Charmed By You ((Destiny Bay Romances-The Islanders 5)) (9 page)

She glared at him, indignation fueling her anger. “Be
serious,” she scoffed. “Do you think I’m going to set myself up for another...” She hesitated, glancing down
at Kevin. “The answer is no,” she amended shortly.

“What are you afraid of, Heather?” Mitch taunted, his
voice as rough as sandpaper. “I’ve got patients waiting, people depending on me. I’ve got more calls stacked up than I can possibly handle in one morning. Not much
time to ravish you again, even if I’m quick about it.”

She flushed, hating him for saying that in front of an audience. “I’m not afraid of you,” she lied stoutly. “You
wouldn’t dare...” She couldn’t quite put the thought
into words, not with Kevin sitting there, absorbing every
bit of the conversation.

“I wouldn’t dare seduce you in a velvet green jungle with flowers falling in a silken shower all around us?”
he asked softly, his eyes gleaming wickedly. “I wouldn’t
dare make love to you beside a silver waterfall, or on a
beach of golden sand?” His laugh was low and suggestive. “I would dare all right, Heather, and so would you. But I tell you what: I’ll give you my solemn promise I
won’t do it on this trip. Not unless you ask me to. Is it
a deal?”

She wanted to throw something at his arrogant face.

He thought he had such total control of her sensuality, that
he could make fun of it at will. She had no doubt
he meant to break his promise, but she couldn’t back
down. Not now. And she’d show him she could resist
his advances if she chose to.

Defiantly, she tossed her hair back with a twist of her
head. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

“Hey!” Mele arrived with a tray full of food. “Where
are you going?”

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Kevin reassured her with
a toothy grin. “I have plans for this meal myself.”

Heather walked beside Mitch along the coral road,
jerking away when he tried to place a hand at the small
of her back. He glanced down at her nylon-covered legs and insubstantial shoes, but he didn’t chide her for stick
ing to unsuitable clothes. In fact, he didn’t say a word
as they walked together under the blue tropic sky.

He led her to a rusty Jeep that hardly looked capable of limping out of the little village, much less taking them
all over the island, as Mitch had implied he planned to
go.

“This is it?” Heather asked as she struggled up onto
the torn and broken seat.

“Sorry,” Mitch answered, vaulting behind the wheel.
“Just pretend it’s your cousin’s Lamborghini. You’ll feel
right at home.”

She swung around to stare at him, surprised by the
bitterness in his voice. “Trevor sold his Lamborghini,”
she said quietly. “He’s got an Astin Martin now.”

Mitch had been about to start the engine, but when she spoke, he stopped for a moment, hands resting on the
wheel, eyes staring out at the horizon. She noticed a slight twitch along his jaw line, as though something
were bothering him so strongly that he had to fight to keep control. She stared, unable to imagine what could be annoying him, but intrigued.

“Good old Trevor,” he said lightly at last, reaching down to insert the key and kick the engine over with a grumbling roar. “How is the old boy?”

Heather frowned. Mitch had always made fun of Trevor
in the past. Now something about her cousin had angered
him. What could it be?

“Trevor’s just the same,” she said slowly. “The job in his father’s company didn’t work out, so now he’s in
charge of the breeding farm for his father’s race horses.”

Mitch nodded, steering the Jeep down the bumpy road.
“Sounds like a good place for him,” he said above the engine’s noise. “I’ll bet he feels right at home.”

Heather ran her tongue tentatively across her lips, wondering whether to pursue Mitch’s animosity further. She tried to think back to the days of their marriage, when Mitch and Trevor had always treated each other
with wary scorn. No open warfare had existed at the time,
at least none that she’d been aware of. What made Mitch so bitter now?”

Just then the Jeep hit a rough portion of road that
almost knocked her from her seat, and she spent the next few minutes scrambling for a more secure handhold.

“Ever heard of seat belts?” she called out to Mitch.

He grinned. “This baby was built when seat belts weren’t much more than a gleam in some inventor’s eye,” he called back. “Hold on tight. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

In the struggle to survive the trip, she
forgot about Trevor.

The road was made of the same rutted coral as in town, a pink and beige ribbon against the greenery on either side. Tropical foliage was everywhere. The light green of the grass gave way to the darker green of the bushes, and that was set off by the royal green of the jungle, the olive drab green of the palm trees, the lime green of the papaya and banana trees. Every imaginable
shade of the color was represented, making a stunning
array before her.

Mitch drew the Jeep to a stop at the top of the hill to let her take in the view of the village they were ap
proaching. Above them the sky was a solid blue setting
for powder puff clouds that scudded by. Below them
houses spread out like bits of confetti scattered over green
velvet between the huge white Catholic church, located on a rise above the town, and the turquoise blue of the
ocean lagoon. A ring of brown reef protected the lagoon, and waves hit it repeatedly, sending lacy foam out across
the water.

Heather’s sense of line and color was piqued by the
view. “It’s lovely,” she exclaimed. “Like something out
of a Gauguin painting.”

Mitch nodded solemnly. “It has a certain charm from
this distance,” he agreed. “Like all things, it invites dis
appointment under closer scrutiny.”

Was he referring to her, to their marriage? She looked
at him sharply but could detect no malice in his glance. “Tell me something about this island,” she urged. “What
do the people do?”

He looked at her searchingly, then returned to staring
out through the dirty windshield. “This is a typical Micronesian island,” he said in a quiet monotone. “It be
longed to Spain for a few hundred years, then to Germany
until World War One. The Japanese held it until the USA
took it back in World War Two. Now the people eke out a living fishing or farming or working for the Trust Ter
ritory.” He shrugged. “They’re poor. If they want a de
cent education beyond junior high, they have to go to
Guam or Hawaii. They have no skills, no idea of how
to bring back the glorious days when they exported food
instead of living on government subsidies.”

Did he intend to help them do that? It was hard to
believe he might have come here just because he was needed, no matter how often he’d told her so in the past.
 

“What made you want to come here, Mitch?” she asked.
“Why here rather than some other backwater?”

He slumped in the seat, looking out across the hood
of the Jeep at the silver-blue ocean. “You never did listen,
did you?” he asked, his voice touched with weariness. “We went over this again and again in Flagstaff. Didn’t
you hear a word I said?”

Heather frowned. He was so awfully enigmatic today.
Just what was it he had said in those days? She thought
hard, trying to remember.

The tension between them had made it difficult to
regain the easy communication they’d enjoyed that first
year. By the time he’d begun talking about going to
Ragonai, they were at each other’s throats over the slight
est disagreement. She remembered how he’d brought it
up.

“I’ve got to get out of here, Heather,” he’d said,
pacing before her in their glass-and-chrome-furnished
living room. “I feel like I’m suffocating. Dede Sablan
has told me about the Pacific island her people come from. They’re in desperate need of medical assistance.”

Heather shook her head. She couldn’t remember the
rest. She’d only heard that he was suffocating, that for some reason he wasn’t happy with her or with the life
they led. It made him feel as though he were drowning.

“Mitch,” she’d said plaintively once, as she remembered it. “It isn’t like we’re living in New York City or something. This is the Southwest. Arizona. We’re practically just a few years from pioneer days. How can this be too civilized for you?”

He shook his head. “Civilization isn’t the point,” he’d said. “Filling a need. Finding a place in the world where I can change lives.” He’d shrugged. “I came from the islands, Heather. I feel the pull to go back. I have to try it.”

Trevor had explained what it all meant. “Let’s face it, Heather,” he’d told her sympathetically. “The guy can’t cut it. You’ve seen how he acts, hanging around
the free clinics down on Santa Fe instead of making his
way among his associates at the hospital. Mitch can’t make
the grade with real competition. He wants to go out to
some island where he can be a kingpin on his own.”

At the time, she’d rebelled against the explanation,
certain that Mitch was good at his work, sure that his true
worth would pull him through. But her father had agreed
with Trevor.

“It’s all very well to spout altruistic ideals,” he’d
grumbled to her one night. “All this talk about helping people is fine. But when it comes right down to it, you’ll
usually find it’s no more than an excuse for failure in
the real world.”

Eventually Heather had come to wonder if they were
right. Was Mitch too unconventional, too careless, to
compete with the other medical professionals at the hospital? Was he falling behind, losing out, and did he want to run to a safe haven where incompetence would be
tolerated?

No, she couldn’t fully believe it. She still loved and trusted him. Besides, if medicine wasn’t his field, she
was ready and willing to stand behind him while he found what he
was really meant for.

But what if he didn’t want her standing behind him?
He seemed to push away every attempt she made to help.
She would have stuck by him no matter what, if only he
hadn’t shut her out. But he had. He’d been disdainful of
everything she tried to do. When her father had set up
a dinner engagement with the head of the hospital surgical
unit, a prize social encounter that might have paved the way for a nice position on the hospital staff, Mitch had
refused to go.

“I won’t fawn over the man, begging for a job,” he’d
told her angrily. “That might be how the people you run
around with make their way in this world, but I won’t stoop to it.”

Her father had grunted. “Can’t take the heat, can he?
I never would have guessed he’d be so afraid of proving
himself.” He’d shrugged. “Well, I suppose Mitch knows better than we do what he’s capable of. If he doesn’t
think he has a chance, who are we to tell him differently?”

She’d defended him again and again. But deep inside she’d begun to doubt.

When he’d left, there had been no question of her going with him. She’d made it plain that she wanted to stay in Flagstaff. But had she made it clear enough that she wanted him to stay, too?

She looked at her dark-haired ex-husband, sitting so near, yet so distant. “All I remember is that you wanted to get out of Flagstaff. You said you were suffocating.”

He nodded and turned to meet her glance. “I was. I
knew I had to get away. When Dede told me about these
islands, about how she was training to go back to help her people, I was fascinated. I wanted to go with her. I
knew I could find a niche for myself, somewhere I could
make a difference.”

Heather pulled her gaze from his, hiding the pain that
surely must be mirrored in her eyes. Mitch had attracted women wherever he went, but it had never really both
ered her until Dede Sablan had entered the picture. Heather
had known immediately that the raven-haired beauty was
different. Mitch respected her, treated her as a valued friend. Heather had been jealous of their professional relationship from the start.

When Dede and Mitch started working together in the
free clinics in their spare time, Heather had swallowed her objections and tried to pretend his relationship with
Dede didn’t matter. But it did matter. It wasn’t the major
factor in their separation, but it certainly helped create
the tension that led to it.

“So it was Dede who influenced you,” she said softly,
wincing even as she said the name. Dede had persuaded
him to come to her island, while Heather herself had
failed to get him to come to dinner with her parents.