Double Dealing Read Free

husband come to collect his wife and
wandered into the wrong room!”
    Samantha was about to reply to the comment when quite
suddenly the intruder glanced in her direction. Something about the intensity
of the gaze made itself felt, and she instinctively reached for her glasses
which were lying on a small shelf attached to the table. She prodded the frames
onto her nose with an automatic gesture and discovered that the man was
watching her even though he was now being approached by two determined
attendants.
    Samantha smiled in spite of herself as the image of the
stranger jumped into focus. In the white-tiled room full of white towels, white
uniforms, clear crystal pools and nude female bodies, he managed to convey the
impression of a satyr who has just succeeded in crashing a party of sea nymphs.
    There was something very solid and substantial about him,
Samantha decided as he looked away to speak quietly to one of the attendants.
He wasn’t fat or soft or particularly tall, just very much there. An
uncompromising, rather unyielding male presence. Then Samantha blinked in
sudden intuition as the intruder followed the nod of one of the attendants and
glanced again in her direction.
    “Oh, no! It couldn’t be! Surely he wouldn’t just walk in
here unannounced.” The words were spoken on a weak hiss of dismay as the man
started toward her with a resolute stride. Just from watching him walk Samantha
got the distinct impression he did everything resolutely. “Oh, hell,” she
murmured in frustration.
    “You know him?” Miss Carson demanded as she returned to work
with a vengeance.
    “I’m not sure, I… Please, Miss Carson, could you stop that for a
moment? I can’t think when you’re pounding on me!”
    “You are here to exercise the body, not the brain!”
    Skirting the hot plunge, the stranger was rapidly nearing
Samantha’s massage table. She found herself desperately wishing for more
covering than the towel provided and grimly reminded herself not to raise her
bare upper torso far from the surface of the table.
    This wasn’t going at all as she had planned! If this was
Gabriel Sinclair, things were already veering disastrously from the course she
had charted. Samantha groaned to herself, and this time the exclamation was not
caused by Miss Carson’s tender touch. How could everything have gone so wrong?
How had Sinclair gotten past that hulking desk clerk in the lobby? Why hadn’t she
been paged?
    Of all the stupid, ridiculous situations! It looked very
much as if she was about to be forced to begin negotiations on the deal of a
lifetime while her body was being pummeled. Talk about not being firmly in
control of a situation!
    Frantically, recognizing that she simply could not get up
and flee into the woods like any other respectable nymph would under such
circumstances, Samantha tried to concentrate on what she knew of Gabriel
Sinclair. If she was going to survive the encounter without a total loss of
dignity, she had better get a firm grip on her flustered thoughts.
    The problem was that there wasn’t a great deal of
information to marshal and collect in her head. From the beginning Samantha had
realized she was going to have to play the opening scene by ear. The computer
had contained so few personal facts on this man that she hadn’t even been able
to guess his age.
    Now Samantha eyed the firmly etched brackets around the hard
line of his mouth, absorbed the impact of the quiet, controlled solidity of
him, and pegged the years at thirty-seven or thirty-eight. There was a
restrained, shuttered look about the stranger, as if he did not allow himself
to become too involved with anything or anyone around him. It would take that
kind of aloof arrogance to stride through a spa room full of naked women,
Samantha decided grimly. The impression was reinforced by the knife blade of a
nose and the cool, watchful expression which schooled the bluntly unhandsome
features.
    “What do you think, Miss Carson?” she