Avoiding Mr Right Read online

  Except that the reason was not unfathomable, however much Christina pretended to herself. It had all been there in the kiss—intensity, anger, need. Christina had never felt that she needed anyone before, not in that immediate, physical way. Nor had she felt the same driving need coming back at her, plucking her out of normality and onto a plane where all she could see or touch or taste was him.

  ‘Sex,’ she said to herself. ‘That’s all it is. Strong attraction, sure, but nothing more than a passing thing. Ignore it and it will go away.’

  Only it didn’t. There were times when she barely noticed her pleasant church group from the American Midwest. They were in Europe for the first time and endearingly enthusiastic about the sights at Mycenae and Delphi. Christina tried hard to share their enthusiasm. She even succeeded sometimes. But the dark, magnetic figure of Luc was always there, always lurking. And all too often he just swamped the rest. It was not like any sexual attraction she had ever felt before.

  It’s not real, she told herself.

  But it felt reat—horribly real. More real than anything else she could remember. It was almost frightening. That stopped her dead in the shadow of a classic column. He had said that she was afraid of him, hadn’t he?

  ‘Ridiculous,’ she said aloud.

  But on the long, hot coach journey back to their hotel Christina was remembering all too vividly every word he had said. It was nonsense that she was afraid of him. Of course it was. She was self-possessed and independent and she was not afraid of anyone.

  But, if she admitted the truth, there was something in that dark, demanding presence that sent little chills through her. Not fear, naturally, but something uneasy that told her she had no defences against him. Or anyway, none that seemed to work.

  The unwelcome truth was that Luc Henri overwhelmed her. He had.only to look—let alone touch—and she started to vibrate like a musical instrument played by a master. And she did not even know who he was!

  He might be a villain, she thought grimly, remembering the long dark car that had seemed to be looking for her. Or merely a businessman, as Geoff had suggested. She just had no idea. She could not even begin to guess. He had given her no clues at all.

  ‘And that’s the problem,’ she told the spotty mirror in her hotel room. ‘He told me nothing. Deliberately told me nothing. He might just as well have been wearing a long cloak and mask for all I know about him. And yet he makes me feel like this. I must be going out of my mind!’

  She applied moisturiser to her heated skin and tried to bring her renowned common sense back into play.

  Maybe he didn’t own that black limo at all. Maybe he wasn’t looking for her. Maybe the meeting at Costa’s was pure chance and the limo was crawling along because it had engine problems. Maybe this was all in her imagination. Somehow that was not comforting.

  She called Sue from the hotel.

  ‘He’s been back to Costa’s,’ Sue said at once. She did not specify who. She did not need to.

  Christina’s whole body lurched, as if she were in a lift in free fall.

  ‘What did Costa tell him?’ she said, her voice jumping.

  ‘Nothing. You know Costa. A customer is a customer but he doesn’t like being pushed around.’

  ‘Oh. What did he tell Costa, then?’

  ‘Not much. He left a telephone number, though. Do you want it?’

  She found she did, very much. It was so unlike her. Was she falling in love for the first time in her life?

  ‘No,’ said Christina in a kind of horror.

  There was a little silence.

  ‘You fancy him,’ Sue said slowly. She didn’t sound anything like as triumphant as she would have done a week ago. ‘It’s happened at last.’

  Christina did not like the sound of that. Especially in the light of what she had just been thinking herself.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said robustly.

  ‘I saw him kiss you,’ Sue reminded her. ‘And the way you looked afterwards. Are you seriously telling me he didn’t get to you?’

  Christina suppressed a little, sensuous shiver at the picture her friend’s words conjured up. She repressed it at once.

  ‘A kiss is just a kiss,’ she said flippantly.

  ‘So what are you going to do about him?’

  The very thought of doing anything about Luc Henri made Christina’s head swim. She swallowed, hoping Sue would not detect her confusion.

  ‘I’m not going to do anything about him. I don’t know him. What I do know I don’t like. He’s just too damned sure of himself.’ Yes, that was better. Indignation might just get that dark image back to manageable proportions. She added virtuously, He’s got to learn that he can’t go around manhandling people like that in public.’

  Sue chuckled unexpectedly. ‘What about in private?’

  It was a thought that Christina had been trying very hard not to let into her consciousness.

  ‘That is not going to happen,’ she said firmly.

  She found that her fingers were crossed hard when she put the phone down.

  She returned to Athens thoroughly unsettled. There was no sign of Luc Henri. She was not sure if she was relieved or piqued. Either way, it did not help her get the man out of her head.

  The next job—crewing for a group of scuba-divers—had been in her schedule for weeks.

  ‘You’re getting famous, Christina,’ the captain greeted her when she went on board. She had worked for him before and they got on well. He looked amused.

  She was startled. ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve set the wires humming,’ he told her. ‘I must have had three requests for references for you in the last week. What have you been doing?’

  She frowned, oddly perturbed.

  ‘I ran out of cash and had to hustle a bit for the next job,’ she said slowly.

  ‘Oh, that will be it, then. If the brokers think you’re running into problems with money they won’t want to put you on a boat stuffed with cash and Rolexes,’ he said indifferently. ‘Moral: never really need a job.’ He gave a hearty laugh and slapped her between the shoulderblades. Christina smiled, but absently.

  Was this Luc Henri’s master-hand again? Or was she flattering herself? She half wished that she had taken that phone number so she could ring him up and tell him to stop intruding in her life. Except, of course, she acknowledged ruefully, the intrusion might all be in her own imagination. If only she knew.

  So it was with turbulently mixed feelings that the night they got back to port she went to Costa’s for dinner with the rest of the crew. As soon as he saw her, the proprietor finished his conversation and came over.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Christina said with forboding. ‘You’ve been having enquiries about me.’

  He looked surprised. ‘That’s a problem? I thought you wanted a job?’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’m getting paranoid. What have you got for me, Costa?’

  He grinned and flung his arms wide. ‘The job of a lifetime,’ he said.

  Three weeks later Christina toiled up the harbour steps, puffing under the burden of an enormous dustbin bag, and thought hard thoughts about Costa. Job of a lifetime, indeed. Well, she was working for royalty, or supposed to be. That must have been what Costa meant.

  All Christina could see was that the yacht was under-provided and seriously ill equipped. Well, she could have lived with that. She had done so before on other jobs. What she couldn’t bear was the poisonous atmosphere. It affected everyone, from the ragamuffin crew to the principal passenger’s seven-year-old daughter, Pru. Nobody helped anyone and they all threatened to tell tales to the Prince, who had chartered the boat.

  The Prince himself, perhaps wisely, had not so far put in an appearance. Instead he had installed his sister and her children and kept promising to join the boat at the next port. He was expected again today in this small Italian harbour but neither the children nor Christina thought he would turn up. The children minded. The Prince of Kholkhastan joine
d Costa and the cheapskate Captain Demetrius in Christina’s bad books.

  Christina heaved the garbage bag onto the top step. ‘I’m never going to let it get this heavy again before I dump it,’ she promised herself. She straightened, panting, and wiped her forehead before stooping to haul the thing along the dock.

  ‘What the hell do you think you are doing?’ rapped out a voice.

  Christina stopped dead. She did not believe it. This was fantasy, brought on by heat, exhaustion and sheer temper. Her heart thundered in her ears. She was so startled that if she had not still been holding onto the lumpish bag of rubbish she would probably have fallen back down the stone steps.

  She knew that voice. In spite of her best resolutions, she had been sleeping with it for weeks. Cautiously, she looked up.

  It was not heatstroke. It was not a hallucination.

  ‘You!’

  In some ways, heatstroke or hallucinations would have been easier to deal with.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she gasped.

  She stood looking up at him, weeks of studied forgetfulness wiped out by the sheer physical shock of his presence. She had told herself that it had all been an illusion brought on by anger and brief panic when the bank had refused to let her have her money. She had told herself he was no different from anyone else: not a frightening, encompassing presence but an ordinary man, perfectly easy to deal with if you kept your head. And the intensity she had felt beating at her like a flame must have been her imagination. He was probably perfectly indifferent to her.

  Luc Henri smiled. His eyes were almost black. He looked tough, powerful and deeply sardonic. Not, thought Christina, recovering herself too late, in the least bit easy to deal with. Or indifferent.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said again, this time with something like accusation.

  Luc reached down. His fingers closed over hers, brooking no resistance.

  ‘At the moment it looks like dustbin duty,’ he said drily. It was the suave voice she remembered. This time it hovered on the edge of mockery. It made no difference. That voice had haunted her dreams.

  ‘I can manage,’ she muttered, horrified. This was no time to remember dreams that embarrassed her even when she was on her own. Now that she was face to face with the other participant, they were frankly appalling.

  Luc seemed unaware of her discomfort. He snorted. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. That thing is obviously far too heavy for you. What on earth are you thinking of, hauling it around on your own?’

  Christina stood very still. A feeling swept over her that made her capable little hands suddenly lose all their usual strength. Shaken, she looked down at his long fingers locked round her own.

  No one had made her feel like that, ever: as if she was all blood and fire, with no strength or will or ability to do anything but mould herself to him. Mould herself with passion. It was not just the dreams, after all.

  ‘Oh, good grief,’ she said, truly horrified.

  She surrendered the bag to him, sliding her fingers out from under his without resistance.

  He misunderstood the cause of her dismay.

  ‘And it’s a great pleasure to see you too,’ Luc Henri said, amused.

  The heavy bag was no burden to him at all. He swung it up over his shoulder like a sack of coals and turned away. She looked after him, trying to steady herself.

  This was no cool, suited sophisticate today. He was wearing jeans and a casual T-shirt which showed powerful muscles. Christina remembered how she had sensed that strength under the smart jacket in Athens. It made something clench in her stomach. She hoped desperately that Luc was not aware of her turmoil.

  Her face burned. The hand which pushed her sunglasses back up her nose shook a little. With his back turned to her, she flexed her shoulders and the fingers that he had made feel so frail. Sternly she told herself to pull herself together.

  Luc bore the rubbish off to the prominently placed bin and returned. He was looking deeply satisfied, as if something he had planned had fallen out better than he had expected. It was a very private look. In spite of her disorientation, it put Christina’s hackles up.

  ‘There. Don’t try carrying it on your own again,’ he instructed her.

  So he was still high-handed. Christina’s hackles went higher. She tried to dredge up the words to tell him exactly what he could do with his orders. But there was something in the intent dark eyes which stopped the words in her throat.

  She strove for normality.

  ‘Perhaps you’d better discuss the matter with the man I work for,’ she said in a practical voice.

  For no reason that she could think of that seemed to entertain him. The look of private amusement intensified.

  ‘Good idea. I might just do that.’

  Christina sent a look over her shoulder. She had had a sharp little argument with the first officer after lunch. It had culminated in a rude instruction from Captain Demetrius for her to take the garbage ashore and come straight back. When she’d set off the captain and the first officer, who was also his cousin, had been leaning on the rail, watching her. She was almost certain that that had been the object of the order in the first place. Conscious of their eyes on her long, tanned legs, she had found herself wishing passionately that she had been wearing anything but the standard shipboard garb of shorts and cut-away cotton vest.

  Luc followed her eyes. There were no figures at the rail now, but he seemed to read her mind.

  ‘Watching you, were they? No one offered to help?’

  Christina shrugged. ‘It’s my job,’ she said levelly. ‘Ship’s cook gets rid of galley refuse.’

  His mouth tightened. ‘Not by the tonne.’

  ‘We—er—haven’t had the opportunity to unload garbage for a couple of days.’

  That was an understatement. Captain Demetrius, seriously out of his depth in charge of a boat all on his own for the first time, had failed to book moorings ahead of their arrival in port. With the early season now well under way, the harbour-masters had turned the Lady Elaine away. The captain’s new arrogance, presumably acquired by association with his princely employer, had not helped. As a result, so far they had docked in one extremely smelly fishing village, a container port and now this unfashionable harbour.

  Luc raised his brows. ‘Explain,’ he ordered.

  Christina sighed. ‘Put it this way—it’s not the best organised voyage I’ve ever been on.’

  ‘But—’ He broke off whatever he had been going to say, looking suddenly annoyed.

  She grinned suddenly, ‘In fact it’s a disaster. Nothing has been properly planned. The passengers blame the crew. The crew blames the first officer. So they hate him. The first officer hates children. And all but one of our passengers are children. The passenger who isn’t a child hates the captain. And the captain hates everybody.’

  Luc looked stunned. ‘This is outrageous.’

  Christina considered. ‘Well, no. It’s like a board game for adults. Who can you afford to leave alone together on the boat without them killing each other?’

  Luc gave an unwilling laugh. ‘It sounds poisonous.’

  ‘Quiet,’ she corrected him. ‘Not a lot of call for conversation.’

  Three hours out of Athens the captain had made his first error of navigation. Their passengers were the charterer’s sister, the Princess, and her children. All too soon it had emerged that the Princess understood charts better than Demetrius. Indeed, even Christina could read the charts better.

  From the moment that had become apparent, the atmosphere on board had become so tense that she could have taken a vow of silence and no one would have noticed.

  Her tension must have shown. In spite of her ironic tone, Luc looked at her curiously.

  ‘Will you jump ship?’

  ‘It’s a tempting thought. You don’t know how tempting,’ she said with feeling.

  His eyes glinted. ‘Then let me take you out of all this.’

  That startled her. She jum
ped and lifted her eyes to scan his face candidly.

  ‘I can’t go,’ she said in pure reflex.

  ‘Why not? You’re wretched. Walk away.’

  ‘It’s not as easy as that.’

  ‘It is for a clear-headed girl like you.’ He paused, then added softly, ‘Unless it’s me you don’t want to go with. Do I frighten you, Christina?’

  That was altogether too close to the truth. She lifted her chin.

  ‘I am not afraid of you or anyone.’

  ‘Then let me be your escape route.’

  She was thoroughly confused and more than a little indignant. She stared at Luc. He smiled back. The bland expression was complicated, but it was still too full of that private amusement for Christina’s liking. She drew herself up a little.

  ‘More and more tempting,’ she assured him with her coolest politeness. Then a thought occurred to her that drove the odd tension between them out of her head. She chuckled. ‘Especially as I have to tell Simon Aston—one of the children—that he isn’t getting the devil’s food cake he ordered for tea. But, in spite of everything, I think not.’

  Luc did not reply at once. Instead he contemplated her with an odd expression. At last he gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Turned down for a schoolboy.’

  Christina sniffed. ‘A row with a schoolboy. Be precise.’

  ‘Very lowering to the vanity.’

  But from the tilt to his mouth Christina was pretty sure that his vanity was undinted. She decided to change the subject. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

  That seemed to disconcert him. Briefly he looked annoyed; then he shrugged. ‘Getting away from it all. It’s been in the diary to visit this place for a while.’

  Which told her precisely nothing. It was quite deliberate, she was sure. Luc Henri was still being evasive. Well, two could play at that game. Christina gave him her sweetest smile.

  ‘I hope you enjoy your holiday,’ she said in a tone of unmistakable farewell.

  She turned to go. Luc stopped her. He put a hand on her arm swiftly, easily, as if he had every right to take hold of her in that casual fashion. Christina stopped dead, inexplicably shocked, aware that her face was suddenly hot. Her heart pounded.