Charmed By You ((Destiny Bay Romances-The Islanders 5)) (2 page)

Heather couldn’t think at all. She felt a little dizzy. How could he be proud of something like this? It was small and looked incredibly dirty, with broken-down chairs and chipped plaster walls. The light was gloomy, the air as thick as pea soup. The one bright spot, she had to admit, was Mitch’s tray of medical instruments, which gleamed with antiseptic polish.

“Can’t you open a window?” she asked tentatively.

“They are open. There’s nothing covering them but screens. Have to keep the bugs out.” He pulled out a folding chair with a torn seat and offered it to her.

As she sat down on the edge, her gaze traveled from
the room to the man who stood looking down at her. He
was dressed in a white coat, but underneath she could see faded jeans.
Still dressing like a teenager after all these years.

That had always been the problem. Mitch was the most
charming, most engaging man she’d ever known, but no
matter how arrogantly adult he appeared, he wasn’t really
a man at all. He was a boy, and, like a boy, he wanted it
all. He thought he could be a physician and still play around
at being a regular guy. He thought he could be eccentric
and still rise by his own merits. He refused to believe that
it just wouldn’t work, that he would have to grow up to succeed in the real world. And when given
a choice, he picked youth over maturity every time.

“Mitch, did you get any of the letters I’ve sent to you in the last six months?”

“Letters?” he asked blankly, his eyes unreadable.

She nodded. “Four or five letters, actually.”

“Love letters?” he asked, though his smile was touched
with cynicism.

“No, Mitch. Business letters. Papers to sign.”

He cocked dark eyebrows in mock surprise. “You mean our divorce isn’t final after all?”

“This has nothing to do with the divorce. We own a house, remember?”

He nodded glumly. “Oh, yes, how I remember that house,” he answered with a touch of irony.

That was better. That was more like the Mitch who’d spent every waking hour arguing with her, not the Mitch of the early days, who’d used every excuse to be in her arms.

“That house was designed by the best architect in Flagstaff,” she announced, then regretted the words as
she remembered how many times she’d said them in the
past. “Maybe if you’d spent more time there you would have learned to appreciate it better.” It was almost as as though they hadn’t been separated for all this time. They could pick up the arguments right where they’d left off.

He shrugged. “That place wasn’t so much a house as it was a status symbol, a signal to all the other society
fools you ran around with that you deserved to be part of the gang
. It was cold, sterile, uninviting—but on the right hill, bordering the right country club.”

She took a deep breath. Ah, yes. Just like old times. She must never forget these running arguments that had gone on for days at a time. A small glow of satisfaction kindled in her. As long as she remembered the worst of what they’d had together, she would never be tempted to resurrect the best.

She rose energetically to her feet. “Good. Since you feel that way about the house, you’ll have no problem signing the release so I can sell it.”

She heard his soft laugh, but didn’t look up.

“So that’s all you came for. I might have known.”

His voice sounded strangely bitter, but she tried to
keep her mind on her mission. She reached into her huge shoulder bag and pulled out the fat, legal-sized envelope.

“Here we are,” she said with forced cheer. “There are
five places for you to sign.” She spread the papers out on his desk and flashed him a silver pen. “Just put down your John Hancock and I’ll be off.”

“Off?” His dark eyes seemed to be smiling, but she couldn’t tell for sure. She never had been able to read him. “What do you mean, off?”

She avoided his gaze as she stated the inevitable. “Back home. Back in the little seaplane I came in. You
didn’t think I was going to stay for a real visit, did you?”

She glanced up and found that his eyes had grown cold. What did that mean? You would think that two
years of marriage would have taught her something about
the man. She remembered his face, his voice, his hard muscular body. She knew that she could close her eyes and see him as she’d known him so well, flesh brown and smooth, all muscle and sinew without an ounce of fat, every part of him moving in sensuous grace. He’d been an unforgettable lover.

She turned away and closed her eyes for a few, guilty seconds, remembering what it had been like to love him, remembering the thrill when he surprised her, his long, muscular body feeling so hot, so fine, so exciting that she thought she would die of happiness every time. How had they lost that? Sometimes she thought maybe their love had been too intense to last. Like flying into the sun.

Yes, she’d known his body well. But his eyes—not so much. They were supposed to be the mirrors of the soul, weren’t they? His eyes had always been a mystery to her.

“Why not?” he was saying. “Now that you’re here, why not stay for a few days?”

She tried to laugh, but the hoarse sound stuck in her
throat as she met his intense gaze. Her heart was beating
hard again, and she sat down in the chair. No, she couldn’t
stay. She knew without thinking that staying would be much too dangerous. There were still too many emotions
lying raw and painful just beneath the surface of her smile.

Why didn’t he sign the papers so she could get on with it? She moved restlessly in the rickety chair.

“I hardly think we need lots of time together,” she said evenly. “We’d just fill it with ugly scenes that wouldn’t make either of us happy.”

He was standing so close that she had to crane her neck to look up into his face.

“Ugly scenes were weapons in our battle for power,”
he told her sardonically. “You were trying to get me to
conform to your country club rules. I was trying to break
you out of the mold, to introduce you to the world at large.” He narrowed his eyes as he gazed down at her. “We’re not married anymore. We don’t need to struggle
for supremacy. We can relax and enjoy each other like we
did in the days before we were married.”

Her startled glance flew from his face. What was he
suggesting? That they go back to being lovers? He had to be crazy
!

“You’ve been on this island too long,” she began weakly, but he cut her off.

“You haven’t even given it any thought. Stay the night, Heather, and think it over. I’d really like you to stay.”

He meant it; she could see that. Maybe she should stay, just for the night. Maybe... But her heart hardened. What was the problem, had he run through the supply of willing women on this little island? Was he hungry for a new experience? She wouldn’t lay herself
open to that pain again. Not for any reason.

Instead of responding to the real need she’d heard in his voice, she retained her patina of indifference. “Mitch,
you know this isn’t my sort of place.” She gazed around,
wrinkling her nose. “I mean, bugs, heat, humidity.” She
shook her head. “I couldn’t possibly stay here. I’ve got
to get back to the civilized world.”

When he shrugged with disinterest, she was glad she’d
stuck to her position. She meant nothing to him, after
all. Not anymore. There had been a time when their love
had swept them along on a current of passion as big as
the Arizona sky. But that had faded. The arguments had
pushed it into the background.

They’d known about their differences from the be
ginning. He’d often teased her about her starched-collar way of life. He’d known they were incompatible, even
when she’d been blind to it. The wonder was that he’d
ever wanted to get married. She’d puzzled over that ques
tion for months and finally come to the conclusion that
he must have thought it would be good for his career to
have a presentable wife. But once he’d decided that a
career wasn’t what he wanted, he’d shed his wife along
with his career ambitions.

“How do you like living out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?” she asked, pleased at the light note she
was able to maintain.

“I like it just fine,” he told her tonelessly. “If you think back really hard, you might remember that I grew up on an island.”

“Oh.” The thought startled her. Yes, she remembered. He was from Hawaii, even part Hawaiian, and that had been one of the things about him that had first intrigued her.
 

“Yes. You told me about your brothers and sister….and your cousins and how you all grew up barefoot and tropical.” She gave a delicate shudder. “Luckily, you survived that and came to Arizona for college.”

“I did. But I never got over missing island life.”

She looked around the room. “Is this the way you grew up?” she asked, appalled.
 

He grinned. “No. We had a beautiful house on the Big Island. My parents still live in it.”

She nodded. “I remember meeting them at our wedding,” she said softly. “They seemed like lovely people. It’s too bad we never got the time to really get to know each other.”

“Yeah. Too bad.” He looked at her and smiled, though his eyes remained icy black. “And too bad I never took you home to see where I grew up. I
don’t think you would find it as disgusting as you think.”

She drew her arms close to her sides. “Maybe not.”
She was unconvinced. “But islands are not my thing. I’ll be happy to get back to
Flagstaff.”

Suddenly she noticed his smile was widening. He lifted his
head as though listening to something in the distance.

As she listened, too, she heard the drone of an engine.

“What’s that?” she asked, an icy anxiety circling her heart.

“Sounds like Gary’s
Albatross
to me,” Mitch said plac
idly.

“No!” she whispered. Then she was running for the door. The sunlight blinded her, but she could make out the little plane circling the lagoon, climbing higher and higher into the tropic sky.

“He can’t go! He agreed to wait and take me back!”

Waving wildly, she began running toward the sandy shore. She could see happy faces in the plane’s windows. As she signaled frantically, little hands were raised, wav
ing back down to her.

“Too bad.” Mitch had followed her out into the tropic afternoon, and he tried hard to sound sympathetic, but it didn’t quite come off. “Maybe he’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!” She turned on him, furious. “What do you mean, tomorrow? I hired that man—“

“I guess he got a better price from somebody else,” Mitch interrupted. “That happens a lot. If a bunch arrive and have the money, Gary will take off every time.”

She turned and watched the little plane as it got smaller
and smaller against the mounting cloud banks on the horizon. “What am I going to do?” she asked softly.

“Stay for that visit we were talking about,” he told her firmly. “I can put you up at my place.” He turned and started back toward the clinic while she stared after him in impotent rage. This was just too convenient.
 

“Mitch Carrington,” she called as she began to run after him. “Just you wait a minute.”

She would have gone on, but her high-heeled sandals, which had teetered from the first on the rough coral road,
finally let her down. As one foot skidded in one direction,
the other bent toward the ground, and she found herself sliding toward Mitch on one knee.

“Oh, damn,” she whispered as she surveyed the dam
age, trying to ignore the humiliation of her fall. The knee
that had served as her landing gear was already bloody, not to mention stiff and sore. How was she going to get
back up on her feet without making a total fool of herself?

Mitch was standing over her looking more annoyed than sympathetic. “What do you expect when you wear shoes like that on an unpaved road?” he muttered as he reached out to help her to her feet. “And panty hose?”
He grimaced at the jagged hole in the nylon on her knee. “Didn’t you get the hint in Honolulu? Surely you realized
by the time you landed in Guam that dressing for this climate was not going to be quite like dressing for Flagstaff.”

“I am not dressing for this climate,” she snapped, chagrined that she needed to lean on him to hobble back to the clinic. “I’m dressing for myself. I never wanted to come to this island, and I don’t want to stay. So don’t try to teach me how to adapt. I’m not going to need your lessons.”

“Take off those nylons,” he ordered as he propped her against the examining table in the clinic.

“I will not,” she retorted angrily.

“Take them off,” he warned, moving toward her purposefully, “or I’ll take them off for you.”

Her blue eyes challenged him, but she knew the fight was already lost. He would do as he threatened. She
quickly kicked off her fragile shoes and reached up under
her linen skirt to roll down the panty hose, careful to pull away from her hurt knee. Mitch stood back and watched her.

“All right.” He placed his two large hands about her waist and lifted her up on the examining table. “Now we’ll see about this wound.”

She averted her eyes as he cleaned the blood and dabbed on antiseptic.

“You’ve got to be careful in the tropics,” he told her absently. “The smallest cut can lead to a nasty infection if it’s not treated properly.”

“I told you I don’t need lessons in tropical living,”
she retorted coldly. “I’m not going to be here long enough
to put them to use.”