Memory assailed her. She thought of him carrying his wounded friend, his white shirt wet with the blood of life. Wet and red. She swallowed. ‘It looks…it looks very inviting.’
‘Sit down,’ he said, and gestured to one of the loungers. ‘Have you eaten breakfast?’
She sank into the cushions. She never ate breakfast, but, most peculiarly, she had an appetite now. Or rather, other pervasive appetites were threatening to upset her equilibrium, so she decided to sublimate them by opting for food.
‘Not yet.’
‘Good. Me neither.’
She watched as he opened the cool-box and pulled out rough bread and chilled grapes, and local cheese wrapped in vine leaves, laying them down on a chequered cloth. With what looked like a Swiss Army knife he began tearing and cutting her off portions of this and that.
‘Here. Eat.’ He narrowed his eyes critically. ‘You look like you could do with a little feeding up.’
She sat up and grabbed the crude sandwich and accepted a handful of grapes, preferring to look at the chilled claret-coloured fruit than meet that disturbing blue stare. ‘You make me sound like a waif and stray!’
He thought she was perfect, but that now was neither the time nor the place to tell her. ‘You look like you haven’t eaten much lately,’ he observed.
‘I’ve eaten well on Pondiki,’ she protested.
‘For how long—two weeks, maybe?’
She nodded.
‘But not before that, I guess,’ he mused.
Well, of course she hadn’t! What woman on the planet ate food when she had been dumped by a man? ‘How can you tell?’
It gave him just the excuse he needed to study her face. ‘Your cheeks have the slightly angular look of a woman who’s been skipping meals.’
‘Pre-holiday diet,’ she lied.
‘No need for it,’ he responded quietly, his eyes glittering as he sank his teeth into the bread.
He made eating look like an art-form. In fact, he made eating look like the most sensual act she had ever seen—with his white teeth biting into the unresisting flesh of the grapes, licking their juice away with the tip of his tongue—and Catherine was horrified by the progression of her thoughts.
When she’d been with Peter she hadn’t been interested in other men, and yet now she found herself wondering whether that had been because there had been no man like Finn Delaney around.
‘This is very good,’ she murmured.
‘Mmm.’ He gave her a lazy smile and relaxed back, the sun beating down like a caress on his skin. There was silence for a moment, broken only by the lapping of the waves on the sand. ‘Will you be sorry to leave?’ he asked, at last.
‘Isn’t everyone, at the end of a holiday?’
‘Everyone’s different.’
‘I guess in a way I wish I could stay.’ But that was the coward’s way out—not wanting to face up to the new-found emptiness of her life back home. The sooner she got back, the sooner she could get on with the process of living. Yet this moment seemed like living. Real, simple and unfettered living, more vital than living had ever been.
Finn raised his head slightly and narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Something you don’t want to go back to?’ he questioned perceptively. ‘Or someone?’
‘Neither,’ she answered, because the truth was far more complex than that, and she was not the type of person to unburden herself to someone she barely knew. She had seen too much in her job of confidences made and then later regretted.
And she didn’t want to think about her new role in life—as a single girl out on the town, having to reinvent herself and start all over again. With Peter away on assignments so much, she had felt comfortable staying in and slouching around in tracksuits while watching a movie and ploughing her way through a box of popcorn. She guessed that now those evenings would no longer be guilt-free and enjoyable. There would be pressure to go out with her girlfriends. And nights in would seem as though life was passing her by.
‘I suppose I’ve just fallen in love with this island,’ she said softly. Because that much was true. A place as simple and as beautiful as Pondiki made it easy to forget that any other world existed.
‘Yeah.’ His voice was equally soft, and he took advantage of the fact that she was busy brushing crumbs from her bare brown thighs to watch her again, then wished he hadn’t. For the movement was making her breasts move in a way which was making him feel the heavy pull of longing, deep in his groin. He turned over onto his stomach. ‘It’s easy to do.’
Catherine removed a grape pip from her mouth and flicked it onto the white sand. ‘And what about you? Will you be sorry to leave?’