In McGillivray's Bed Read Free Page B

with his eyes.
    For an instant her gaze slid away, but then she broughtit back and met his squarely and Captain Ahab was back. “I needed to leave. That’s all.”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œLook, will you just go?” she said. “I’ll tell you. I promise. I haven’t done anything wrong. I just need some space and a little time.” She wasn’t quite begging, but there was a definite urgency in her tone. She met his gaze steadily. “Please.”
    There was, even now, a sense of self-possession about her. As edgy as she was, it was a polite please not a frantic please.
    Cripes, maybe it had been a proactive jump.
    He nodded and moved to start the engine. She stepped out of his way. He got it going but didn’t let out the throttle.
    â€œWhat are you waiting for?” she demanded.
    â€œYou.”
    She looked blank.
    â€œCan’t go too fast,” he explained. “I won’t be able to hear you when you tell me why you jumped. And it better be good,” he warned her, “to make up for my record catch that got away.”
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    â€œI DON’T believe it,” the scruffy fisherman said flatly when Sydney told him what had prompted her to jump overboard.
    She glared at him. Who gave him the right to pass judgment, for heaven’s sake? “Well, believe it or not, it’s true.”
    â€œLet me get this straight. You jumped off a yacht in the middle of nowhere so you wouldn’t have to get married?” He all but rolled his eyes as he repeated the gist of what she’d said.
    Her jaw tightened. “More or less.”
    He rolled his eyes, then cocked his head and fixed his gaze on her. “Are you too young to remember the phrase Just Say No?”
    â€œThat was to say no to drugs.”
    â€œIt is possible,” the grubby fisherman pointed out, “to say no to other things.”
    â€œLike baths and clean clothes?” she said sweetly, her gaze raking him.
    He had at least a couple of days’ growth of beard on his face and he wore a pair of faded jean cutoffs and an equally faded short-sleeved shirt covered with outrageous cartoon flamingos and palm trees.
    His dark brows drew down. “I’m clean,” he protested. “I took a swim this afternoon.”
    â€œA swim?”
    â€œWater’s water. Don’t change the subject. Why didn’t you just say no? No, thank you,” he corrected with a grin.
    â€œBecause,” she told him haughtily, “it wouldn’t have been efficacious.” She doubted he even knew what the word meant.
    He repeated it. “Efficacious. What’s that when it’s at home?”
    â€œAppropriate. Though I doubt you know what that means, either.”
    â€œMe?” His brows went clear up into the fringe of hair that flopped over his forehead. “ I don’t know what’s appropriate? Who jumped into the ocean miles from shore?”
    She felt her face grow hot, but she refused to acknowledge the foolishness, even though now her knees were feeling like jelly. “It worked. They didn’t see me. No one saw me.”
    â€œAnd that makes it appropriate?” He was almost shouting at her. “You’re a flaming idiot, you know that? If I hadn’t fished you out, you’d have drowned. Or been eaten by a shark.”
    â€œI saw your boat.”
    He stared at her as if she’d just escaped from Bedlam. “You saw my boat? A quarter of a bloody mile away?” He made it sound like rank idiocy. To him it obviously was. To her, at the time, it had been completely sensible and absolutely necessary.
    There had been no other way.
    She certainly couldn’t call Roland Carruthers, her father’s CEO, a liar! Not in front of the entire group of management and investors he’d brought together on the yacht to celebrate the acquisition of Butler Instruments by St. John Electronics.
    And Roland had known it, damn him. That was