Summer Beach Reads. Natalie Anderson

to her friend. ‘The ideas are already popping. Tell Joy she’s going to love Lucinda.’

      Diana laughed. ‘Joy will be overjoyed.’

      Stella grimaced. She hoped so. She’d added a decade to her very patient editor’s life and she owed Joy this. Not just a book, but a book to rival Vasco’s. She scurried to Rick’s hire car with her bag, hoping they made it out of Cornwall before another storm blew in.

      Rick pulled up beside Diana and smiled at her. ‘See ya later, Miss Kitty. It was nice spending some time with you,’ he said.

      Diana nodded distractedly, bobbing her head back and forth to see what Stella was up to.

      Rick frowned. These two women were hard on his ego. ‘I know Stel values your friendship and—’

      ‘Yeh, yeh,’ Diana said, cutting him off and dragging him back inside the cottage. She pulled her dog-eared copy of Pleasure Hunt from her handbag on the hall stand and thrust it at him. ‘Take it. Read it. You won’t be disappointed.’

      Rick frowned down at the cover he recognised from earlier. ‘Er, it’s really not my thing.’

      ‘Trust me. It’s your thing.’ She glanced over Rick’s shoulder, knowing that Stella would kill her if she even had an inkling of what Diana was doing. ‘It’s really quite...illuminating.’

      ‘Okay.’

      He ran his fingers over the raised gold lettering that spelt out Stella’s name. He felt a surge of pride that Stel had made a path for herself in the world—something that rocked her boat. He knew that Nathan had been immensely proud of his little girl’s success.

      ‘Thanks,’ he said as he tucked it under his arm and backed out of the cottage.

      ‘Stop,’ Diana hissed. ‘What are you doing?’ She whisked it out from under his arm, spun him around, unzipped his backpack and shoved it deep inside.

      ‘She’s sensitive about it,’ Diana explained as Rick gave her a questioning look. ‘Do not read it around her. And if she springs you—I will deny all knowledge of how you came by it. Capiche?’

      Rick chuckled as he held up his hands in surrender. ‘Sure. Okay.’

      He took a couple of tentative paces out of the cottage, expecting to be yanked back inside again. It wasn’t until he was halfway to the car that he started to relax.

      He smiled to himself. God, but he loved women.

      * * *

      Five hours later they were airborne and Rick was busily flirting with the air hostess. Stella wasn’t sure why she was so annoyed. After all, she’d seen Rick in action with women nearly all of her life.

      Maybe it was just the relentless afternoon of it. The woman at the petrol station. The one at the rental desk. Another at the check-in lounge. Oh, and the coffee shop—and she’d have to have been in her sixties. It seemed there wasn’t a woman in existence who wasn’t fair game for his laid-back style of flirting.

      Including her.

      But she was used to his casual, flirty banter. She knew it was harmless and she could give as good as she got.

      The women of the world were not.

      ‘Champagne?’ Rick asked her.

      It was tempting but after last night her liver probably needed a break. ‘No, thanks,’ she said, smiling at the hostess, who she was pretty sure actually didn’t give a damn if Stella wanted a drink or not.

      Rick watched the swagger of the stewardess’s hips in her tight pencil skirt as she left to grab his beer. Stella rolled her eyes at him and he grinned. ‘So,’ he said, snuggling down further into the comfortable leather seat. ‘You haven’t asked how the business is going.’

      Stella pulled the blind down on her window. ‘Well, we’re in business class so I’m assuming it’s all going okay.’

      Rick nodded. ‘It is.’

      Stella sighed. ‘Rick, I told you at the wake that whatever decisions you wanted to make were fine by me. That I only wanted to be a silent partner. You’ve been half of the business since you were fifteen. It’s been your blood, sweat and tears that helped to build it to where it is today. Dad should have left his half to you, not me. It should be all yours.’

      Rick looked askance, his blue eyes flashing. ‘Stel, what is a man worth if he cannot provide for his family?’ he said, his voice laced with reproach and sounding remarkably Spanish all of a sudden. ‘The business was Nathan’s legacy and he knew how much you loved it. Of course he wanted it to go to you. Of course he wanted to leave you with no financial worries.’

      She raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you have any idea how much money my book has made?’

      Rick thought about the contraband copy of Pleasure Hunt secreted away in his backpack. ‘No. But the business has a multimillion-dollar turnover annually and whether you need it or not—half of it’s yours.’

      ‘I know...I’m just saying, I can look after myself.’

      He nodded. ‘I know that. I’ve always known that.’

      Stella’s breath caught in her throat at the sincerity in his tropical eyes. His shoulder-length hair fell forward to form a partial curtain around his face and, with his slight sideways position, she felt as if they were cut off from the rest of the aeroplane.

      ‘Your beer, sir.’

      Stella glanced up at the stewardess and was surprised to feel Rick’s gaze linger on her face. She looked back at him quizzically and they just looked at each other for a long moment before he smiled at her, then turned to accept the offering.

      He started to chat with the stewardess again and Stella turned away. She shut her eyes, not wanting to hear the banter that fell so easily from those wicked Vasco lips.

      It was a long flight. She might as well try and get some sleep.

      * * *

      She woke a few hours later feeling miraculously refreshed. Rick was stretched out asleep in his chair, his face turned towards her, those killer sable lashes throwing shadows on his cheeks.

      For a moment she just stared at him, at his utter beauty. He’d always been good-looking but age had turned all that brash youthful charisma into a deep and abiding sex appeal.

      The urge to push his hair back off his forehead where it had fallen in haphazard array almost trumped the urge to trace his lips with her finger. They looked all soft and slack in slumber but she knew, without ever having experienced it, that they would be just the right amount of hard at precisely the right time—like Vasco’s.

      She’d come perilously close to knowing it for real. Could still remember the way her pulse had roared, her eyes had fluttered closed as he’d leaned in to make good on her dare and fulfil all her teenage fantasies.

      And, courtesy of a crush bigger than the United Kingdom, there’d been plenty of them.

      Fantasies that had seen her tick each day down on a calendar as the holidays had approached, her foolish heart tripping every time she’d thought about those blue, blue eyes and all that bare, broad, bronzed skin courtesy of his Spanish mother.

      All the time hoping that it would be this summer he’d see her as a woman instead of a girl. That he’d make good on the increasingly confusing signals he sent and act instead of tease.

      And the eve of her sixteenth birthday all that breathless longing had come to fruition.

      ‘Sweet sixteen and never been kissed,’ he’d teased.

      He’d been nearly nineteen and so much more experienced. She’d watched him flirt with girls since he’d been thirteen and been aware of his effect on them for much longer than he had.

      She’d screwed up her courage. ‘Maybe you should do something