Sunny Chandler's Return (3 page)

“Was it something I said?”

She faced him like a spitting cat. “It was everything you said, everything you did. I despise that stupid, masculine superiority that you emanate like a bad odor. In fact, I wholly dislike every sexist thing about you, Mr. Beaumont. Now, leave me alone.”

“All right, look, I’m sorry, maybe I was coming on a little too strong.”

“A little too strong?”

“I saw you and I wanted to take you to bed. So—”

He was talking to her back again. He jogged down the steps to the gravel drive that was doing serious damage to Sunny’s pastel leather heels. He caught her arm; she wrested it free.

“If you get your kicks from talking dirty, Mr. Beaumont, I suggest you go to Bourbon Street. There are girls there you can pay by the minute to listen to that garbage. But please spare me from listening to it.”

“George gave me the impression that you’re not like the women around here.”

“Thank heaven for that.”

“You lead a single life in the city.”

“Right.”

“So I was just going straight to the heart of the matter. We’ve only got a week.”

“Of course. Why waste time?” she said, dripping sarcasm from every syllable.

“A sophisticated woman like you knows the score. I saw you, wanted you, I made my move. If I read you wrong, you have my sincerest apology. I wouldn’t want to offend you.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.”

“So, do we plan a roll in the sack for later in the week or not?”

She stared at him, momentarily speechless. But he looked like he actually expected an answer. Finally she said, “No, Mr. Beaumont, we do not.”

He grinned disarmingly. “Sure?”

She crossed her arms over her middle and assumed the aggravated stance and expression that had burst innumerable masculine egos. “Not unless hell freezes over, Mr. Beaumont.”

He wasn’t the least put off. Indeed, he moved closer, so close that she had to tilt her head back to look up at him. “Then you don’t play fair. You should have just come right out and told me that, Sunny,” he said in a throbbing voice, “instead of getting all warm and fluid while we were dancing.”

Sunny stared up at him with mortification, not only because his words were so provocative, but because they were so accurate. “I...you...I didn’t get warm an... an...and fluid.”

He peered at her from beneath a shelf of unruly dark blond brows. “You’ve already got one lie to your credit, Sunny. I wouldn’t go pushing my luck if I were you.”

“I’m not lying!”

His eyes slid down her middle. “Want me to prove it?”

She spun on her heels, which wasn’t too easy to do in the loose gravel, and stormed toward her car. Ty, grinning from ear to ear, watched her get into an American sports car and drive away as though the devil were after her. In essence that was exactly who was after her, Ty thought with a lecherous grin.

“I warned you you’d strike out,” George said, joining him under the porte cochere.

“This is just the first inning, George. Don’t start making space above the mantel for all the fishing trophies you’re going to catch with that new rod,” Ty said confidently. “A lot can happen in a week.”

George seemed equally confident of Ty’s failure. “A week isn’t much time.”

In her car, Sunny was speeding down the highway. “A week!” she exclaimed. It would seem like an eternity.

Two

She had forgotten how hot the sun could be out on the lake. Fran and she had spent hours lying on beach towels spread out on this very pier, basted in suntan oil so thick they could trace the initials of their latest beaux on their thighs, bellies, chests.

How they had giggled! How catty they’d been, speculating if this girl really
did,
as everyone said she did, wondering if this boy was as good a kisser as his smug girlfriend claimed, weighing Warren Beatty’s merits against those of Paul Newman.

Everything had been such fun then. Growing up in a small town hadn’t been so disagreeable. Maybe that was the problem; she had simply outgrown the town. She was no longer a small-town girl. Now she belonged in the city.

New Orleans was a laid-back city in comparison with many others, but even at that, it couldn’t offer this sublime serenity. She’d forgotten how quiet the country could be. The hustle and bustle and clamorous noise of the city seemed far away. For at least today, she had nothing to do but lie here in the sun and soak up the silence and the glorious heat.

For most people the heavy, humid heat would be stifling. Sunny loved it. She welcomed its blanketing embrace. The sun’s rays seeped into her skin like mystical healing powers, inducing a delicious torpor, a state of utter laziness.

There was very little breeze, but occasionally a breath of it would stir the tops of the cypress trees lining the shore. On the horizon enormous white thunder-clouds were building up. They were empty threats of evening showers that rarely materialized. The lake was still, its surface glassy. Sunny liked the sound of the water lapping at the piling beneath the dock. Insects droned around her. Dragonflies skimmed the surface of the lake, sometimes rippling the water with their fragile, sheer wings.

Their buzzing sound, combined with the rhythmic, slapping sound of water against the piling, was hypnotic. She dozed.

“You’ve got a lot of nerve.”

Sunny sat up, grabbing the top of her bikini in the process. Her heart was in her throat. Bright yellow dots exploded against a field of black in front of her eyes. She had sat up too fast and didn’t immediately regain her vision or her equilibrium. When she did, she muttered a curse.

Ty Beaumont was hauling himself onto her dock and securing his small fishing boat to one of the piles.

“You’re the one with a lot of nerve, Mr. Beaumont. You scared me half to death!”

“Sorry.” His grin said otherwise. “Were you asleep?”

“I must have dozed off.”

“Didn’t you hear my motor?”

“I thought it was a bug.”

“A bug?”

“A dragonfly.”

He looked at her warily. “How long have you been out in this sun?”

“Forget it,” Sunny said, and uttered a long-suffering sigh.

She couldn’t lie back down. It was bad enough having to look up at him from a sitting position. She stubbornly refused to secure the neck strap of her bikini. The bra was snug and stretchy enough to stay up by itself. She wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of seeing her rattled. Groping for and tying the straps would make her look like a flustered old maid in the company of her first gentleman caller. Well, she wasn’t an old maid. And he sure as hell wasn’t a gentleman.

He plopped down on the bare deck beside her. “Won’t you have a seat?” she asked sweetly.

He merely grinned again. “Thanks.”

To give herself something to do besides stare into his mirrored sunglasses and wonder what part of her exposed body he was looking at, she took off her own sunglasses and unnecessarily cleaned the tinted lenses with a corner of her towel. “What are you doing here?”

“I was fishing on the lake and just happened to see you sprawled out here, lying half naked. That’s why I said you’ve got a lot of nerve. You were issuing an open invitation to any pervert on the lake to come over here and take a gander, possibly do you bodily harm.”

“I’ve been sunbathing on this pier practically all my life, and no one has ever bothered me before. In fact, you can’t even see this dock from the open lake. You have to come into the cove. And as far as I know, there’s never been a pervert on Latham Lake...until now.”

His laughter was deep and richly masculine. “Well, I’ve admitted to being interested in your body, but I wouldn’t do anything too perverted.” He paused for several beats. “Unless you like it that way.”

Sunny got the impression that he winked behind his sunglasses. She hastily began tossing things into her canvas beach bag. Paperback book. Sun visor. Transistor radio. Deciding to leave her towel where it was for the present, she stood up and began stalking barefoot across the planks.

“Where’re you going?”

His arm shot out. Sunny gasped. His hard fingers encircled one of her ankles. He didn’t make her stumble, but he effectively stopped her in her tracks just the same.

“Indoors. I prefer sunbathing in private. Beyond that, I don’t want to swap sexual innuendos with you, Mr. Beaumont.”

“Chicken?”

“No!”

“Then come back.”

It was a challenge Sunny had to accept. But she would have agreed to anything just to get his strong fingers from around her ankle. The contact was shooting alarming sensations up her leg and into her thigh. She worked her ankle from his firm grip and sat back down on the towel, her expression mutinous.

“I was only being neighborly.” She glanced at him with patent disbelief. “I was,” he said defensively. “I was only trying to make you feel welcome.”

“I don’t need the welcome mat rolled out. I grew up here, remember?”

“Then by comparison that makes me the newcomer. You should be nice to me.”

She trapped a smile just before it broke across her lips. Give this man an inch and he’d take endless miles. He needed no encouragement, not even a simple smile. Sunny only wished his charm was easier to ward off.

He was dressed in cutoffs and a faded sleeveless shirt, which was opened almost to his waist. She couldn’t help but notice that his chest was muscled and matted with crinkly, sweat-curly, dark blond hair. He had nice legs, too, if you liked hard, well-shaped muscles, tanned skin, and sun-gilded body hair. He wasn’t wearing any socks with his tennis shoes. And he had on a bill cap.

Sunny associated bill caps with baseball players and rednecks with “Honk if you’re horny” bumper stickers on their muddy pickup trucks. Neither type appealed to her. But Ty Beaumont under a bill cap wasn’t bad at all. Perhaps because of his blond hair curling around the sides of it, and the way he wore it low on his brow right above his opaque sunglasses. When he smiled, his teeth shone whitely in his bronzed face.

His shirt clung damply. There were beads of perspiration trickling down his neck and making sodden points out of strands of his hair. Sunny rarely saw a man sweating. The men she came into contact with were usually inside air-conditioned buildings. They were dressed in business suits and ties. They always had on socks.

Beaumont was a shock to her system, that was all. The scent of sweat and sunshine and lake water on a man was new to her.

That was the only way she could account for her accelerated pulse and the fact that the bottom had fallen out of her stomach. She wanted to run just as fast as she could back into the security of her cabin. But she couldn’t retreat without losing face. So, she would stay and be “nice” to him if it killed her.

“Catch anything?” she asked, nodding down toward the boat.

He leaned back, stretching his long legs out and propping himself up on one elbow. “Not yet.”

His simple answer vibrated with undertones that made Sunny uncomfortably aware of just how skimpy her bikini was. It was the color of cayenne and set off her golden coloring to full advantage. She wished she had brought along the jungle print sarong that went with it. A cover-up hadn’t seemed necessary when she left the cabin. Now she longed for one. A T-shirt, a robe, a bear rug, anything to shield her from Ty Beaumont’s gaze. She couldn’t see it behind his glasses, but she could
feel
it moving over her, resting on places that felt abnormally warm.

“It’s hot today,” she said briskly.

“And getting hotter.”

“Almost too hot to fish.” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. Her father was a fisherman. In the summertime he went out early in the morning, while it was still relatively cool and the lake was shrouded with mist. He never went out in his fishing boat in the heat of the day. An accusation was forming in her mind, but he spoke before she had a chance to.

“I bet you love the heat.”

“I do,” Sunny admitted. “How did you know?”

“You’re a very sensuous woman.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Lots of things. I watched you yesterday at the party.”

He crossed his legs more comfortably. At least the readjustment made
him
more comfortable. It unnerved Sunny considerably. She swallowed hard as she glanced down at the impressive bulge between his thighs. The aged denim cutoffs had conformed to the shape of his body years ago. They kept no secrets.

“I noticed your ankle bracelet right away.” He reached out and, with his index finger, followed the slender gold chain around her ankle. “There’s not another woman in Latham Green who wears an ankle bracelet.”

“Have you personally verified that statistic?”

“An educated guess,” he said, taking no offense at her mild rebuke. “It’s not a piece of jewelry that the majority of women wear. Only women with intensely passionate natures.”

She jerked her foot away from his hand. “That’s crazy.” Sunny wished that her voice had more impetus behind it and didn’t sound so breathy. “I bought it because I like it. I think it’s pretty.”

“You bought it for yourself?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“A man didn’t give it to you?”

“No.”

“That’s a damn shame.”

“Why?”

“Installing it would have made for one helluva private party.” He grinned broadly.

“Look, Mr. Beaumont, I don’t know what my
former
friend George told you about me—”

“Oh, he told me plenty, but I formed my own opinions.”

“In the ten minutes that we were together?”

“Before we even met,” he said easily. “Did you realize that you mouthed the words to every song the band played last night?”

Sunny was about to argue when she decided that denying it was pointless. Singing along with the radio was a habit of hers. “I like music.”

“And food. I’ve already told you that your mouth does more for a strawberry than shortcake and whipped cream.”

“You make eating a strawberry sound lewd.”

“It bordered on it,” he said softly.

Sunny had no effective comeback prepared and decided that if such were the case, it would be more prudent to say nothing. Even when she was at her most acerbic, he seemed to be ready with a glib rejoinder.

“You selected food from the buffet very carefully. Food with eye appeal. Everything you put on your plate was...pretty.” He smiled as though “pretty” was a word he didn’t use frequently. “Except for the oyster, of course, and you only took that because Mrs. Morris was annoying you.”

Sunny’s mouth formed a small
o
. Just how long
had
he watched her? But more startling than the time involved was his accurate perception of her. She felt exposed and vulnerable. “You should have become a window peeper.”

“How do you know I’m not?” At her stunned expression, he laughed. “Relax. I’m not that subtle. Nor that masochistic. If I’m interested in a woman, I want to do more than peep at her from the bushes. I want to touch.”

He picked up her plastic bottle of suntan oil and poured a drop into his palm. He sniffed it. “Smells like a drink from Trader Vic’s bar.”

“That’s why I bought it.”

“I’m not surprised. Several times last night I saw you smelling the flowers.”

He was rubbing the oil between his palms. The slow, rotating motion of his large hands was getting to Sunny. She blinked rapidly to stave off the trance she felt stealing over her like a fog. “I like perfume.” She noticed suddenly that she was very thirsty. Her tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth. “I love anything perfumed. Flowers, suntan oil, anything.”

“Have you ever been into that perfumery in New Orleans?”

“The one on Royal?”

“I forget exactly. Somewhere in the French Quarter.” He was rubbing his thumbs along the tips of his fingers, coating them with the slick oil. “I spent an entertaining hour in there once, selecting perfume.”

“For whom?” She’d been watching the movement of his fingers too long. Their wanton enjoyment of the suntan oil had made her drowsy. The question popped out before she realized she’d spoken it. When she did, she snapped back to attention.

“My mother.”

“I should have guessed.”

His smile was lazy. “I didn’t realize until then that fragrance is a science.”

“The formulas are carefully guarded.”

“I don’t mean how it’s made.” He sat up straight and leaned close. “I was talking about the science of applying it.”

Sunny wished he would take off his glasses. It was disconcerting to talk to her own image in their mirrored lenses. But now, when he granted her unspoken wish and removed them, she wanted him to replace them immediately. His eyes were much more unsettling than the opaque sunglasses.