Читать книгу Her Tycoon Lover - Lee Wilkinson - Страница 9

AT TWO o’clock that afternoon Luke unlocked his rental car and got in, dropping his camera on the passenger seat. It was a perfect summer day, warm with a breeze from the lake, fluffy white clouds skudding across a sky as blue as Katrin’s eyes. He had no real plan in mind, other than driving to the nearby village and looking around, asking questions of anyone he happened to meet. The village of Askja was small. Everyone must know everyone else.

Certainly he could find out if a fisherman called Erik Sigurdson existed; and whether he had a wife called Katrin.

He’d played with the idea of asking the desk clerk where Katrin lived, and had abandoned it because he couldn’t think of a plausible reason why he should want such information. Whether she was married or not, he didn’t want to cause her any problems at work. She must have her reasons for taking a job that didn’t use her intelligence and caged her spirit; it wasn’t up to him to upset that particular apple cart.

He left the grounds of the resort, taking the turnoff to the village. The road was narrow, following the lakeshore. Little whitecaps dotted the water like seabirds; a lighthouse, brightly striped in red and white, stood guard over a long, tree-clad promontory where gulls soared the air currents. It was a peaceful scene. But Luke had grown up at much the same latitude, and knew how long and brutal the winters could be; for the early Icelandic settlers, this must have been a cruel and unforgiving landscape.

He took a couple of photos of a weathered gray barn, of sheep munching the grass in a fenced field and a solitary cow chewing her cud. A small stone church stood watch over lichen-coated gravestones and neatly mowed grass; along the village wharf, fishing boats were rocking at their moorings, their white flanks gleaming. He didn’t want to take a photo of the boats. What if he found out Katrin wasn’t lying? That one of those boats belonged to her husband Erik? What then?

He’d turn around and go back to work. That’s what he’d do. And he’d forget her existence in three days’ time when the conference ended and he flew to New York for a series of meetings.

The houses were small, set apart in a long curve that followed the shoreline, most with a fenced garden. He’d drive the length of the village first, then he’d turn around and go into the general store. Or into that tearoom.

The last house was painted pale yellow, with a rhubarb patch, hills of potatoes, and neat rows of peas and beans. On the sand beach in front of the house, a woman and two children were playing with a Frisbee. Luke jammed on the brakes. He’d have known the woman anywhere, even though her hair was hidden under a baseball cap. She was wearing the same shorts and top that she’d had on this morning.

She hadn’t said anything about children.

His heart beating in thick, heavy strokes, Luke looped the camera around his neck, got out of his car and walked through the trees toward the sand. He felt overdressed in his lightweight slacks and cotton shirt; he felt like a kid on his first date.

He stopped and, using his zoom lens, brought Katrin into focus, her legs a blur of movement, her teeth a dazzling white as she laughed. She was so intent on the game that she hadn’t seen him yet. In quick succession he took three photos of her, hating her for being so carefree when he felt anything but.

As he lowered the camera, one of the children yelled something to her, and Katrin pivoted to face him. Her body went rigid. Then she tugged at the strap of her tank top and swiped at her forehead. “Are you looking for someone?” she called in a voice no one would have described as friendly.

Okay, Luke. Go for it.

He plastered a smile on his face, hung his camera over the branch of a small apple tree, and loped down to the beach. “Hi, Katrin,” he said. “I had a couple of hours off, so I decided to check out the village…it’s a gorgeous day, isn’t it?” Without waiting for a reply, he grinned at the nearest child, a girl of about seven with pale blond hair in two long pigtails. “I’m staying at the resort. It’s been a long time since I’ve played with a Frisbee…do you mind if I join you?”

She gave him a gap-toothed smile. “You can be on my team,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Luke. What’s yours?”

“Lara,” she replied, and tossed him the plastic disc.

Lara Sigurdson? Daughter of Katrin? Discovering he wasn’t ready for the answer to that question, Luke watched the Frisbee whirl toward him in a graceful arc. His muscles seemed to have seized up. Awkwardly he grabbed for it, then with a wicked twist of his wrist threw it toward Katrin. For a split second she stood stock still, glaring at him.

“Get it!” the little boy shouted. He also was blond, about five, thin as whip.

The same age Luke had been when his mother had left.

Katrin leaped sideways, her arm upstretched, and caught the Frisbee. She tossed it to the boy. “Run, Tomas!”

Tomas ran the wrong way, doubled back and clutched the Frisbee to his shirtfront. When he threw it toward Lara, it smacked into the sand. Lara said gleefully, “Our point.”

She aimed it at Katrin, who then with the strength of fury whipped it through the air straight at Luke’s chest. He began to laugh, a helpless belly laugh, jumped to his right so it wouldn’t break his ribs, and snagged it from midair. His shoes weren’t intended for the beach; he skidded on the sand, saving himself at the last minute from falling to the ground. “Good shot,” he said appreciatively, and sent the Frisbee to Tomas with just enough spin to be a challenge, but not so much that the little boy couldn’t catch it. Tomas’s hand closed around it; this time his throw was to Luke, a wildly off-course throw that somehow Luke managed to land.

He was enjoying himself, Luke realized, laughing at the little boy. How long since he’d done something like this?

Not since he’d played with his friend Ramon’s children in the spring, back in San Francisco.

In quick succession Katrin scored two points on Luke, who then proceeded to gain them back; she was playing in deadly earnest, he could tell, and laughed at her openly as she missed an underhanded shot he’d flashed her way. Then Tomas snaked a shot at him that he hadn’t been expecting; his eyes glued to the white disc, he ran for it, his hand outstretched. Lara shouted a warning. And Luke ran smack into Katrin.

The two of them tumbled to the soft sand in a tangle of arms and legs. Somehow Luke ended up with his cheek jammed into her chest, one leg under her, his other thigh flung over her hip. She was breathing rapidly, her breasts enticingly soft. She smelled delicious, a dizzying combination of sunshine and that same delicate floral scent he remembered from the dining room.

His body hardened. He shifted hastily, not wanting her to know how instantly and fiercely he wanted her; and felt, as he moved against her, the tightening of her nipples. With all his self-control he fought against the urge to take her in his arms and find her mouth with his. Kiss her so he could taste the sunshine on her skin, the heat of her flesh.

Footsteps padded across the sand toward them. “Are you guys okay?” Tomas huffed. “You look kind of funny—all tangled up like an octopus.”

Swiftly Luke rolled over on his stomach, distancing himself from Katrin, who leaped to her feet and said breathlessly, “We’re fine. That was a great shot, Tomas.”

“It was our point,” Tomas said complacently. “Whose turn is it now?”

Luke hauled himself to his feet, grabbed the Frisbee and flung it with very little finesse at Lara. He felt as though he’d been hit with a ton of bricks. He felt punch-drunk, wired and lustful.

Just as well the kids were here, he thought with a crazy edge of laughter. Or he’d have rolled Katrin onto her back on the sand, fallen on top of her and kissed her until neither one of them could breathe; until making love with each other was the only possible option. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Frisbee coming at him; catching it, he whipped it toward Tomas.

He didn’t dare look at Katrin.

Five minutes later, the little boy plunked himself down on the sand. “Time out,” he puffed. “I’m too hot.”

“Me, too,” Lara echoed.

Katrin smiled at them. “Why don’t you both go up to the house and get yourselves ice-cream cones? You know where they are. Don’t forget to shut the freezer afterward.”

“Two scoops?” Lara said, her blue eyes calculating.

Katrin grinned. “Two scoops. But not three, you know what happened last time.”

“Splat,” said Tomas.

“Exactly,” Katrin said. “Off you go, and look both ways before you cross the road. I’ll be up in a minute.”

The two children, forgetting they were tired and hot, ran for the house, obediently stopping on the grass verge and checking for traffic. By the time they were out of earshot, Katrin had turned her back on them to face Luke. Her smile had vanished. “How dare you invade my private life?” she blazed. “You’ve got no right to be here, forcing yourself on my children like that.”

A cold fist squeezed his heart. “So they’re your children?”

“Who else’s would they be?” she retorted. “I don’t want you anywhere near here—I keep my work life and my personal life totally separate. Besides, I told you to leave me alone, remember?”

He said reluctantly, “They’re fine kids.”

“Yes, they are. And if you think I’m going to have some kind of a two-day fling with you and jeopardize my whole life, you’re crazy.”

Luke’s tongue felt thick, and his brain seemed to have stopped working altogether. Katrin was married, the mother of two children. What the hell was he doing here? He swallowed, clearing his throat. “Let’s keep something straight. I’ve not once suggested I wanted a fling with you.”

She flushed, shoving her hands into the pockets of her shorts. “Don’t insult my intelligence—I can read the signals.”

“Then you’re quite intelligent enough to know that some very basic chemistry’s operating between us. It’s not just me.”

“It is just you!”

Her cheeks were now a bright pink. Luke drawled, “We could have one of those exchanges best suited to Tomas and Lara. It’s not. It is. It’s not. It is…is that what you want?”

“I want you gone from here. And I don’t want you to come back,” she said with deadly precision.

He had the same sinking feeling in his gut that had overcome him ten years ago when he’d been outwitted by a broker whose financial wizardry had been exceeded only by his lack of morals. Now, as then, there was no way to recoup. His only recourse was to get out as gracefully as he could and accept his losses. He said with a sudden raw honesty that took him by surprise, “Okay. I’ll leave and I won’t come back. But I won’t find it easy to forget you…don’t ask me to explain that, because I can’t. And don’t for one minute think I make a habit of hitting on women when I’m at a conference. Nothing could be further from the truth—and that holds whether they’re waitresses or CEOs.”

He’d run out of words. There was nothing else to say that could make any difference. Game over.

As though he were taking another photograph, Luke found himself trying to memorize every detail as Katrin stood before him: the elegant lines of her cheekbones, the sudden uncertainty in her sky-blue eyes, the push of her breasts against her thin green top. Storing it all in his brain against the time when he’d be gone from here. When he’d never see her again.

She said stiffly, “Give me one good reason why I should believe you.”

“I can’t! Either you believe me or you don’t. And what does it matter anyway?”

“You’re right, it doesn’t matter.” She bit her lip. “Please leave now, Luke—I should go up to the house and make sure the kids are all right. Besides, Erik will be home shortly.”

The last person in the world Luke wanted to meet was Katrin’s husband. The man who shared her bed. The father of her children. With one small part of his mind he realized that this was the first time Katrin had called him by name, and would also be the last. “Goodbye, Katrin,” he said, turned on his heel and wound through the poplars toward his car, remembering on the way to snag his camera from the apple tree.

Just as he opened the car door, Lara and Tomas emerged onto the front step of the house, each clutching an icecream cone. They waved at him. “Bye, Luke,” Lara called.

“Goodbye, Lara. Bye, Tomas,” he called back, turned around in the road and drove north along the shore. In his rearview mirror he watched Katrin cross the road and walk toward the house.

Game over, indeed.

Except it didn’t remotely resemble a game. Rather, Luke felt like that little five-year-old boy in Teal Lake who’d finally realized his mother wasn’t going to come back home; that she hadn’t just gone to the store, or into Kenora for a visit. Then, as now, he had the same sensation that the earth had shifted, that there was nothing firm to stand on.

Katrin was married, the mother of two children. No matter how much he desired her, she belonged to someone else.

Once Luke was out of sight of the pale yellow house, he pulled up by the side of the road and gazed out over the lake. Its serenity mocked him, so placid was it, so much in harmony with the graceful willows that draped its shoreline.

He felt cheated. As though he’d caught a glimpse of beauty beyond his imagining, only to have it snatched away before he could grasp it.

A couple of teenage boys were slouching along the road toward him. Luke edged off the shoulder and drove on. But five minutes later, when the tearoom came in sight, he slowed down again. He didn’t want to go back to the resort and be convivial. He didn’t want to play golf or lift weights, and he’d already jogged this morning. While tearooms weren’t priority on his list, he could do with something cold to drink. And maybe a piece of chocolate pie, he thought wryly. The basic cure for a bruised ego.

Because that’s all this was. It wasn’t a major tragedy. He’d merely made a fool of himself for reasons he didn’t want to analyze, with a woman far too acute for his own comfort. Yeah, he thought, turning into the driveway between rows of pink and scarlet petunias. Chocolate pie. That’s what I need.

The tearoom wasn’t designed with six-foot-two men in mind: the tables were small, the curtains frilly, the wallpaper with more flowers than a Hollywood funeral. But in the cooler by the door there was a chocolate torte with thick layers of dark chocolate icing, and the proprietress gave him a friendly welcome. Luke smiled back. “I’ll have a big slice of the torte,” he said, “and iced tea with extra lemon, please.”

“Coming right up,” she said, her brown eyes twinkling at him. Her name tag was inscribed in such elaborate calligraphy that he had difficulty deciphering it; he was almost sure it said Margret. Her hair was the orange of marigolds, her eyeshadow blue as delphiniums, and she had no pretensions to youth. But something in her smile said that a tall, athletic-looking man could brighten her day anytime.

Luke picked up a newspaper from the stand by the door and sat down by the window. Six women were sharing a table on the far side of the room, and two more were seated nearer to him; he was the only man. Feeling minimally more cheerful, he unfolded the paper. When his iced tea arrived, he took a sip; it was exactly as he liked it. Then Margret arrived with a flowered plate bearing a huge slab of torte surrounded by swirls of chocolate sauce, sliced strawberries and whipped cream. He grinned. “No calories in that.”

“You’re in fine shape, you don’t need to worry,” she said, giving him a flirtatious wink. “You must be staying at the resort?”

“That’s right, there’s a mining conference going on.” Deliberately he added, “I was just driving through the village and met Katrin, who’s our waitress in the dining room.”

“Katrin Sigurdson, that’s right. She lives in the pink house two down from the church.”

Luke’s fork stopped in midair. “No…she was at the very end house in the village. Playing with her kids.”

Margret frowned. “Kids?”

“Lara and Tomas. Blond like her.”

“Katrin doesn’t have any children.” Margret’s brow cleared. “Those are Anna’s children.” In a carrying voice she addressed one of the two women seated nearby. “Anna, is Katrin looking after your kids today?”

Anna, who had a cluster of blond curls and light blue eyes, smiled at Margret. “She offered to take them to the beach for an hour so Fjola and I could meet here and have an uninterrupted visit.” Her smile encompassed Luke. “Katrin’s such a lovely person. So kind. And the children adore her, they’d do anything for her.”

Anna, he could tell, was the sort of woman who’d grown up in a small place and trusted everyone, including himself. Striving for just the right touch of lightness, he said, “Then it’s to be hoped she has children of her own someday.”

Anna chuckled. “First she has to find a husband.”

Luke’s heart jolted in his chest. “She’s a pretty woman,” he said with deliberate understatement. “That shouldn’t be a problem.”

“But Katrin is very choosy, too choosy for a little village like Askja.” Anna shrugged. “She is talking of leaving here. That will be our loss, but no doubt her gain.” She gave Luke another of her generous smiles. “Now, if you will excuse me…”

She went back to her conversation with her friend Fjola. Luke said, “Margret, I’ve heard that a fisherman called Erik Sigurdson takes tourists out in his boat, is that right?”

“Erik? Yes, but only on weekends. He’s too old now to do it every day, he says.” Her smile had a touch of malice. “Too fond of the rum bottle if you ask me.”

“Too bad…I’ll be gone by the weekend.”

“Jonas takes out tourists every day, the resort would have his phone number.”

“Thanks,” Luke said. “I’ll probably look him up.”

Three more women came in the door and Margret left to show them to a table. Luke stared unseeingly at the newspaper. So Katrin was neither a married woman nor a mother.

She’d lied to him.

For her own protection? Because she was afraid of him, and put him in the same category as Guy? Or because he’d been reading her correctly all along, and Katrin wanted him as badly as he wanted her?

The latter couldn’t be true. She’d been doing her level best to discourage him ever since they’d met.

His initial assessment of her as deadly dull had been way off the mark. So maybe when it came to her sexuality he was misreading her again.

Luke gazed at his torte, discovering that he’d entirely lost his appetite. However, he had the feeling Margret would take it personally if he didn’t finish every morsel on his plate. He picked up his fork, his thoughts marching on. He now knew where Katrin lived and that she was thinking of leaving Askja.

He could invite her to San Francisco.

Sure, he jeered. You’re really into rejection, Luke MacRae. She’d laugh in your face. And if by any chance she did agree, she’d turn your life upside down, you can be sure of that. Is that what you want?

No. Definitely not. His life was fine as it was.

The torte was moist with chocolate, the strawberries slightly tart. Luke began to eat, trying simultaneously to make some sense out of the latest financial predictions; but when he left the tearoom twenty minutes later, after a serious overdose of chocolate, he realized he was in a foul mood. Oh, he’d been all very clever the last couple of hours. Chief Detective MacRae in action, ferreting out the truth about the marital status of a waitress in a little fishing village in Manitoba. But what good did his new knowledge do him?

Katrin Sigurdson spelled danger. And what was a sensible tactic when face-to-face with danger? Avoid it. He wasn’t a reckless eighteen-year-old anymore, he had no bent toward self-destruction; and he’d proved himself often enough in the past, he didn’t need to do so again. Not with a blue-eyed blonde who could tear apart everything he’d so carefully constructed.

Stay away from her. That was all he needed to do.

It was so simple.