AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Roman Garner starred at the girl steering his boat barefoot, her toned legs displayed by the glittering gown hooked into her panties and a clump of her hair sliding down her head on one side.
He’d just been tossed across the cabin and woken from a perfectly sound sleep.
But the jet lag and fatigue—which had driven him down to his boat to take a nap and escape the boring spectacular of the Cade Launch Ball in the first place—had disappeared. He grabbed the rail as the boat skipped over the waves, glaring at the girl, whose wide eyes were now the size of saucers.
‘I... I wasn’t stealing it,’ she said, having regained the power of speech.
‘Oh, yeah, does it belong to you?’ he snarled, determined not to be amused by her horrified expression. Or turned on by the way her breasts pressed against the jewelled fabric of her dress and seemed to be sparkling in the moonlight.
His head hurt and it was all her fault.
‘I was borrowing it,’ she explained.
‘Usually, when someone borrows my property, they ask me first,’ he pointed out and rubbed his forehead, where he was pretty sure he’d just lost a sizeable portion of braincells after headbutting the cabin floor. ‘So I can tell them to get lost.’
‘I thought the boat belonged to my brother-in-law.’
A likely story. Did she think he was an idiot? ‘Yeah, right.’
She opened her mouth to say more, when the boat smacked a rogue swell. Her hands were yanked off the steering column as the boat wheeled to one side.
Her scream split the night as he lurched to catch her before she went headfirst into the Tyrrhenian Sea.
They went down hard on the deck together. He managed to roll just in time to take the brunt of the fall, instead of crushing her body beneath his much larger one. But it cost him. He grunted as pain radiated through his hip.
The boat’s engines cut out instantly. Thank God, the kill cord was already engaged.
He lay dazed on the deck, staring up at the night sky with his arms full of the little boat thief—who it turned out was soft in all the right places.
It had clearly been far too long since he’d had a woman on top of him, if he was noticing the girl’s lithe figure and abundant curves.
Something to remedy another time, Roman.
His wayward libido quickly got a clue, though, thanks to the throbbing pain in his backside—and his all-round fury at being inconvenienced to this extent.
She scrambled up, managing to recover a lot quicker than he did, her face a picture of anguish and shock... But not nearly penitent enough for his liking.
‘I didn’t mean to steal your boat,’ she protested.
‘Yeah? So, whose boat did you mean to steal?’ he snarled, lifting himself up on his elbows.
But then the full moon appeared from behind a cloud and he got a proper look at her features.
Her make-up was almost as much of a mess as the rest of her, but the smudges of eyeliner, the dregs of mascara and the lipstick she had chewed off did nothing to detract from her unusual face—wide eyes, a stubborn chin and a slight overbite accentuated her surprising beauty. A small gold ring in her left nostril added to her quirky, unorthodox appearance.
The girl was striking...
His eyes narrowed. And vaguely familiar.
How did he know her? And then it hit him. She had arrived with that bastard Cade’s wife, Lacey. If he’d known Cade wasn’t going to be at the launch himself, he would never have bothered to attend the event—even though it was less than a mile from the island retreat where he was supposed to be starting an enforced two-week break.
‘You work for Brandon Cade, right?’ Was she the wife’s assistant? If one of Cade’s employees had tried to steal his boat, he would find a way to use it against his rival.
Perhaps a little industrial espionage? Or better yet, a major lawsuit to humiliate the man.
‘What? No...’ she said. ‘Do you know Brandon?’ she asked, sounding wary now, but still not sorry.
He climbed to his feet, ignoring the pain from his slam dunk on the deck.
