The Heat of the Night

‘So you want to talk about where we go from here?’

He felt her tense beside him and her toes stopped their wriggling. ‘I’m not selling to some consortium, some...giant hotel chain, Luke.’ She glared at him and Luke couldn’t decide if the flare in her eyes came from her sudden well of pissed off, or the fire.

‘If you’ve stopped by to butter me up about that you might as well keep on going.’

Luke knew it was important to stay calm and frankly he was too wrecked from a week of hard yakka to get into an argument. ‘Okay, so what are we going to do?’

‘The Tropicana has been here for forty years. Our parents ran it together for twenty of those years. And it will be again.’

‘Complete with Tiki Suites, salsa nights and lei stringing?’

Luke felt her hostile glance shoot bullets of disapproval straight into his chest.

‘Yes. What’s wrong with those things?’ she demanded. ‘I know they probably don’t seem very sophisticated to Mr Hotshot Ad Exec, but the Tropicana has always been a family resort—that’s the way our parents wanted it. And that’s the way it’s going to stay.’

‘And what about you, Claude? What do you want?’

Claudia frowned. Where was the man who had teased her about a bikini before? He was looking at her as he had by the pool earlier, as if he was trying to see all the way to the inside. And now, as then, it discomforted her.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean if you were given a bottomless bucket of money and told you could build whatever you wanted—anything—what would you build? Not what our parents wanted, not what the town wants, not what’s always been. What Claudia Davis wants.’

Luke watched her intently as she opened her mouth to say something and then shut it again. Conflict crinkled her brow. Wisps of blonde hair had loosened from her ponytail and the ocean breeze blew them gently across her face. The firelight played across her features complementing their fineness but it also illuminated her internal struggle, backlit her doubt.

She chewed on her bottom lip, contemplating the question as if he’d just asked her to tell him the meaning of life in ten words or less. The firelight glowed in the moisture she was creating and his gaze dropped to her mouth briefly before returning to the fire, tuning into the background noises of surf, laughter and hula music.

He drank his beer and waited quietly for her to figure it out. Was the question really that difficult?

Claudia contemplated the rim of her beer bottle, conscious of the time ticking away. She didn’t know. She’d been so caught up in her parents’ vision it had become her own. And she loved the kitschy, retro feel they’d created. But was it what she wanted?

What did she want?

She rubbed absently at her neck again and the muscles protested. ‘A day spa,’ she said on a whim. ‘A place for people to be pampered.’

Luke blinked, both surprised and excited by her answer. ‘Yeah?’

For a brief moment their eyes met and the spark in his caused a flutter of possibility inside Claudia’s chest. But reality intruded and snuffed it out. She shook her head. ‘The people we attract here can’t afford that kind of decadence, Luke. We’re the affordable alternative.’

‘Can’t we be both?’

Claudia frowned. ‘Being good at one thing is better than being half-arsed at two.’

‘So then let’s not be half-arsed. Let’s be some kind of hybrid resort where we cater to both ends of the market.’

‘I think that’ll be really confusing to the market, don’t you? High-ticket clients aren’t going to want to be bothered by a bunch of screaming kids and salsa lessons on the beach.’

Luke shrugged. ‘So we keep them separate—we have enough land. Why shut ourselves off to another, potentially very lucrative, source of income?’

Claudia could feel that flutter again and her pulse picked up slightly as her imagination started to run a little wild. Avery would be great at managing and running a spa business. Temptation shimmied possibilities in front of her—typical that Luke would be an integral part of that, enticing her with firelight and his strange but lovely accent like a big, fat, juicy apple.

She dragged her gaze off him and looked into the fire. Bad enough that he’d reminded her of how she’d perved on him in the pool today, but now he was waving a shiny new future in front of her.

Get behind me, Satan.

Luke was encouraged by Claudia’s contemplation, the little flare of interest he’d seen in her gaze. He nudged his thigh against hers and a quiver of something hot and sinful spread all the way up to his groin. ‘Just think about it, Claude. You don’t have to rush into anything.’

Claudia looked down at his thigh, all warm and muscled in the firelight. And tempting. Oh, so tempting. It was hot against hers and she didn’t think it had anything to do with the fire. Did he feel it too or was it just her? She wondered what he’d do if she slid her hand onto it. If she slowly moved it upwards.

Right. To. The. Top.

She blinked as the image formed in real time in her head and stood abruptly, shocked by the ferocity of the urge to follow through. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said, looking straight ahead. Not down at him. And his eyes. And his smile.

And his outrageously sexy accent.

Luke smiled at the stiffness of her stance. ‘Good,’ he murmured.

Claudia nodded. ‘Right, well...I think I might turn in,’ she said, still not looking at him.

Luke chuckled. ‘Sweet dreams.’

Claudia swallowed as she thought about the dreams she’d been having this last week.

Not one of them sweet.

‘See you in the morning,’ she said with as much nonchalance as she could muster before she fled the beach for the safety of the Copacabana Suite, far away from men with sexy accents and delectable thighs.

FIVE (#ulink_57c35348-ea7e-5954-922d-3b6331a4c9ff)

Claudia barely slept a wink. It was as if Luke had tripped some switch in her brain and a hundred different possibilities for what the Tropicana could be had bombarded her. And frankly it was a relief to think about something other than the way Luke’s hand had felt on her breast. The way his boardies had clung to him in the pool.

The way his thigh had sizzled against hers.

By the time morning rocked around, her head was buzzing. And she needed to share! Avery and Jonah weren’t on her radar—she’d walked in on them too many times to know that spontaneous bursts of shared creativity were off the table.

But the one man who had inspired them was just through a connecting door and he was in there alone.

She rose at six, climbed into her uniform—the skirt for a change—and made copious notes. When she was all spent she took to the floor, pacing it until the clock ticked over to seven—a perfectly reasonable hour. After that, all propriety was off. She rapped once on the door before pushing it open, knowing in her gut that Luke wouldn’t have locked it.

The room was like a black hole when she pressed inside but that didn’t deter her. It was only eight in the evening in the UK—still a perfectly decent hour. She marched over to the curtains from familiarity alone and yanked them back with a harsh squeal along the railing. Another impossibly sunny day greeted her and was surprisingly buoying.