, emerging a few minutes later dressed for bed in a sleep shirt.
“Michele?” Jackie was standing in the doorway to her room, wearing short pajamas and looking as if she’d been crying. “Can—can we talk? I have some iced tea in here.”
Silently, Michele followed her friend into the other room, sitting down by the balcony doors and accepting a cold glass. “Did Jon call?” she asked.
“No.”
Conscious of a niggling worry, Michele frowned at her glass. It wasn’t that Jon called every single day, it was just that during his last few calls he’d been unusually silent about what was going on with the company—and the feud. He knew his sister had never approved of the “eye-for-an-eye” concept, and though he was quick to report some foul deed of the Stuarts, he was generally silent about what he and their father did in retaliation.
That was what had Michele concerned. Though Ian had denied any involvement in the troubles between their families, he had said nothing about his father, and Jon had seemed certain that a Stuart had been behind the company’s recent problems—though that was, of course, his inevitable reaction to difficulties with the business. She couldn’t help but feel uneasy about what might be happening in Atlanta, especially since she and Ian were trying to build a bridge instead of a fence.
“I’m sorry,” Jackie blurted as she sank down on the bed and drew her legs up. “Sorry for the things I said, the way I acted this morning.”
Michele was more than a little surprised. “That’s quite a change of heart,” she noted slowly. “Quite a sudden change of heart.”
Jackie looked miserable. “I’ve been thinking about it all day. I’m your friend, Michele. I should be on your side no matter what. Lord knows nobody else is going to be.”
“How can you be on my side? You hate Ian.”
“No matter how I feel about him, I know how hard this has to be on you. I could see it on your face the other night. And you were right, it’s your decision. It has to be. You aren’t a child or an idiot. If your feelings for Ian are strong enough to overcome the fact that he’s a Stuart, then—well, who am I to tell you it’s wrong?”
Michele nodded, still surprised. “I’m glad you’ve changed your mind.”
With a rather uncertain smile, Jackie said, “Hey, I know how tough a relationship can be with the normal number of strikes against it. You don’t need me pointing out the obvious.”
Michele sipped her tea, then said quietly, “You aren’t giving us a snowball’s chance in hell, are you?”
As quietly, Jackie said, “I can’t lie to you, friend. I can’t see a happy ending for this. We’re thousands of miles from home, and maybe you can see Ian differently here. But back in Atlanta, he’s a Stuart and you’re a Logan. In Atlanta you’re on opposite sides of a war. And sooner or later, you have to go back to your real world.”
“Maybe we can go back together.”
Jackie stared for a long moment, then leaned back on the bed. Her lips twitched in a sudden, rueful smile. “Well, if that happens, I want to watch. It ought to have about the same effect as Sherman’s march through Atlanta.”
—
In spite of her change of heart, Jackie turned down Ian’s occasional invitations during the next two days. She was civil enough when she found herself in his presence but took care to avoid him. Michele accepted Jackie’s limited support, then firmly closed her mind to all the problems that lay ahead. She also accepted Ian’s determination to avoid the temptations of being alone together, and though it cost her sleepless nights she was even grateful for his resolution.
They explored the island, swam in the hotel’s pool and walked on the beach—always with other people around. They shared meals and thoughts and opinions. They became familiar with each other’s expressions and moods. Their closeness grew, and with it an ever-heightening sense of where their relationship was leading.
She had realized only in her early twenties that she had been ridiculously overprotected when it came to men. Since she’d been something of a tomboy, it hadn’t disturbed her that her father had refused to allow her to date until her eighteenth birthday, or that her brother had found fault with every boy who’d expressed an interest in her. And she hadn’t protested the situation simply because she hadn’t been much interested in the dating scene.
It was only when she finished college and found a job that the reins had begun to feel uncomfortably tight. She continued to live at home because it was home, but also to avoid a fight with both her father and brother, and there definitely would have been a fight. Living under her father’s roof, Michele felt she owed him the respect of conducting herself according to his rules. Perhaps because he felt the lack of a strong feminine influence in his daughter’s life, Charles Logan had always been fierce about conventions—and his were decidedly old-fashioned.
The Logans were a family shaped by a Southern heritage, and Charles wasn’t the only father of such a family who still harbored visions of Southern belles and gentility despite the realities of life in the final quarter of the twentieth century. He would have been shocked and deeply mortified if Michele had chosen to live openly with a man outside marriage. Though his remarks on the subject had been clumsily delivered during her early adolescence, his meaning had been clear; nice girls were virgins on their wedding nights.
And Michele Logan was a nice girl.
—
“You’re very quiet.”
They had spread beach towels on the sand just outside the garden and in the shade, away from the path of traffic to and from the beach. There were other hotel guests on the beach, but they were some distance away—visible, but not intrusive.
Michele set her book aside and rolled over onto her stomach. She gazed toward the ocean rather than at Ian, wishing she had the nerve to dive into his arms and abandon everythin
g else. Her doubts were growing rather than disappearing. She felt a sense of desperation, a painful feeling that she was going to lose something infinitely precious if she didn’t act—and act quickly.
“Can I trust you?” she asked abruptly.
“I hope so.”
She sat up and looked at him. They were both wearing bathing suits; he also wore a light windbreaker, and she a sheer linen caftan over her two-piece suit.
“After these past few days…I just don’t know.” Michele shook her head. “Does trust come in a blinding flash? Am I supposed to wake up one morning and say, ‘Yes, today I trust Ian’? Or look at you and somehow know?”
“Michele—”
She felt tense, quivering on the edge of a chasm. “It isn’t going to happen, Ian. You can’t overcome twenty years in a week. That’s all we have left, a week. Not even that, because your client is due here day after tomorrow. And I go home in seven days.”
“What are you saying?” His voice was rough.
Michele struggled to find the words. “What happens when I go home? I’m no more certain of anything than I was the first day. I don’t know if I can trust you. I don’t even know if I trust myself to—to understand what I’m feeling. All I do know is that what we don’t find here, we won’t find in Atlanta.”
Ian took a deep breath, aware that they had reached some kind of turning point. Michele had weighed it all in her mind, he knew, had wrestled with it in silence even while she’d walked beside him and smiled up at him and talked of other things. She had struggled against a lifetime of conditioning and had ended up, now, certain of nothing except her uncertainties.
And it was an impasse; Ian didn’t know what he could do to win her trust. Frustration gnawed at him, because he wanted Michele to the point of madness and she was held tauntingly out of his reach by a feud neither of them wanted any part of. He had pushed himself to the screaming limits of restraint when he wanted nothing more than to lock both of them in his room and shut out the world, and the waiting had him tied in knots.
“Ian?” She was gazing at him and felt a flutter as if something caged deep inside her sought escape. She’d never seen him look like this, his lean, handsome face hardening, his eyes containing a glitter that was hot and bright with a promise she instinctively understood. For an instant she was conscious of panic, but then heat rushed in to overwhelm her doubts and fears.
He leaned toward her, and Michele found herself being eased back onto the blanket. She felt the hardness of his thigh against hers, the strength of his arm under her. His head lowered, his mouth brushing hers very lightly, and his breath was warm.
“Maybe we haven’t been looking in the right place,” he muttered huskily.
Michele gazed up into those vivid eyes, smothered by the pounding of her heart, his first touch sending a dam-burst of sensations flooding through her body. The strength of her own feelings made her hands shake as they lifted to touch his face. “Maybe we haven’t,” she agreed in a whisper.
Ian made a low, rough sound and buried his face between her breasts. She caught her breath raggedly, her fingers sliding into his thick hair as she felt his mouth moving on her. The sheer material of her caftan was a frail barrier, but even that was too much, and he impatiently sought the warm flesh beneath. The first three big buttons down the front of the garment yielded, and he nuzzled between the lapels to find the curves of her breasts.
Michele’s skimpy bathing suit was the final barrier, but Ian didn’t try to remove it. His mouth slid along the cup of her bra, his tongue darting out to taste her silky skin. He felt her shudder, felt her fingers tighten in his hair as a smothered moan escaped her, and that soft, uncontrolled sound sent a jolt of frantic need through him.
“Yes?” he demanded thickly against her.
She moaned again, and her voice was so low it was hardly more than a whisper. “Yes…yes.”
Ian raised his head and then kissed her deeply, molding his mouth to hers hungrily. Her response was instant, heated, her body arching against him wildly. He forced himself to remember where they were, and it was like fighting his way through a red-hot haze of necessity. Muttering a curse, he caught her hands and got to his feet, pulling her up.
“Ian?” Her voice was unsteady, bewildered.
“We’re going up to my room,” he said roughly. “Now.”
Michele didn’t protest. She couldn’t have. She held on to Ian’s hand like a lifeline, and even if her father and brother had been standing in the lobby, she wouldn’t have paused or even hesitated. The need inside her was so strong it was like something with a life of its own, filling her until it could hardly be contained, until the pressure of it was almost unbearable. Was unbearable.
She didn’t care what this cost her, what she lost because of it. Whatever price was demanded of her, she’d pay it.
In the elevator alone, Ian pulled her into his arms. “I’m not going to give you a chance to change your mind,” he murmured, staring down at her with blazing eyes.
The fierce jolt of pleasure when Michele was pressed against his hard body made her catch her breath and close her eyes. Her arms slid up around his neck, and she stood on tiptoe to fit herself more intimately against him. “I don’t want to change my mind,” she whispered, all her emotions and senses fixed on him and nothing else.
Ian made a rough sound and lifted her into his arms as the elevator doors opened. He carried her down the hallway to his room. The maid was just coming out, and he brushed past the startled woman with an impatient “Excuse us,” kicking the door shut behind them.
A nervous giggle died in Michele’s throat when he slowly lowered her to her feet beside the bed that lay in a bright spill of sunlight streaming in the balcony door. Her arms lowered, her hands trailing down between the edges of his partially unzipped windbreaker. His chest was hard, covered with a mat of thick golden hair that felt wonderfully sensual against her palms. She curled her fingers to probe the solid muscles beneath springy hair, aching to touch him all over. In the back of her mind was the vague thought that she really should tell him she’d never been with a man before, but the confession couldn’t escape the tightness of her throat. She wanted this, wanted him, and nothing else seemed to matter.
“Michele…” He surrounded her upturned face in his hands and kissed her, his mouth warm and hard. She shivered as she felt the gliding touch of his tongue teasing the sensitive inner flesh of her lips, and opened her mouth wider under his in a mute plea for a deeper caress. Instantly he responded, his mouth slanting across hers, his tongue stroking hungrily against hers.
Dizziness washed over Michele in a hot wave. Desperate to touch him, she pulled at the windbreaker, hardly feeling the steel teeth of the zipper bite into her hands as she jerked the edges apart. He shrugged out of the garment and tossed it aside, then got rid of her caftan by simply yanking it open and pushing it off her shoulders. Without even thinking about it, she stepped out of her sandals and the pool of material at her feet, kicking them aside.
Gasping as his lips left hers, Michele felt his hands on her, moving over her back, unfastening the flimsy string ties of her top. She bit back a moan as the scrap of material was pulled off her and her naked breasts rubbed against his chest as she pressed herself closer. The fire inside her was burning out of control, her need so urgent she had to clench her teeth to hold back the wild, primitive cries she could feel rising in her throat.
Ian held her hard against him, his mouth buried in the warm flesh of her throat. She was so alive in his arms, so utterly responsive that he had no more control than a teenager. He wanted her with a burning fever that was worse than hunger, worse than thirst. Groaning harshly, he slid one hand down until it clamped below the swell of her bottom, then lifted her against him so that his face was buried between her breasts.
He could feel her heart thudding wildly, feel the sting of her nails digging into his shoulders. He explored the valley between her breasts, then slid his mouth hotly over a swelling
curve and captured a tight nipple. She jerked, a whimpering sound escaping her as he sucked strongly.
Michele couldn’t believe what she was feeling. His mouth on her breast sent pleasure stabbing along her nerve endings, and deep in her belly an awful ache throbbed emptily. She clung to him, almost sobbing at the shocks battering her senses.
“Ian…” Her voice was thin, shaking, her eyes closed tightly. “Ian, please…”
He shifted his hold on her slightly and bent forward to lay her on the bed, then straightened briefly to get rid of his shoes and trunks. Before Michele was fully aware of his absence, he was with her again. She felt his hands on her hips and lifted them instinctively as he stripped off what remained of her bathing suit and threw it aside.
Michele opened her eyes slowly, realizing that she was naked only when she saw him looking at her. A fleeting shyness vanished before it could take hold, because he was looking at her with such hunger it almost stopped her heart. She wouldn’t have believed she could lie naked on a bed in a pool of bright sunlight while a man looked at her and feel only sharp excitement, but that was what she was feeling.
“Michele,” he said tautly, kissing her deeply again and again before trailing his lips over her warm throat. His hand stroked her breasts, her quivering belly, then slid lower to gently probe the dark curls between her tense thighs.
She felt him touch her, and an explosion of pleasure forced a gasp from her throat. Tension wound inside her with an almost brutal intensity, her control over her own body totally gone as it responded blindly, instinctively to the ancient mating drives. Her legs opened for him and she clutched at his shoulders desperately as his caress sent shockwaves of heat through her.
“Make it stop,” she whispered raggedly, almost afraid of these wild feelings. “Ian, please…”
He drew a shuddering breath, fighting for a last remnant of control as he spread her legs wider and slipped between them. She was ready for him, her body warm and moist, her smoky eyes darkened and sleepy with desire. His own need was so wildly urgent he thought he’d explode, but he held himself back fiercely for the searing pleasure of entering her slowly.