LITMIR.BIZ

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of swelling tightness that grew and grew until it exploded and she screamed with the agony of blissful release.

      Then Joshua was wrenching and groaning and pouring himself into her, and their bodies eased into the sweet aftermath of mutual fulfilment that to Regan felt like the settling of her soul, like coming home…

      She rolled over onto her side at the edge of the bed, facing away from him, trying to control the unruly emotions that threatened to spill out of her mouth. She stared, dry-eyed, across the cabin, trying to close herself off from the press of feelings, reaching inwards for the courage to accept what she couldn’t change. Joshua wouldn’t want tears and tantrums—he probably got enough of those from Carolyn. He would want her to be cool and sophisticated. He might even, God forbid, want them to remain friends…

      ‘I’m sorry…’ She heard the bittersweet remorse in his voice as she felt a finger slowly trace the bony centre line of her back from her nape to the hollow at the base of her spine.

      ‘I’m not!’ She widened her eyes fiercely, refusing to regret a moment of her glorious physical outpouring of love.

      ‘No, not for what we’ve just done…’ His finger stroked up again. ‘But for the fact that I can’t offer you any more than this…’ She felt his lips against the wing of her shoulderblade. ‘If I were a different sort of man and you were a different sort of woman we could remain lovers, but we both have too much pride and self-respect to sacrifice honour to a self-serving lie…’

      She remembered that he had quoted her Shakespeare about her being a pearl, and now another quotation floated into her mind that summed up her understanding of Joshua Wade…‘Mine honour is my life; both grow in one; Take honour from me, and my life is done.’ She could not love him half so much if he were not a man of such unflinching principle.

      ‘I know…’

      She felt his hand spread out across her back as the breath came sighing from her lungs. ‘Chris wanted a long engagement…he didn’t want to lose Carolyn, but she refused to move in with him and he didn’t feel quite ready for marriage. When she broke the news that she was pregnant they had a fight in which he accused her of trying to trap him and she accused him of wanting her to have an abortion. They both said some ugly things that neither seem willing to overlook—’

      ‘You don’t have to tell me this—’ she began painfully, but he firmly overrode her.

      ‘That morning after you left the apartment, Carolyn phoned me from here in hysterics, begging me to come up and help. She and Chris had been rowing for a week, and she was at the end of her tether. She isn’t cut out to be a single mother; she’s tough in some ways but emotionally fragile in others. She had given herself to my brother in good faith and he had turned his back on her when she most needed his support. I promised her that she wouldn’t have to go through this on her own and I have to stand by that promise. I owe that to her—and to Frank and Hazel, for the way that they’d welcomed Chris into their home.

      ‘Whatever her feelings for Chris, we agreed that if we married, then for the baby’s sake it has to be a real marriage…not simply a temporary sham for the sake of convention. I’ll be a faithful, protective husband and do my utmost to ensure that she’s a contented wife. And the baby will grow up as Ryan’s brother or sister.’

      How noble of him. The acid words burned on the tip of her tongue as envy challenged her good intentions at the thought of another woman as the sole object of his cherishing. And yet it was balm to her heart to believe that the reason he had never tried to contact her again after their original tumble between the sheets might not have been because he hadn’t been interested, but because his orderly world had suddenly exploded in emotional chaos and his strong sense of honour had relegated all women but Carolyn firmly into the past.

      Only, where Regan was concerned, his past had come back to tempt him to dishonour…

      She stiffened as there was a light tap of the door.

      ‘Ahem…monsieur? Excusez-moi, but I thought you’d like to know that we’ve arrived back at the moorings. The captain is just backing into the slips…and your brother is waiting on the dock.’

      ‘Chris?’ Joshua swore in a low voice while Regan automatically yanked the edge of the satin cover over her nakedness. ‘What in the hell is he doing here?’ He lifted his voice. ‘Thanks, Pierre—I’ll be right up. Tell Grey not to lower the gangplank until he sees me on deck.’

      He climbed lithely over Regan’s prone body and began pulling on his discarded clothes.

      ‘No—you stay here,’ he commanded as she made a move to do the same, checking himself in the full-length mirror on the en suite bathroom door, raking his hair back with his fingers before buttoning the open collar of his shirt to hide the tell-tale red mark glowing on the skin on the unblemished side of his throat. ‘He probably only wants to ask if he can stay the weekend in the condo. I’ll be back as soon as I get rid of him.’ He swooped and sealed his hastily made promise with a brief kiss on her dismayed mouth.

      As soon as the door closed behind him Regan scrambled out of the bed and darted across to bolt the door. She picked up her clothes and shook them out. The skirt was a bit crumpled, but luckily the creases wouldn’t show up on the dark fabric, and her cotton-knit top was uncrushable. She would have liked to have a shower, but didn’t know whether the sound of the pipes would be audible above deck and instead contented herself with a quick spongedown in the bathroom before hurriedly dressing.

      She dashed warm water in her face from the marble basin and used a comb from the vanity to return her hair to silky smoothness. Her face looked naked without make-up, her lips pouty and swollen, and she could see whisker burns on her chin and throat. To her horror she remembered that she had put her handbag down somewhere in the lounge, when Joshua had been showing her around. Unfortunately the drawers in the vanity yielded strictly masculine toiletries, and without recourse to make-up she had to satisfy herself with a pat of male moisturiser and a dab of cologne.

      Although the boat no longer felt as if it was moving, the engine still continued to hum, and even straining her ears she could detect no sound from above. The luxury interior fittings obviously included soundproofing.

      However, for added safety, she closed the bathroom door and perched on the closed toilet seat to await her rescue. When fifteen minutes had passed by the tick of the excruciatingly accurate platinum watch on her wrist she paced back out into the cabin and peered out of the porthole, but all she could see was the stylish super-yacht parked in the next slip.

      After twenty-five minutes she could bear it no longer. Perhaps Joshua had taken Chris across the boardwalk to his condominium. All the two-storeyed condominiums that edged the dock had electronically coded security gates that opened from the boardwalk into private courtyards, and it might be possible for her to slip off the boat without being seen, unless the two men were standing at one of the huge picture windows overlooking the canal.

      She silently cracked open the cabin door and peeped down the empty corridor towards the companionway. Everything was quiet. She decided that she would creep as far as the stairs and see if she could hear any conversation from the lounge. Her hand had just touched the smooth, polished stair-rail when there was a slight sound behind her.

      ‘Looking for this?’

      She spun around, hoping that Pierre had tidied up his accent.

      Christopher Wade stood in the open doorway of one of the end cabins, her navy jacket dangling from a coat hanger on his finger.

      He was looking very casual in white jeans and a striped T-shirt, and behind him an open suitcase lay on the threequarter bed. Regan realised that whatever had brought him back to Palm Cove for the second consecutive weekend, he hadn’t arrived expecting big brother to give him houseroom. In view of the tension between them he had evidently chosen to stay on the boat.

      ‘Yes, I was, thank you,’ she said, hoping her voice didn’t sound as nervously shrill to him as it did to her own ears. ‘I spilled a drink on myself and Pierre was

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