His Christmas Acquisition by Cathy Williams

Author:Cathy Williams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781408926260
Publisher: HarlequinUKLtd
Published: 2011-09-30T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

CLAIRE and Hannah, their husbands and children left in a flurry of forgotten stuffed toys that needed to be fetched, a thousand things that had to be ticked off their check list and lots of hugs and kisses and promises to meet up just as soon as life returned to normal. And then they were gone and the house felt suddenly very quiet and very empty.

In two days’ time, Ryan would take one plane to Florida while she took another back to England and Vivian, his mother, would stay on for a further week, joined by several of her friends for their annual bridge holiday.

With Vivian excusing herself for an afternoon nap and Ryan announcing that he intended to work, waving her down when she immediately started to talk about what they would be doing, Jamie found herself at a loose end. For the first time, she realised that it was a relief to have been deprived of her mobile phone. Normally, she would have been following the crisis between Greg and her sister in a state of barely suppressed stress, but without the means of contacting them unless she used the landline, which she didn’t intend to, she felt guiltily liberated from the problem—at least temporarily.

For the first time since she had arrived, she decided to take advantage of the empty swimming pool, and was there in her bikini with her towel, her sun block and a book within forty minutes.

It felt like a holiday. The pool offered spectacular views of the sea and was surrounded by palm trees and foliage, ripe with butterflies and the sound of birds. Jamie lay down on her sun lounger and let her mind wander, and every one of its meanderings returned to Ryan. His image seemed to have been stamped on her brain and she wasn’t sure whether that had always been the case or whether it was something that had occurred ever since some of the barriers between them had been eroded. Had she been sucked into his charming, witty, intelligent personality without even realising? Or had all that charm, wit and intelligence only begun working on her once he had uncovered some of those private details that she had striven so hard to keep from him?

She had been determined never to repeat the folly of getting personally involved with the boss. Falling for Greg had been a youthful indiscretion and she could now look back on that younger self with a certain amount of wry amusement, because her crush had been so harmless.

This situation with Ryan was altogether more dangerous because Ryan was just a more dangerous man. There were times when she physically reacted to him with something that was unconscious and almost primitive in its intensity, and when she thought about that she wanted to close her eyes and faint with the horror of it.

In comparison, her silly infatuation with Greg was exposed for what it had really been: something harmless that had occurred at just the time she had needed it.

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