PETE BENNETT was both passionate and extremely thorough when he put his mind to it, decided Serena some half an hour later as she stood beneath a lukewarm shower. Pete had showered with her briefly, kissing her senseless beneath the spray, and, cursing her roundly as his body responded to hers again, had made himself scarce.
She watched him through the gap between the shower curtain and the cubicle as he dried off and pulled on his shorts and then his shirt. Such a tough, hard body. Such pleasure to be found from exploring it. He had another scar, in addition to the one on his shoulder. This one was nasty—a couple of centimetres wide running across his lower back. She couldn’t be sure but it looked like a burn of some kind, maybe a rope burn, and she wondered what the hell had been on the other end of that rope to carve a gash that deep. He was a warrior, this man, never mind the façade. Beneath his reckless, charming ways lay the heart of a fighter.
Right this minute her warrior was a very sated man, she’d stake her life on it. His body had been to heaven and back. She knew this because he’d taken her with him. His brain, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have made the trip at all.
She stepped out of the shower and met his gaze in the mirror, hers questioning, his bleak.
‘Light-hearted,’ he said grimly.
‘Yes.’
‘And brief.’
‘Yes.’
‘Civilised.’ His eyes were anything but.
‘You forgot exclusive,’ she told him.
‘I didn’t forget.’ He turned around to scowl down at her, a thoroughly disgruntled dark angel, all the way from the spikes of his midnight black hair right down to his toes. ‘This is a disaster,’ he said as he pulled her closer. ‘You’re a disaster.’ And with a kiss so unguardedly needy she trembled beneath the force of it, he turned on his heel and left the bathroom.
Pete sagged against the bathroom door the minute he closed it, willing himself not to go back in there, willing his feet to take him down the corridor and out of the cottage and to keep on walking, straight down the hill to the village. He needed to think. To regain the balance he’d lost in the arms of a siren.
One step. He dragged his extremely happy body away from the door and took it. And stopped abruptly as he looked up, straight at Nico—at Nico and Sam—who stood beside him.
‘We’re gonna cook the sea bass I caught this morning,’ said Sam. ‘Me and Nico. And we’re inviting Chloe and Serena and you to come and help us eat it for dinner.’
‘Oh.’ He struggled for words, for some sense of normality, a modicum of discretion, while Sam looked up at him hopefully and Nico eyed the bathroom door. ‘How big is this fish?’
‘Big,’ said Sam with a grin. ‘Where’s Serena?’
Not a question he wanted to answer. ‘She’s been downloading the photos she took of you and Nico this morning onto her computer. I think she wants to use one of them for her postcard series. Go take a look. In the sitting room.’
Sam didn’t need any more urging. Nico, on the other hand, stayed right where he was.
The bathroom door swung open the tiniest bit, an inch or so, nothing more, and Pete stepped in front of it, blocking Nico’s view as he reached for the handle and pulled the door firmly closed.
Nico stared at him, studying his wet hair with a narrowed gaze. Pete stared back with not a lot to say. He tried putting himself in Nico’s place. Tried to pretend he’d just caught some poor schmuck coming out of his sister’s bathroom, with every indication of his sister still being in there. What would he do?
Castration seemed like a reasonable option.
Hopefully Nico was of a more civilised bent.
‘You want to explain why that bathroom door suddenly seems to want to swing open by itself?’ asked Nico silkily.
‘Not really.’ But for the sake of discretion he gave it a shot. ‘Could be the wind.’
‘Uplift. Downdraft. Air. Wind.’
Nico didn’t look convinced.
‘O-or it could be that the door’s set on a slant and swings open by itself.’
‘It doesn’t.’
‘Pity.’ He was running out of plausible excuses. ‘Maybe it’s possessed.’
Nico’s lips twitched. ‘Nice try.’ But he wasn’t buying it. ‘Serena’s a grown woman,’he said after a lengthy pause. ‘She makes her own choices. I try and respect that.’
Castration didn’t seem to have entered Nico’s mind. This was a good thing.
And then Nico’s gaze swung from Pete to the bathroom door and his face hardened. ‘Hurt her and I’ll hunt you down.’
Or maybe it had. ‘No one’s going to get hurt,’ he said curtly. ‘Serena knows what she’s doing, and so do I.’
‘Do you?’ Nico rapped on the door with enough force to make it vibrate. ‘Dinner’s at seven. Chloe and Sam are eating with us,’ he said loudly and stalked off.
No sooner had Nico disappeared than Serena stalked out, as fully dressed as a person could get in skimpy white shorts and a pink and lime bikini top. She glared at him, thoroughly miffed about something, possibly his parting shot about her being a disaster, but it was too late to take it back now. Besides, he didn’t want to. ‘What?’ he said. What now?
‘You call that discreet?’
‘Well…yeah. It could have been worse.’
‘How?’ she demanded. ‘Nico knows I was in there; that you were in there with me. How on earth could it get any worse?’
‘Hell, Serena,’ he said, darkly amused by her indignation. ‘Five minutes earlier and he’d have found us naked on the day-bed.’
Chloe arrived shortly after that and added her voice to the dinner invitation. ‘It started with me offering to cook for you all at my place,’ she told them ruefully as she set a big basket on the kitchen bench and turned to look back out the kitchen door to where Sam and Nico were cleaning the barbecue. ‘I’m still not sure how the invitation got turned around to having it here. I hope you don’t mind. I brought the fixings for a salad with me and some bread and wine. Nico says he’s cooking the fish.’
‘I love it when he says that,’ said Serena.
‘So you don’t mind?’ Chloe turned towards her and Pete, her expression faintly apologetic. ‘You weren’t planning to go out to dinner? Just the two of you?’
‘Well…we could?’ said Pete. ‘I hadn’t thought much about dinner at all. Yet.’ He caught her gaze, a question in his, and that small act of courtesy and uncertainty after all that had gone before was Serena’s undoing.
‘If we stay here I can guarantee us a glass of wine or beer with dinner,’ she said lightly, opening the fridge and raiding it for both items and setting them on the counter. She had no idea how much their disastrously wonderful lovemaking had changed things. Absolutely no idea what he wanted from her. All she knew was that he was welcome at her table and that she didn’t want him to leave. ‘Matter of fact I can guarantee them now.’
‘There is that,’ he said, with the whisper of a smile.
‘So you’ll stay for dinner?’ said Chloe hopefully. ‘The more the merrier, I say.’ She didn’t want to dine alone with Sam and Nico was what she meant. ‘There’ll be plenty of food.’
There was that word again, thought Serena wryly. Plenty. She looked at Pete and that was exactly what she saw. ‘Here.’ She passed him the beer, got another bottle from the fridge and a lemonade for Sam and handed those to him as well. ‘Go help Nico and Sam man the barbecue while Chloe and I get busy in the kitchen.’
‘Does this feel light-hearted to you?’ he muttered, shooting her an enigmatic glance as she held the kitchen screen door open to let him through. ‘It doesn’t feel light hearted to me. Feels kind of family-oriented.’
‘I know.’ She smiled wryly. ‘But stay anyway.’
Having Pete stay on for dinner was a bigger mistake than she’d thought it would be, decided Serena an hour later as she sat at the garden table and watched him bond with Sam and Nico over slow-barbecued potatoes and soon-to-be-barbecued sea bass. She didn’t want to notice the way Sam looked up to him, or how much Nico seemed to enjoy his company, never mind Nico’s earlier words of warning outside the bathroom door. Pete Bennett charmed without thinking, without understanding what it would do to a woman fresh from his lovemaking to watch him interact so easily with the people she loved.
‘If I were a betting woman—which I’m not,’ said Chloe, coming up beside her and handing her one of the two glasses of champagne she held in her hands, and sipping delicately on the other, ‘I’d say the universe you’ve been contemplating of late was standing right there by the barbecue. And what a universe it is,’ she murmured with a wicked smile, and Serena felt her own lips curve in reluctant agreement.
‘It’s only a temporary universe,’ she told Chloe. ‘He’ll be leaving soon. I’ll be leaving soon.’
‘Haven’t we just had this conversation?’ said Chloe dryly.
‘No, that was a different conversation. You and Nico have a shot at something beautiful. Pete and I…well…he’s going in one direction and I’m going in another. I don’t want to change direction to accommodate him.’
‘Perhaps he’ll change direction to accommodate you.’
The thought slid through her, bright and beckoning, demanding closer examination.
‘He’s very good with Sam,’ said Chloe. ‘He cares for people.’
She’d noticed. And all of a sudden she was standing there wondering just what kind of father he would make, what kind of husband. And what it would take to capture his heart.
No.
Some other woman could glory in his passionate lovemaking and delight in the compassion beneath his strength. Not her.
Some other woman could heal a heart too heavy and too wounded to carry any more loss. Not her. She had dreams of her own to chase. Dreams that didn’t involve him.
Serena tore her gaze away from Pete to stare out at the ocean with a growing sense of panic.
If only she could remember what they were.
It was almost ten p.m. when Chloe deemed it time for her and Sam to head back to the village. Dinner had been served and savoured and Sam was fading fast in the wake of his early morning. Pete stood as well, offering to walk back to the hotel with them, and the happy family picture the three of them made set Serena’s eyes to narrowing. Never mind that it wasn’t real, Serena didn’t like it. Neither did Nico.
‘Aren’t you going to walk down with them?’ she muttered to her cousin.
‘Aren’t you?’ he countered darkly.
‘No.’
Nico scowled. ‘I’ll join you,’he said to them abruptly.
Pete nodded, as if he’d expected no less, and started clearing plates and empty glasses from the table, carrying them into the kitchen while Nico helped Chloe and Sam gather their belongings ready for departure. Better, much better.
‘What time are you heading out in the morning?’ she asked him lightly as he set the dishes on the sink. No pressure. No clinging. Much.
‘Around ten. My clients want to go to Santorini.’
Santorini. Plenty of night-life in Santorini. ‘Staying overnight there, are you?’
‘Yeah.’ He leaned forward and kissed her cheek.
‘What was that?’
‘Discreet.’
Oh. She thought of him not being around tomorrow, or the day after that. Thought of the pleasure to be found in his kisses and decided to scrap discretion and go with need instead. She ached for his touch, for what it could bring, and she dumped her own armful of dishes into the sink, stepped in close and touched her lips to his, teasing at first, and then ravenously hungry as she dragged them deeper and deeper into uncharted waters.
‘I’ll call you,’ he said raggedly when at last the kiss ended. ‘I’ll be back. Soon. As soon as I can.’
‘I’ll be here,’ she said and felt her heart tremble. ‘For the next couple of weeks.’
Pete called her mid-afternoon the following day.
‘Where are you?’ she wanted to know.
‘Sitting in a café in Santorini, reading the paper.’
Lucky him. She was sitting beneath the beach umbrella beside the Vespa shed.
‘How do you feel about working for a fashion photography house in New York?’ he asked her.
‘Unenthusiastic.’ She leaned back in her chair. ‘Although it does satisfy the requirement of being some distance from my family.’
‘Just checking,’ he said. ‘Wedding photographer in Vegas?’
‘Only if I’d be working for Elvis.’
‘It’s possible.’ She could feel the smile in his voice, closed her eyes and let it warm her through. ‘Okay, here’s something you might be more interested in. It’s a photography competition and it’s global. They want you to capture and celebrate the essence of humanity.’
‘I’m glad. I’ll bring you the details.’
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
Serena sighed. She knew what soon meant. It meant he had no idea when he’d be back. ‘Enjoy Santorini. It’s a pretty place.’
‘You’re prettier,’ he said, and disconnected.
He phoned her again the following day. This time she was ready for him.
‘What are you doing?’ Pete asked her.
‘The crossword in The Sydney Morning Herald.’ She was sitting in her usual place beneath the beach umbrella by the old Vespa shed, but time was passing more quickly this morning. ‘A British rock god needs a helicopter pilot to keep on retainer.’
‘Just shoot me now,’ he said.
‘Just checking. There’s also a need for a medivac helicopter pilot along the Northern Australian seaboard.’
Silence.
‘I’m sensing some reluctant interest in that one,’ she said with a grin. ‘I’ll keep the paper for you. Meanwhile I have a job interview in Athens tomorrow with a big daily newspaper. They’re after a photojournalist who can cover politics one day and human-interest stories the next. It sounds promising.’
‘How are you getting there?’ he asked her.
‘I thought I’d take the ferry.’
‘I can get you there faster than a ferry,’ he muttered.
He could get her there faster than anybody on the planet, and she was pretty sure he knew it. ‘Are you free tomorrow? I could hire your charter services.’
‘You can have them for free. When’s your interview?’
‘Four in the afternoon.’
‘I’ll come for you at midday. We can go out for a meal afterwards. Spend the night in Athens. If you’ve a mind to.’
‘I’d love to.’ She already had a teenager from the village organised to take charge of the Vespas for a day. Why not for two days? She had good reason, and heaven help her she had a fierce need to spend some time alone with Pete without having to be discreet about it. ‘I’ve missed you, flyboy.’
‘I want you in my arms again,’he told her, with a rasp to his voice that set her skin to tingling. ‘Preferably sitting on my lap.’
He wasn’t the only one. ‘Am I naked?’
‘Very.’
‘Are you naked?’
‘I’m at the airport in Athens. If I was I’d be arrested.’
‘So…I’ll see you tomorrow, then?’
‘I’ll come for you,’ he said.
She was counting on it.