Charmed By You ((Destiny Bay Romances-The Islanders 5)) (3 page)

All at once she regretted her argumentative tone. She really didn’t need to be so snappish. Or did she? Was she reacting defensively to the danger she felt implicit in him? Was she afraid she would swoon in his arms if he tried to kiss her? Damn. That was exactly the case.

She watched him cutting a section of sterile gauze, his long fingers working deftly and smoothly. She remembered how she’d always loved watching him work with his hands. Beautiful and tapered, they had a calmness of purpose, a sureness of touch, that made mistakes unthinkable.

“Don’t worry, Heather,” he said softly as he attached
the gauze with translucent tape. “I’ll make sure you don’t
get into trouble while you’re here.”

She bit her lip. That was all she needed to have, Mitch take charge of her life again. No thanks.

But instead of allowing herself to sink back into bick
ering, she aimed at her true goal. “There must be some way of getting that plane back.” She worked hard at
keeping her voice low and casual. “Or of finding another
pilot who could take me back to Guam for the flight to the States. I’m sure you know someone who could do it.”

She was staring into the dark temptation of his silky
hair while he worked on her knee, but suddenly he raised
his head, his face only inches from hers, and she found herself a captive of his slow smile.

“Relax, Heather,” he told her calmly, his eyes sparkling with dark laughter. “You’re condemned to a night on this island. You might as well enjoy it.”

“Enjoy it!” Now she was really angry. Jumping off the table, she winced slightly at the twinge of pain in her knee, but didn’t stop to dwell on it. “I’m not about
to enjoy anything.” She glared at him. “Never mix busi
ness with pleasure, they always say, and I’m a firm believer in following conventional wisdom.”

He threw back his head and let out a full-throated laugh. “Heather, you’re still as candidly conformist as ever,” he told her happily. “You don’t know how much I’ve missed your little speeches on the values of an orthodox life.”

“Maybe if you’d listened more closely when you had
a chance,” she lectured sternly, “you wouldn’t have ended
up with nowhere to go but some primitive island in the middle of the Pacific.”

He was still laughing as he walked toward her, but she found herself backing away until she came up hard against the wall.

“You talk a good game, Heather,” he teased softly as he reached for her, “but you never would have married me in the first place if you really believed all that righteous drivel you spout.”

She’d spent a good deal of time in the last few days
alternately dreading this moment, and chiding herself for
even thinking it might be possible. But now it was reality.
Mitch was kissing her, just as he had kissed her so often before. Only this time it was different. This time it was against her will.

“Mitch, no!”

She tried to twist away from him, but his arms were around her, pulling her against the solid warmth of his
wide chest. His mouth was devouring her anger, turning
her protest into a sigh of surrender.

“Mitch...”

His kiss was easy and pleasant, like the cordial greet
ing of a loving friend. How could she resist it? She let
his sensuous tongue claim possession of her warm mouth,
sliding across her teeth in tantalizing seduction. The roughness of his afternoon growth of beard set the skin of her cheek tingling, and his hand at the small of her back pulled her hips into the cradle of his.

“Mitch, no...”

She managed to murmur the words, but at the same
time her arms were twining around his neck and she was
arching against him, so hungry to feel the maleness she had missed for so long.

All the sweet, aching misery surged up, reminding her of what had once been between them. She’d loved him so much. There would never be another man like him in her life.

The men she’d dated in the last few months hadn’t compared to Mitch. She’d found men just as handsome, just as warm and intelligent—but not one had lit a smoldering fire in her like he could. The touch of his hand set a sizzling trail of sparks moving across her skin. The
hot urgency of his lips drew out a response she had
only for him.

They’d first met at the university where he was a
teaching assistant in an anatomy class she was taking to improve her figure drawings. Always, right from the beginning, that spark had glowed between them. She remembered how he’d bent over her sketches, touching
her lightly on the shoulder. She’d turned in surprise, her nose grazing his cheek. They’d laughed into each
other’s eyes, but more than humor had been churning
through her veins.

“Great drawings,” he told her. “Better than the ones
we have in the text.” He raised dark eyebrows. “Really interested in the workings of the human body, are you?”

He wasn’t her type at all. She was strictly a button-down girl, used to tennis-playing law students. Mitch’s hair was too long, his shirt needed pressing, and he had a decidedly unconventional glint in his eyes.

She smothered her smile and raised her cute nose a bit higher before she answered. “I’m an artist,” she in
formed him. “This is all research for me.”

“Research, huh?” He’d grinned that devastating grin.
“Got any openings for a guinea pig?”

She stared at him blankly. “A guinea pig?” What on
earth was he talking about?

He nodded, then reached out to take her hand and place it firmly, palm down, against his own chest. “I’ve
got some prime research material right here. Reasonable rates and...” he grinned to the appreciative audience of
students snickering all around them, “guaranteed re
sults.”

Heather snatched back her hand, her cheeks flaming
with humiliation while the laughter of the others rang in her ears. Standing abruptly, she began to stack her books
together with a snap. “Sorry, Mr. Carrington,” she said through gritted teeth. “Clowns need not apply.”

As the others hooted in appreciation, she tossed her head and strode out of the room.

She made up her mind to drop the class, but on the
day of its next meeting, she found herself walking toward
the Human Science building. She wasn’t going to let a
fresh young teaching assistant scare her away from some
thing she really needed. No way!

She saw his eyes light up when she walked into the class, and she couldn’t hold back a small feeling of satisfaction. But when he didn’t look at her again during
his lecture, the satisfaction dissolved and she knew some
thing was wrong. She’d never been jealous of a teacher’s
attention before—even if he was only a medical student
working as a teaching assistant to help pay his way.

Suddenly he was calling her name. “Miss Worthing,
would you please come up and name the muscles of the
back for us?”

She stood and walked past rows of attentive students, glad she’d studied the lesson well enough to know the
answer. If he thought he was going to embarrass her again, he had another think coming.

A huge picture of a human form made of unskinned muscle hung at the front of the room. Heather looked
straight at the pink and white poster, avoiding eye contact
with the man beside her.

“This is the trapezius across here,” she answered crisply, using the pointer he handed her. “The deltoid
crosses the top of the upper arm. The latimus dorsi covers
the back of the ribs reaching out from under the arm.” She pointed them out, stabbing at the picture. “And, of
course, the gluteous medius and maximum form the but
tocks.”

She turned to hand him back the pointer like a trium
phant duelist might hand his sword to a second, but it seemed the contest wasn’t over yet.

“Turn around,” he said evenly.

“What?” She gazed at him suspiciously. He wasn’t think
ing of using her to model what she’d just been illustrating,
was he?

“Miss Worthing,” he said softly, his eyes inscrutable,
“I am not going to strip you bare to the class. I just want
to give them a quick reinforcement of what you’ve said.”
He turned his open palms to her as if to show he had nothing up his sleeves. “No tricks. I promise.”

She turned slowly. She was wearing beige wool pants
and a pink cashmere sweater that hugged every curve. As she felt his hands on her back, she found herself holding her breath.

“The trapezius...” he was droning on, but
she hardly heard him. His fingers grazed the soft cashmere, barely touching her, and only above the waist, but everywhere they left behind a flush of warmth that swept through her unprepared soul. His touch was magic. She was breathless.
 

Then he was turning her back toward him, his hands on her shoulders. When he looked down into her eyes, his fingers tightened on her flesh. She gazed up at him in wonder. He’d felt it, too.

The bell rang to end the class period, and still they stood together while the students filed out of the room. She heard nothing around her, and he seemed just as
blind and dumb as she was. All they knew was the misty
fascination they found in each other’s eyes.

“Where do you live?” he whispered at last.

No
, her mind told her severely,
don’t tell him
. At the
same time, she heard herself giving him directions to her
sorority house.

And so had begun a relationship of love and passion such as she’d never dreamed possible—a gift from the love gods.
 

She didn’t know then that you have to pay for everything in this life. She knew it now.

Even as her hands threaded through his silky dark hair, even as his warmth enclosed her in the excitement
she’d lost so long ago, she knew she would end up paying
for this, too. As she gloried in the shivering ecstasy his touch sent through her blood stream, a part of her was shrinking back in despair. Would it never change? Would she ever be free of him?

In the sensuous tension that trembled between them,
Heather didn’t hear the creaking of the opening clinic door.

“Mr. Doctor? If you busy now, I come back later.”

Heather sprang away from Mitch, but he moved more
slowly, as though he was accustomed to interspersing his office visits with romantic interludes.

“Hello, Rita,” he told the small dark-haired woman who stood casually in the doorway. “Time for your monthly prenatal check, isn’t it?”

Noting that the woman was very pregnant, Heather began backing toward the door herself. “Will you sign
those papers?” she reminded Mitch in confusion, pointing
toward his desk.

“Oh, sure,” he told her, but she could see that his mind was already on his patient. “Wait out there, will
you? I’ve got to see how the youngest Cruz kid is coming
along.” He threw the island woman a friendly wink. “I’ll
be with you in a few minutes, Heather.”

Rita Cruz was coming along fine and didn’t require much extra attention, so while she gave him an exhaustive report on the last weekend’s fiesta feast she and her sisters had cooked up, Mitch could wash up from his exam letting his mind drift back to his ex-wife, waiting only a few feet away. Just thinking about her made his adrenalin surge and his heart beat a little faster. He’d felt that way about her from the first and the months apart had only made him crazier about her. If he could just get her in his bed one more time, he might have a chance…

But that was where he was really crazy, and he knew it. The problems between them had never had anything to do with their lovemaking. Life style choices, jealousies, relatives—those were what had driven them apart. And the one big one—the fact that he had an overpowering need to do the kind of work he’d trained all his life for, and to do it in places like this—that was what stood between them like an iron gate with a missing key. If he could just find a way to make her love it here like he did—if he could just find that key.
 

“So everything’s okay?” Rita asked him.

“That little boy is good as gold,” Mitch told her. “Come on out into my office once you’re dressed and I’ll go over some nutrition information for you.”

“You bet,” she said, looking pleased. “Did I tell you? We gonna name him after you. We gonna name him Mitch.”

“Rita!” He placed his hand over his heart, truly touched. “I’m honored.”

She nodded happily. “You gonna be his godfather, huh? You’ll be like one of the family.”

Mitch laughed. He’d known that was coming. And he also knew he was facing a lifetime of expectations for cash in an envelope at every birthday and lots of other miscellaneous holidays. But he didn’t mind. That was what it was like being the doctor in a place like this. And this was how he became a part of the community. It all came together like a big island quilt.
 

But his smile faded. Somehow he didn’t think he could get Heather to see it that way. She’d never been into quilting. And she didn’t seem ready to start learning how now.

Chapter Two

Heather left the examining room and sank down on the low couch in the waiting
room, her mind racing but going nowhere. How had she
let this happen? She felt as though she’d been mowed
down by something very large and enervating. Her bones
had turned to rubber and she didn’t trust her brain at all. Was her confusion caused only by the horrible muggy heat of this place, or did Mitch have something to do with it?

She stared down at her feet, annoyed with herself. She’d left her shoes, as well as her large traveling purse, in the
examining room. She was a prisoner here, waiting for Mitch to decide what to do with her. She’d been defeated before she’d even had a chance to put up a real fight. The situation was impossible!