Substitute Engagement. Jayne Bauling
him ask such a question, and in that particular tone. He couldn’t possibly see her as some sort of femme fatale, especially when Thierry had just rejected her!
Lucia drew her shoulders back. So there was to be one last call on her strength today. Her friendship with Hassan went back to the days when they had been childhood playmates, the first time she and her parents had lived on the island. He was one of the kindest people she knew, but she didn’t want his pity and he had to be convinced that it was superfluous.
She tilted her chin at an angle, fixed a smile to her face, willing her eyes to be clear and shining, and went forward, aware of Rob Ballard at her side.
Mercifully, Hassan made no reference to Thierry, being more interested in hearing whether she thought she had passed her exams and telling her how delighted he was to have secured a position here where he was being trained in all aspects of the hotel business.
Once again Lucia was aware of Rob as the dynamic magnate, as it was obvious that Hassan and the other two young men considered themselves honoured by his brief attention when he asked a question or two.
‘Lucia may be joining you on the staff temporarily if Chester Watson feels she has something to offer,’ Rob told Hassan when the formalities of registering were concluded.
Lucia absorbed the ‘temporarily’, and she was no longer smiling as they turned and moved away from the counter.
‘What are you hanging around for?’ she demanded aggressively in a low voice. ‘I hope you’re not expecting me to thank you?’
‘I’d be disappointed if I was, wouldn’t I?’ he retorted sardonically in an equally low voice. ‘Don’t worry, you’re free of my company as of now. I must get back to the party outside. But, much as we both wish this could be a permanent parting of the ways, I’ll need to see you some time tomorrow so we can discuss whether it’s necessary for us to continue with this act.’
‘It isn’t!’ she assured him in an intense, hostile whisper, which made his brilliant smile come as a surprise.
But it was only for the benefit of the men at the counter and the handful of other people around, as she realised when he raised his voice and said, ‘I’ll see you later, angel.’
Then he was striding easily away from her, attracting the usual amount of fascinated attention but ignoring it, presumably intent on taking up with Madelon Brouard where her own inconvenient arrival had forced him to leave off, Lucia decided acidly.
A few minutes later as the young man who had brought her luggage up to her room departed, closing the door quietly behind him, she was alone at long last, the need for pretence over.
The first thought to occur to her came in the form of the belated realisation that Rob still had her engagement ring in his pocket, and she slapped her hand down onto the dressing-table top in a fury of frustration, irrationally inclined to blame him for everything that had gone wrong and all the humiliations that had been inflicted on her this day.
Then, as her shoulders slumped and she collapsed onto a pretty wooden chair, Lucia burst into tears.
HER shirt dangling from her hand, Lucia stopped to select a shell from the softly gleaming scatter washed up by the high tide in the night. Then she continued on up the dazzling white beach, which she had to herself at present, stopping when she came to a palm, automatically checking it for the presence of coconuts likely to fall and then turning to look back at the ocean from which she had just emerged.
She was an excellent swimmer, but with no one around to expect an impressive demonstration she had merely splashed about in the shallow waves close to shore. Nevertheless, even such modest exercise had left her hungry and she was looking forward to breakfast.
So, being crossed in love hadn’t affected her appetite—unless she was about to turn into a comfort-eater, she reflected with wry humour.
She had also been ravenous after the storms of angry weeping the evening before, and had completely finished the meal she had ordered from room service. Then, exhausted by emotion and with her muscles all aching as a result of the tension which must have held her in its grip ever since Rob Ballard had told her about Thierry’s betrayal, she had fallen into a sound, dreamless sleep, sufficiently healthy to be awake early in consequence.
The Comorean hot season was just beginning now. Although a few clouds were racing overhead, the sun already blazed with a burning heat at this hour of the morning. Hence her retreat to the shade of the coconut palms fringing the beach, as she had neglected to apply any protection to her skin prior to coming out for her early swim.
‘Deepest black! Is that in mourning for your lost love?’
The soft, fine sand underfoot had prevented Lucia hearing Rob Ballard’s approach, and she spun round in shock as the mocking voice spoke from close by, finding his gaze travelling from the black Indian cotton shirt she held to the plain black one-piece she was wearing cut low at both back and front and high over her hips.
She felt a prick of resentment at his having caught her off guard, acutely conscious that he hadn’t been encountering her at her best the previous day either, when shock and fury over Thierry’s defection had been affecting her behaviour, causing her to talk wildly, to lash out at him as the bearer of the bad tidings.
‘All sympathy, aren’t you?’ she attacked sarcastically, aware that she would have hated it had he really been sympathetic, preferring his callous derision. ‘How did you know I’m not about to jump in the sea and drown myself?’
‘Would you bother to dress so alluringly for the occasion? Or I should say undress,’ he corrected himself amusedly, his glance skimming the slenderness of her limbs and the subtle curves to which the one-piece clung so faithfully, as he shook his head. ‘You’re too tough anyway. I can see you in a reckless mood setting out to drown your sorrows. But yourself—no!’
‘Is that meant to be a compliment? It just makes me sound thick-skinned, but perhaps you admire people like that, being so insensitive yourself.’
She offered the insult with a wide smile, secretly longing for the concealment of the sunglasses that had served her so well yesterday, but she hadn’t bothered to bring them out with her.
The way he was studying her was disconcerting, and she pulled the thin shirt on in an instinctive, defensive reaction, although it was actually only her heart-shaped face, sensitive mouth, and eyes almost the same colour as the sea over which his smoky gaze was roaming now.
The intense black probably did look funereal on her at present, when she was still afflicted by examination pallor—the dull, faded look that came from too much time spent indoors and the diet of coffee and carbo-hydrates that she had needed to keep going—but the colour suited her when she wasn’t so washed out. Right now, with her hair still darkened and flattened by sea-water, she probably looked even mousier than she had yesterday.
By contrast Rob looked superbly healthy, vibrantly alive, alert and fit. Lucia ran her eyes over his jeans and white sports shirt, her mind visualising what they hid. He wasn’t one of the those overtly muscular men whom she found such a turn-off, yet somehow he gave an impression of physical as well as mental power, of strength implicit in the long, lean lines of his body and limbs.
There was a collision of glances as she lifted her eyes to the idiosyncratic appeal of his dark face, and for several strangely mindless moments she was quite unable to look away. With her gaze locked to Rob’s like this, she was prey to an odd prickly heat that was more internal than outward.
Then Rob stirred, and she was free, capable of thought again, and putting that heat down to embarrassment. This man knew too much about her; he knew the worst—that another man had rejected her and that she hadn’t taken it as well as dignity demanded.
He was saying tauntingly, ‘Insensitive, if you like, but