The evening didn’t start very promisingly. All her timings were out so that the fish was cooked before the starter was even ready, the sauce she’d cobbled together had started to curdle and she forgot all about the accompanying vegetables until the last minute. With a grimace she lifted up the lid of the boiling potatoes—only for a cloud of steam to hit her in the face and make her feel as if she’d been thrown into a sauna.
There wasn’t even enough time for her to touch up her make-up and brush her hair before the hungry crew arrived. They crowded in a cluster around the table outside, onto which she’d just piled a haphazard collection of crockery and glasses.
And then Carlos appeared, looking infuriatingly cool and sexy. He had clearly found time to shower and change because the thick black hair was still damp and Kat thought she could detect the raw clean tang of sandalwood.
For a moment he just stood there, surveying the general air of disarray—and his mouth twisted.
‘Has someone trashed the boat while I’ve been showering, or are you trying to sabotage the meal in order to prove a point, Princesa?’
An image of Carlos in the shower was the last thing Kat needed to add to her already-shot nerves, and a renewed waft of sandalwood as he waved a disparaging arm around didn’t help. She gritted her teeth in a grim replica of a smile. ‘Would…would you like to sit down?’
‘Where?’ he questioned pointedly.
Kat leant over and cleared a space at the table. ‘Right there. Dinner is about to be served.’
‘I can hardly wait.’
Horrible, sarcastic tyrant! I’ll show him, vowed Kat silently, as she went back into the cramped galley to prod at a boiling potato which unfortunately still had the consistency of a rock. She tipped salad onto eight plates and drizzled on some of the dressing she’d made, trying desperately to remember what was supposed to go in it, but afraid to ask for fear of looking stupid.
But she knew the moment that everyone had started eating that something was wrong.
‘Is everything…okay?’ she questioned.
There was a brief but loaded silence.
‘Salad dressing which tastes of washing-up liquid is an interesting innovation, querida, but perhaps it’s easy to see why it hasn’t yet come to dominate the market,’ came Carlos’s sarcastic assessment, and Kat felt like hurling a dish at his arrogant face as the rest of the crew burst into relieved laughter and pushed their barely touched plates away.
The main course was no better. The fish was stone-cold, the potatoes still rock-hard and the overambitious sauce had congealed into a horrible mess around the plate. As Carlos pointed out, it was a waste of a perfectly good fish, and once again Kat ended up scraping most of it into the garbage.
She felt hot from the heat of the kitchen when she appeared on deck again after crushing amaretto biscuits and cooking some mixed berries which now resembled roadkill. They looked up at her expectantly. Seven faces in all, but Kat could see only one. It swam before her line of vision with cold ebony eyes that mocked her which made her aware that her face must be flushed and her hair falling down.
‘Everyone ready for pudding?’
‘What kind of pudding?’ questioned Mike.
‘I’m calling it “Berry Surprise”,’ said Kat brightly.
Carlos took a mouthful of wine and put his glass down, a sardonic smile curving the edges of his lips. ‘Please, no more surprises—not tonight—I don’t think I could take it.’ There was an answering peal of laughter from the other men before he fixed her with a cool stare. ‘I don’t really think you’re up to it—at least, not tonight. Perhaps you could bring some cheese and fruit upstairs and I’ll eat there instead.’
She wanted to tell him to get it himself. That she wasn’t his slave. But in a way, that’s exactly what she was. And if she threw some sort of tantrum about her treatment, wouldn’t that only increase his glaring contempt for her?
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And stupidly, his assessment hurt. Really hurt. I don’t really think you’re up to it. With those few wounding words he had made her feel so…so inferior. And the trouble was that he had been right. Was he a man who enjoyed wounding, she wondered bitterly, and was that why he had been such a success as a bullfighter?
Determined to salvage something of the evening, Kat put a ridiculous amount of care into arranging a dish for him, washing and drying all the fruit and arranging it in an artful rainbow display. Placing two pieces of cheese at the dish’s centre, she added bread and crackers and took it upstairs, to a deck that was washed with moonlight and empty save for a tall figure which dominated the skyline.
Carlos was leaning over the rail, looking out to sea—and there was something so silent and imposing about his frozen stance that, for a moment, Kat just stood in the shadows silently watching him. Seemingly lost in thought, she’d never seen anyone looking quite so alone before—nor quite so comfortable with his own sense of solitude.
And despite his wounding words, she found herself realising that she knew little of the man who was now effectively her employer. Not even how old he was. Mid-thirties, perhaps—maybe more, for his handsome face was hard and lined with experience and he carried with him a habitual and faint air of cynicism. Why hadn’t he settled down with a wife and a family, she wondered, when women must have been beating a path to his door for most of his adult life? Was it because, as Mike had said, he was a true loner?
He must have heard her, or sensed her presence, because he turned round and Kat forced herself to stir into life, to step out of the shadows and into his private circle of silver moonlight.
‘I’ll…I’ll put this over here,’ she said, holding the platter up, her voice suddenly faltering and she wasn’t sure why. ‘Is that okay?’
‘Thanks.’
He watched as she bent over the table, the dark hair falling in untidy strands around her face and the linen she wore now looking crumpled. And yet she looked…delicious—more womanly than at any other time he’d seen her, and curiously accessible without her ridiculous high-fashion status symbols and dripping with jewels. Her face was flushed with heat and the effects of probably the only honest day’s work she’d ever done.