Avoiding Mr Right (7 page)

‘There. Don’t try carrying it on your own again,’ he instructed her.

So he was still high-handed. Christina’s hackles went higher. She tried to dredge up the words to tell him exactly what he could do with his orders. But there was something in the intent dark eyes which stopped the words in her throat.

She strove for normality.

‘Perhaps you’d better discuss the matter with the man I work for,’ she said in a practical voice.

For no reason that she could think of that seemed to entertain him. The look of private amusement intensified.

‘Good idea. I might just do that.’

Christina sent a look over her shoulder. She had had a sharp little argument with the first officer after lunch. It had culminated in a rude instruction from Captain Demetrius for her to take the garbage ashore and come straight back. When she’d set off the captain and the first officer, who was also his cousin, had been leaning on the rail, watching her. She was almost certain that that had been the object of the order in the first place. Conscious of their eyes on her long, tanned legs, she had found herself wishing passionately that she had been wearing anything but the standard shipboard garb of shorts and cut-away cotton vest.

Luc followed her eyes. There were no figures at the rail now, but he seemed to read her mind.

‘Watching you, were they? No one offered to help?’

Christina shrugged. ‘It’s my job,’ she said levelly. ‘Ship’s cook gets rid of galley refuse.’

His mouth tightened. ‘Not by the tonne.’

‘We—er—haven’t had the opportunity to unload garbage for a couple of days.’

That was an understatement. Captain Demetrius, seriously out of his depth in charge of a boat all on his own for the first time, had failed to book moorings ahead of their arrival in port. With the early season now well under way, the harbour-masters had turned the
Lady Elaine
away. The captain’s new arrogance, presumably acquired by association with his princely employer, had not helped. As a result, so far they had docked in one extremely smelly fishing village, a container port and now this unfashionable harbour.

Luc raised his brows. ‘Explain,’ he ordered.

Christina sighed. ‘Put it this way—it’s not the best organised voyage I’ve ever been on.’

‘But—’ He broke off whatever he had been going to say, looking suddenly annoyed.

She grinned suddenly, ‘In fact it’s a disaster. Nothing has been properly planned. The passengers blame the crew. The crew blames the first officer. So they hate him. The first officer hates children. And all but one of our passengers are children. The passenger who isn’t a child hates the captain. And the captain hates everybody.’

Luc looked stunned. ‘This is outrageous.’

Christina considered. ‘Well, no. It’s like a board game for adults. Who can you afford to leave alone together on the boat without them killing each other?’

Luc gave an unwilling laugh. ‘It sounds poisonous.’

‘Quiet,’ she corrected him. ‘Not a lot of call for conversation.’

Three hours out of Athens the captain had made his first error of navigation. Their passengers were the charterer’s sister, the Princess, and her children. All too soon it had emerged that the Princess understood charts better than Demetrius. Indeed, even Christina could read the charts better.

From the moment that had become apparent, the atmosphere on board had become so tense that she could have taken a vow of silence and no one would have noticed.

Her tension must have shown. In spite of her ironic tone, Luc looked at her curiously.

‘Will you jump ship?’

‘It’s a tempting thought. You don’t know how tempting,’ she said with feeling.

His eyes glinted. ‘Then let me take you out of all this.’

That startled her. She jumped and lifted her eyes to scan his face candidly.

‘I can’t go,’ she said in pure reflex.

‘Why not? You’re wretched. Walk away.’

‘It’s not as easy as that.’

‘It is for a clear-headed girl like you.’ He paused, then added softly, ‘Unless it’s me you don’t want to go with.
Do
I frighten you, Christina?’

That was altogether too close to the truth. She lifted her chin.

‘I am not afraid of you or anyone.’

‘Then let me be your escape route.’

She was thoroughly confused and more than a little indignant. She stared at Luc. He smiled back. The bland expression was complicated, but it was still too full of that private amusement for Christina’s liking. She drew herself up a little.

‘More and more tempting,’ she assured him with her coolest politeness. Then a thought occurred to her that drove the odd tension between them out of her head. She chuckled. ‘Especially as I have to tell Simon Aston—one of the children—that he isn’t getting the devil’s food cake he ordered for tea. But, in spite of everything, I think not.’

Luc did not reply at once. Instead he contemplated her with an odd expression. At last he gave a theatrical sigh. ‘Turned down for a schoolboy.’

Christina sniffed. ‘A row with a schoolboy. Be precise.’

‘Very lowering to the vanity.’

But from the tilt to his mouth Christina was pretty sure that his vanity was undinted. She decided to change the subject. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’

That seemed to disconcert him. Briefly he looked annoyed; then he shrugged. ‘Getting away from it all. It’s been in the diary to visit this place for a while.’

Which told her precisely nothing. It was quite deliberate, she was sure. Luc Henri was still being evasive. Well, two could play at that game. Christina gave him her sweetest smile.

‘I hope you enjoy your holiday,’ she said in a tone of unmistakable farewell.

She turned to go. Luc stopped her. He put a hand on her arm swiftly, easily, as if he had every right to take hold of her in that casual fashion. Christina stopped dead, inexplicably shocked, aware that her face was suddenly hot. Her heart pounded.

‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a car at the hotel. Come with me now. You need never see these people again.’

Christina shook her head. ‘I can’t. I signed on for the voyage.’

‘Contracts can be broken. Especially if they’re treating you badly.’

She sighed. ‘It’s not the contract.’

A small flame lit in the dark eyes. ‘Well, then—’

‘I promised,’ she said simply.

He stared. For a moment she thought he had not understood what she said.

‘I made a promise when I took the job—’ she began, but he had understood all right. He was shaking his head in disbelief.

‘What does that matter? You don’t care about these people.’

It was her turn to look disbelieving. ‘I care about my promises.’

He stared. Eventually he said slowly, ‘That is very—laudable.’

Her blush was subsiding but she still felt far from at ease. She smiled at him with constraint. Suddenly, startlingly, the brown eyes began to dance.

‘So the lady in distress won’t let me carry her off,’ he said softly. ‘What can I do, then? Bring out your dragons.’

Christina could not help herself. She looked at the black rubbish sack and laughed. ‘That was about all the tasks I had on hand at the moment.’

He shook his head, seemingly disappointed. ‘No dragons at all?’

Christina stared. The way his mouth was tilting, it almost sounded like a challenge.

She thought of Captain Demetrius. Of his cousin, the first officer. Even better, of their absent royal employer who had commanded the whole mess into being.

‘None available for slaying,’ she said ruefully.

The heavy brows rose. ‘You mean there are dragons and you’re afraid I won’t be able to handle them?’ He sounded affronted.

She looked at the broad shoulders and laughed aloud. ‘No, no, I’m sure you could handle them beautifully. It’s just that if you slay them I’m out of a job. My employer might not feel about promises the same way that I do.’

His eyes narrowed suddenly. ‘You’re fighting with your employer?’

‘My employer is an absentee. It’s not easy to fight with a man who isn’t there,’ Christina said crisply.

His eyes went blank suddenly. ‘I don’t think I follow,’ he said slowly.

‘Oh, technically I take my orders from the captain. But the guy who calls the shots is a tennis-playing playboy with an unpronounceable title,’ Christina said, selecting freely from what she knew of the Prince. ‘He,’ she added with some bitterness, ‘chose the captain.’

There was a curious little silence.

Then Luc raised his brows enquiringly. ‘It really isn’t a happy ship, is it?’ he drawled.

She laughed shortly. ‘I’ve been on happier.’

The black brows twitched together. He looked at her broodingly. ‘This is—irritation,’ he said half to himself.

Christina did not understand. It was occurring to her suddenly that he had shown no surprise at encountering her, and that, although he might have had the trip in his diary for ever, she had not the slightest idea who the man really was who owned that diary or what he was doing here.

For a couple of moments during their conversation she had wondered whether he had pursued her to this place deliberately. But his manner did nothing to support that reading of the situation. He found her attractive all right, but whatever he was frowning over at the moment it was not her. If anything, he seemed almost too preoccupied to remember that she was there.

And yet he was not surprised to see her…

‘What are you doing here?’ she said again abruptly.

Luc’s eyes found hers. He smiled suddenly, brilliantly. ‘Reconsidering my strategy,’ he said. His voice was full of that infuriating secret amusement again.

To Christina’s complete astonishment, he leaned down and slid the sunglasses down her nose so that he could speak straight into her suspicious eyes.

‘Don’t look so alarmed, Christina Howard. Don’t forget, you’re not afraid of me.’

He bent his head before she knew what he was about and gave her a light, searing kiss full on her startled mouth.

Then he was gone, slipping like a shadow among the shadows of the waterfront buildings. Christina stared after him. The kiss had been so brief that she was not sure whether she had conjured it up from her fevered imagination.

But then she touched her throbbing lips. It was not her imagination. God knew who he was or what he wanted but, whatever it was, he was
there
.

Irrationally, recklessly, her heart began to sing.

CHAPTER FOUR

C
HRISTINA prepared the evening meal on autopilot. Luc was here. Still evasive, still mysterious, but
here
.

She looked in the mirror in her tiny cabin that night and barely recognised herself. Her cornflower-blue eyes were sparkling and her mouth looked softer, fuller, as if inviting a kiss from the unknown. It alarmed her a little but it intrigued her too.

‘This is where you find out how much was pure fantasy,’ she told herself with satisfaction. It never occurred to her that Luc Henri would not seek her out again. He would not be able to keep away, she knew—any more than she could. She gave a soft, excited laugh

‘Burn, fire, burn,’ she told her reflection.

. But he did not have to seek her out. She saw him at the little town’s smartest hotel the very next day.

She delivered the children to the hotel’s sports complex while their mother strolled off in search of more exciting company. Christina lingered briefly. The director of the children’s activities was an old acquaintance from previous summers.

‘Take care of Simon Aston,’ Christina warned Karl. ‘He’s not as grown-up as he thinks he is.’

‘I’ll keep an eye out for him,’ he promised.

Relieved, Christina made her way up to the lobby. She was dying for a cool drink. That was when she saw Luc Henri. Across the hall, his tall figure was unmistakable. She stopped dead.

He was sitting at a desk in an alcove, below a notice that said ‘Press and Office Services’. He did not see her. He was frowning at the screen of a small laptop computer. As she watched he leaned forward and collected a page from the printer, scanning it.

Christina hesitated. For the first time it occurred to her that he could be a journalist. But what sort of journalist? She could imagine him as an international correspondent—one of those soldiers of fortune that patrolled the troubled hot spots of the world looking for their exclusives, even though Athens was hardly hot these days.

Suddenly, she was confronted with another and deeply unwelcome possibility. What if he were a different sort of journalist entirely? This sleepy little port was even less of a hot spot than Athens. What was more, it had no claim to fame either, unless it was the presence of the latest heartthrob, Stuart Define, and his film crew.

Karl had been crisp about them. The actor’s entourage had partied into the small hours by the swimming pool, leaving glasses and cocktail detritus to be cleared by the pool attendants at breakneck speed before the first guests arrived to swim in the morning. Now, Christina thought, what if that entourage was about to include a bored and lonely princess? What if Luc Henri were here looking for an entirely different sort of scoop?

As she watched, Luc shrugged. He turned to another machine and fed the paper into it, dialling rapidly. Simon Aston’s little face flashed before Christina’s inner eye. Her heart twisted.

Well, if that was what he wanted, he would have to think again, she thought suddenly. Luc Henri was not going to get that scoop as long as Christina was on board the
Lady Elaine.
She drew a deep breath, knotted the tails of her shirt more ruthlessly round her tanned midriff and stepped forward.

At once, as if drawn by a powerful, invisible magnet, his eyes lifted, found her. They locked onto her without expression. In spite of that impassive face, Christina sensed a jolt of surprise go through him—not a welcome surprise.

If she had had any doubts about her hypothesis, that reaction would have banished them. He fetched up short, his eyes narrowing. He did not look guilty, exactly, but he did look as if he wished she were anywhere but here in the lobby.