This feeling of being constantly unsettled and on edge was unacceptable, she told herself for the thousandth time as she made her way to her room to send Georgie an email giving her a temporary number and an update, and to arrange some annual leave for next week. As was the longing to know what Rico’s bedroom looked like, and not just because perhaps that was where he stashed all his things. She did not need to know anything about his bedroom or how exciting it would be to kiss him.
The only interest she had in his attitude to risk was that it was another thing to investigate and report back to Finn. An analysis of how different it was to hers was not required, any more than was the kick of appreciation she’d felt in the pit of her stomach when she’d realised that he recognised her ability and need to take care of herself.
She would not be sidling across her room to the balcony that overlooked the terraces to check out the splash she’d just heard that indicated a gorgeous man might now be in the pool, scything slickly through the water while wearing virtually nothing. She would not be contemplating how deliciously tanned his skin might be, how powerfully he might move or whether the well-honed definition of his muscles was limited to his arms.
Time was marching on and she had a job to do, and she would concentrate one hundred per cent on that.
* * *
Rico tended to do much of his strategising while pounding up and down his pool, and the swim he’d just taken was no exception. As the rhythmic strokes cleared his head of the tangle of unanswerable questions Carla had stirred up, and his body of the excruciating tension that had been gripping him, he’d had something of an epiphany. Not about the shift in his attitude towards BASE jumping—that was still clear as mud—but about how to handle Carla and her continued attempts to prise information out of him.
One excellent way of putting a stop to it, it had occurred him as he’d flip turned and switched from crawl to butterfly, would be to divert the focus of conversation from him to her instead. He had no interest in finding anything out about her, of course, but if she was talking about herself she wouldn’t be able to interrogate him. She’d be too busy picking and choosing her own answers, the way she had at dinner last night and the police station earlier.
He might be out of practice when it came to conversation, while she was anything but, but how challenging could it be to turn her questions back on her? How hard would it be to drum up some of his own that might just wrong-foot her the way hers did him?
It was an approach that would require focus and caution, he thought with a stab of satisfaction and relief at finally having come up with a way of taking back the upper hand, but it would get him through the hours until she left, certainly through the supper he was about to start preparing, and it was a solid one.
* * *
Determined to concentrate on the job she’d come to do and not get distracted once again by the subject of her investigations, Carla walked into the kitchen and didn’t even break stride at the unexpectedly sexy sight of a big, handsome man standing at the island and pouring boiling water over a couple of tomatoes in a bowl.
‘How was your swim?’ she said, noting when he glanced up at her that there was a gleam to his eye that she’d never seen before, which was both shiveringly unsettling and unnecessarily intriguing.
‘Refreshing,’ he said with the easy-going smile that she’d learned concealed so much. ‘Wine?’
‘Thank you.’
He poured her a glass of something pale and cold and—she took a sip—utterly delicious. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
‘You can get the clams from the fridge.’
Reminding herself to focus, which was hard when she could feel his eyes burning into her back, Carla put down her glass and walked over to the appliance he’d indicated and opened the door.
‘Wow,’ she said, staring at the shelves that were crammed with more food than she’d ever seen in one place outside a supermarket. ‘You have one very well-stocked fridge.’
‘I like to eat.’
Yet there wasn’t a spare ounce on him. She’d felt him when she’d fainted into his arms. Nothing but warm, solid muscle... ‘So I’ve noticed,’ she said, hauling her recalcitrant thoughts back on track with more effort than she’d have liked.
‘Oh?’
‘Last night,’ she said, locating the box of clams and taking it out. ‘At the restaurant. You ate as though you were afraid that if you put your fork down for even a second someone would whip your plate away.’
‘The food there is good and I’d missed lunch.’
Hmm. ‘It seemed like more than that. And you did it again at brunch today.’
‘Do you cook?’
‘I never learned.’
‘Why not?’
‘Work’s always been crazily busy,’ she said, as an image of her fridge, which generally contained milk, ready meals and not a lot else, slid through her mind. ‘I’ve been putting in fourteen-hour days for years. That doesn’t leave a lot of time for haute cuisine.’
‘What were you doing in Hong Kong?’
‘Dealing with a crisis and a CEO who didn’t believe there was one.’