One Summer At The Lake: Maid for Montero / Still the One / Hot-Shot Doc Comes to Town. Susan Carlisle
‘Nice thought, but unless you have them in your pocket…’ She tried a smile but her teeth were chattering too hard. Every squelchy footstep was uncomfortable. ‘Where are you parked?’
‘I’m not. Alex took the twins back to Ravenwood. I’ll ring him, and he’ll tell the twins we’ll be back later.’
Belatedly Zoe realised his intention.
‘You’re kidding—no way!’ She shook her head and shrugged off the guiding hand on her shoulder as she stared up at the recently restored art deco façade of the five-star hotel with a reputation that drew a lot of people to the area.
She’d often thought it would be nice to sample the food there—but not looking like this!
‘Why would I be kidding?’
‘You can’t just walk in there looking like this.’ She glanced at him and made the mental adjustment that while he could, she couldn’t. Isandro’s clothes might be sodden, but he had not been swimming, and even if he had, she acknowledged reluctantly, he would still have the presence to make any door open for him.
‘Why not?’
‘Well, I don’t know what the dress code is but I’m pretty sure this isn’t it.’ She held her hands wide to reveal her sodden muddy clothes. ‘They’ll throw me out. They won’t even let me walk across the hallowed threshold.’ She took a step backwards, shaking her head in response to the gleam in his eyes. ‘And before you suggest it, being carried won’t change anything.’
Except possibly her pulse rate. She knew that later that night she was going to remember every little detail of being carried in his arms, which would have made her a disgrace to modern liberated womanhood had she not suspected that inside most modern independent women lurked a secret desire to be swept off her feet. And if a man like Isandro was doing the sweeping, she suspected that few would find the experience objectionable.
She couldn’t help but wonder what it would have felt like if his motivation had not been totally practical—a scenario that would have required her not looking like a drowned rat and for him to not be her boss…
But this is the real world. And once more, as far as he’s concerned, you’ve shown yourself to be a pain in the backside.
‘I was not about to offer. The fact is you’re not as light as you look, especially wet.’ His grin widened in response to her indignant squeak. ‘Who exactly do you think is going to stop us?’
Zoe, who felt oddly light-headed, didn’t react to the question. ‘Just take me home, Isandro.’ She clutched her spinning head, suddenly feeling nauseous as frames of the past hour flashed before her eyes. ‘I turned around and they weren’t there, and I…’
Observing the blue discoloration of her beautiful lips, Isandro released a hissed imprecation from between clenched teeth before taking her chin firmly between his thumb and forefinger. He turned her face up to his. The problem was not so much her imminent collapse or her stubborn refusal to enter the hotel as his struggle to maintain the necessary level of objectivity.
‘Look, adrenaline was the only thing that kept you on your feet, and it’s crashed.’ So had she.
‘I do feel a bit…’
‘You look a bit, too.’ His glance drifted over the curve of her cheek, delineated by classic high cheekbones. Her perfect skin was marble pale, the only colour in her face was supplied by her eyes, which stood out as a flash of startling colour in a monochrome film.
‘You didn’t succeed in drowning yourself, so now you are inviting hypothermia.’ The effort to conceal the concern her fragility evoked in him made Isandro’s voice cold and flat. ‘We need to warm you up, get you out of those wet clothes.’
The words had barely left his lips before a stream of images that Isandro could have done without flashed through his head. He was regaining his shattered control when a sly voice reminded him that skin-to-skin contact was a well-known treatment for hypothermia His control went out of the window!
Even a sub-zero body temperature was not going to save him from the spike of lust that hardened his already half-aroused body. Madre di Dios, he was turning into a sad adult version of some sex-starved teenager! For a man who prided himself on his self-control it was…not tolerable. The only thing that was going to restore him to sanity was spending a week in bed with Zoe Grace.
He exhaled. The first step to solving a problem was admitting it existed. This he had already done. The next step was to work out a strategy. He needed to treat this problem like any other and apply logic and cool objectivity. The problem was that where his housekeeper was concerned he struggled to think objectively, and as for logic—he’d just stolen a boat, for God’s sake!
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Zoe said, looking at him over the soggy tissue she had produced and was now sniffing loudly into.
The prosaic action was rather touching, but not touching enough to hold his attention when the competition was the heaving contours of her breasts under the thin layer of drenched cotton through which her peaked nipples were clearly outlined.
‘I rather doubt that, querida.’ His thoughts were pretty rampant.
‘You think I’m not fit to look after a cat, let alone two children,’ she wailed, in full self-pity mode.
He did not respond with any comforting denials, but glanced rather pointedly at his watch.
This callous behaviour drew a hiss of annoyance from between her chattering teeth. ‘So sorry—am I keeping you?’ she said, wondering why she had thought for a second that her problems would do anything but bore the pants off him.
Her eyes dropped, running the length of his long legs, then making the journey back once she had reached his now muddy boots. She could see that, for some women, getting his pants off by whatever method would be considered a good result but she…Who was she kidding? Even on the brink of what felt like imminent hypothermia she could not stop lusting after him.
‘Not at all. Feel free to go ahead and beat yourself up,’ he encouraged. Zoe tried to bear her teeth in a snarl but she was shaking too hard and she bit her lip instead, drawing a pinprick of blood and his disturbing dark stare. ‘But do you mind if we continue this conversation indoors?’
Zoe glanced at the hotel entrance. The golden light shining through the doors looked warm and inviting…and she was very cold. She lifted a hand to the hair that was plastered to her skull. His was, too, but in his case the effect was not drowned rat.
‘I can’t.’ It was an invitation for him to contradict her, and he accepted it.
‘Can and will,’ he said, catching hold of her hand. ‘We need a room.’ On so many levels they needed a room!
‘You can’t walk in and book a room for a few hours,’ she said, pointing out the obvious. At least it seemed obvious to her.
‘Why not? People do. Oh, I see.’ He laughed. ‘You’re afraid your reputation will be ruined if you’re seen going into a hotel room with a man.’
‘Of course not. And nobody is going to think that you…me…we…unless you normally have to half drown a woman before she’ll have sex with you.’
‘Not so far.’
Before she could interpret the odd inflection in his voice he had tightened his grip and virtually dragged her up the shallow flight of steps.
The warmth inside the hotel foyer hit her like a wall. So did the stares. It seemed to Zoe that a thousand eyes followed their progress.
But, as he predicted, nobody attempted to stop them, though it would have taken a very brave person to approach Isandro, who had adopted what she privately called his ‘to hell with the lot of you’ expression. His antagonism was probably aimed at her. This couldn’t have been the way he had intended to spend his day, but the people who cleared a path for