Rendezvous Read Free

her body as comfort.
    A memory, raw and graphic, of Reed ripping off her panties, bending her over the dining table and entering her with one solid thrust flashed through Cassie’s mind. Her blood heated farther, practically hitting boiling point. Their sexual life hadn’t merely been good or great. It had been intensely hot, so hot it had overshadowed their problems—for a while.
    Cassie crossed her arms over her chest, willing her body’s eager response to Reed’s nearness to cool. “Even so, I needed more than a husband who came home only when he felt like it and thought sex was a substitute for communication.”
    Reed pushed out a sigh and dragged a hand through his dark-brown hair until the ends spiked up. He always did that when they argued, and in the very beginning she’d thought it was cute. Cassie had once loved smoothing those abused strands back down before rising to her tip toes and kissing her husband’s beleaguered face.
    Unbelievably, that urge remained. Cassie had to clench her fists to keep from acting on it.
    “I’m here now, Cass. And if it’s communication you want, that’s what you’re going to get,” Reed said. “We have six days to communicate, if that’s all you want to do.”
    “Six days?” Cassie blinked in surprise. “You mean you really intend to charter The Rendezvous ?”
    “I made a booking, didn’t I?”
    “For Robin Sherwood and his wife,” Cassie pointed out. “If I’d known who you were, I would never have taken the booking.”
    “I figured that, hence the cover name.”
    Now that she thought about it, Cassie couldn’t believe she hadn’t picked that name as fake. Robin Sherwood. Ha! At the time she’d taken the booking online, she’d been far too thrilled at the prospect of a full-paying customer to question it.
    “If you don’t take me on the trip, I won’t pay your fee,” Reed told her. “And I figure you need the money, am I right?”
    Cassie narrowed her eyes. Since she’d had the Sherwoods slotted in, she hadn’t been able to take any other bookings, and it was too late now. She couldn’t afford to take no income at all for the entire week. From the smug expression on Reed’s face, he knew it. It seemed she didn’t really have a choice but to spend the week in close quarters with the infuriating man, the one man who made her forget all common sense as easily as he smiled.
    What if he really does want to talk, to really talk?
    Cassie couldn’t prevent a seed of hope from germinating in her heart, even though she was deathly afraid she’d be disappointed with Reed’s definition of communication—whatever it was. Yet the hope was there, and she had to give it a chance—she had to give them a chance, one last one, before they decided once and for all if they had a future.
    After all, he was still her husband.
    “All right, Reed. You’ve hired yourself a captain.”

Chapter Three
    As it turned out, Reed was prone to sea sickness.
    Something he would have loved to have known before he got stuck on the open water of the Whitsunday Passage on a forty-something-foot sailboat that never seemed to stop moving. Up and down, up and down… ugh . This was not something his stomach was used to.
    He’d lived all of his life in land-locked locations. He’d moved from his parents’ three-bedroom fibro house in Penrith to the police academy, then on to a series of postings in inner-city Sydney. He’d been on a joint task force with the water police when he’d met Cassie at a pub at The Rocks, Sydney’s famous harbour-side tourist precinct.
    To say it was love at first sight was too cheesy for Reed’s taste, but after talking and flirting with her all that night he would have been willing to crawl over broken glass for her phone number. Cassie hadn’t made him go that far, but he’d nearly been reduced to begging before she’d relented. She’d only been planning to stay in Sydney two weeks, while visiting her brother.
    Ten days later, Reed had