Mango Kisses (12 page)

‘Certainly not,’ said Tiffany. ‘Anyway you weren’t my client yesterday.’

The conversation had veered into a completely different arena where she was at a disadvantage, unsure of her footing, whereas he was right at home having done the steering. Wearing shorts and her white skimpy top didn’t help maintain a professional demeanour. Neither did bare feet.

‘Does that mean we can’t do it again?’ His smile was overpowering, shutting down her brain. Tiffany struggled out from underneath it.

‘You’re my client. It wouldn’t be professional.’

‘But that’s not what I asked,’ said Miles. Her eyes kept returning to those smiling, kissable lips. ‘We could be unprofessional, couldn’t we?’

‘I think that would cause far too many problems, Mr Frobisher.’

‘How long will this job take? Doesn’t sound as though I’ll have any problem meeting your fee, does it?’ Fortunately he’d backed off under the chill of her tone. If he hadn’t she might have cracked.

‘No.’

‘So you could be here for what? A week?’

‘Possibly.’

‘And then when you’ve finished, I can take you out for dinner.’

‘Yes. If you’d like to.’ At last he’d got the idea. Work first, pleasure later.

‘And kiss you.’

Tiffany nodded dumbly. That had snuck right up on her.

‘And we could be completely unprofessional,’ he murmured. He stepped closer. ‘I don’t think I can wait a week,’ he said.

Tiffany scraped herself together. She must not, on any account, look into his eyes. Fortunately, he was so close to her that was almost impossible; she’d go cross-eyed at this distance. She stared at his throat instead which was level with her face. The taste of mangoes was in her mouth, strawberries on her lips.

‘You’ll have to,’ she managed to say. ‘I can’t possibly...’ She swallowed.

‘What?’ Now he was brushing her cheek and his fingers were making her lean into his hand and increase the pressure just like a cat wanting to be stroked. She’d be purring next.

‘I can’t become sidetracked,’ she stated firmly and stepped backwards. ‘Don’t you have a shop to run?’

Miles sighed. His hand fell to his side. He gave her a lopsided grin and raised his eyebrows.

‘See you tomorrow?’ He turned to go, took a few steps and stopped. His face swung towards her.

Tiffany waited with her hand on the door ready to shut it if he came too close. She couldn’t resist if he walked right up and kissed her. Reservations and professional ethics would disappear like mist in the sunshine.

‘Do you ever stop thinking about work?’ His eyes narrowed. His expression was the same as all those other boys and later, men, who had thought and asked the same thing.

‘I love my work,’ she said defiantly. ‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘What about your life?’

‘At the moment my work and my life are intertwined. I’m in line for a junior partnership and I have to decide whether I want to stay where I am or go somewhere bigger with more room for advancement. I have to think of my career.’

‘Onward and upward,’ he stated but his voice held an edge of disappointment.

‘That’s exactly what my father says.’

‘What does your father do?’

‘He lectures in economics at Sydney University. He’s a professor.’

‘I understand.’ He nodded with a particularly annoying, supercilious expression.

‘What do you understand?’ she demanded. ‘I don’t think you know enough about me or my father to understand anything.’

‘You’ve been trained to think making money is the be all and end all of your existence. When you’re faced with an alternative you retreat because you’re afraid of what you might feel.’

His face turned stony. His words hit her hard, like hailstones, the more so because on one level they held an unpalatable truth. It served her right for thinking this man might be the one. He couldn’t be. Men like him never were — for her. For once, and if only to prove this one wrong, she could let fly and tell one of them what she thought of their judgemental arrogance, secure in their sexiness and attractiveness.

‘What? What alternative?’ she cried. ‘What are you talking about? How dare you presume to know...who do you think you are, talking to me like that?’

There was far more to say but she had to stop and order her thoughts before delivering the next round.

Miles glared at her. ‘What alternative? This one.’

He stepped forward swiftly and grabbed her shoulders with both hands before she could shut the door. His mouth closed over hers. A roaring began in her ears as her mind cartwheeled and careened about with all her thoughts falling around in her head. All the words she meant to say and all the objections she meant to make mixed up in a gigantic blender, so that what came out was a whimper.

He forced her lips apart and demonstrated advanced kissing. Any attempt at thought was completely demolished for an undetermined period as time evaporated. But he stopped abruptly and released her. She stumbled back into her room. By the harsh sound of his shoes on the parking lot gravel and the set of his back in the navy blue cotton shirt, he was very, very angry.

Tiffany raised shaky bewildered fingers to her mouth to touch her lips gently. His lips had been hard, nothing like yesterday’s tender, playful caresses. Angry and forceful with a passion she’d had no idea was there. An exciting passion, there was no denying — the passion of a strong male thwarted by a reluctant female. She’d aroused those feelings with no experience of how to handle them.

The only way she knew was to retreat as he’d accused her. He’d seen exactly what she was — a woman incapable of expressing her feelings, hiding behind her work, her professional front, and doing it since childhood because she knew no other way. He kissed her with passion and a skill she couldn’t match because she didn’t know how to express the feelings she had. As far he was concerned there was nothing else, no feelings there to discover. And he despised her for it.

Tiffany closed the door. But was she so wrong? That’s how she was. It was her, and if a man couldn’t understand that about her and approach her with the right amount of understanding and sensitivity then...

What?

He walked away — furious.

Miles had no right to attack her. He seemed to think he could initiate her into a life of emotional richness via sex, of course, as if she was unaware. Perhaps he thought she was a virgin, and envisaged a cosy little
ménage a deux
in his beach house. She would turn him into a millionaire in the morning and then spend the afternoon in his bed.

Tiffany stomped into the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth. She had to return Fiorella’s umbrella. And she definitely had to remove that thought from her head. Hot afternoons in Miles’s bed learning advanced kissing and other things from a man who could empty her head with one brief, soft, gentle kiss in the rain, let alone a wildly passionate one on her doorstep.

Fiorella didn’t answer the bell so Tiffany propped the umbrella against the wall next to the front door and left it with a note of thanks. She spent the rest of the day as planned, lazing on the beach smothered in sunscreen, wearing her broad brimmed hat and ploughing her way through a brick-sized, lurid thriller-come-murder-mystery-come-almost-porn paperback masquerading as romance, set in that den of iniquity and vice, Hollywood, which was the best in literature that George’s General Store could offer.

Every so often she wandered across the street to Xanthi’s and bought a drink or an ice-cream. She didn’t even glance into the surf shop, had no idea whether Miles was in there or not, and didn’t care. Their relationship would be ultra-professional from now on and should have been from the start. She wouldn’t be making any mistakes like that again, thinking she was falling in love with a guy because he looked at her a certain way and kissed her another certain way. He was supposed to kiss her, for heaven’s sake. They’d been at a kissing course. Anything she felt, or imagined she felt, and anything she imagined he felt was all in her head. Imagination.

He had made a point albeit in an extreme way when he kissed her. He was a flirt, a charmer and the best looking man in town. She had injured his pride by turning his offer down and made him angry.

Eventually, cooked through and lethargic, she laid down the book, stretched, and contemplated one last quick swim before returning to the motel. Tiffany rose to her feet, tossed her sunglasses and hat on the towel, and headed for the water.

Miles, having watched Tiffany on and off all afternoon from his observation point behind the window display surfboards, decided to close twenty minutes early. Each time she walked across the road he held his breath and pretended to be busy with the bin of children’s swim floats but she never came in. She didn’t even look at the shop as far as he could judge, although it was difficult to tell given she wore dark glasses. Under the hat, her face was expressionless. And she must have bought that one in Kandala after rejecting his range the other day.

He had had plenty of time to make up his mind that long, slow, hot, frustrating afternoon. Coming to terms with three hundred thousand dollars wasn’t easy. He had marched straight home to verify what she’d told him but even he could see the veracity of her assessment. The figures on the bank statements were clear — low six-figure numbers. The rest of the papers were still a confusing muddle that stymied him after a couple of pages. He needed expert assistance. His expert was right here in Birrigai, ready and willing to go to work, unless she had quit because she had been so offended by his actions.

He must apologise and promise to keep their relationship on a professional footing, which is what she’d asked, and he’d stupidly ignored. Just because they had done Fiorella’s ridiculous course together didn’t mean she regarded him as a friend or something more intimate.

‘Closing up now, see you tomorrow, Boris,’ he said.

Boris kept any surprise to himself and took his early mark with a grin and a wave.

Miles walked across to the beach. About a dozen people still lazed on the sand, more splashed in the waves. He scanned the water from the edge of the sand and spotted her blonde head bobbing up and down, diving under an incoming wave, turning to wait for the next. She caught it, disappeared in a flurry of white foam, and reappeared in waist high water, running her hands over her face and hair. An electric blue one-piece moulded perfectly to her slim figure and she waded to the beach like a sea goddess, her skin glowing and glistening in the late afternoon sun.

Miles strode on to the sand in the direction she was heading. Tiffany bent to pick up her towel without noticing his approach. She flapped the towel vigorously sending sand flying, then buried her face in it, and rubbed her hair.

‘Hello Tiffany.’

The towel stopped abruptly. Two startled blue-grey eyes emerged staring at him warily. She resumed drying her body.

‘Hello,’ she muttered.

‘Tiffany, I want to apologise for my behaviour earlier. I’m sorry.’

She dropped the towel and pulled a t-shirt over her head.

More words tumbled forth. ‘I shouldn’t have spoken to you that way and I hope you’ll accept that I really mean it when I say I’m sorry. From now on I’ll respect your professional position as my accountant.’ Was that as horribly stilted sounding from her side as his? Would she think he was being patronising?

‘In other words,’ she said, ‘you don’t want me to quit.’ To his acutely sensitive ear there seemed to be a note of resignation in her tone.

‘No! No, of course I don’t. But that’s not the only reason. No, that’s not the reason at all. Well, it is sort of but not just that...’ Miles gave up.

Tiffany gave him a twisted little smile. She folded the towel.

‘Apology accepted. Thank you.’

‘You’ll come tomorrow?’ he asked hopefully.

‘It’s my job,’ she said implying that she had to come whether she liked it or not.

‘Bring your washing.’ He smiled but Tiffany didn’t meet his eye. She scooped up her book and stuffed it with the towel into her straw bag. She picked up her hat and stuck her sunglasses on her nose. Then she looked at him. He couldn’t see her eyes at all. Strands of fluffy blonde hair, already dry in the heat, wisped around her cheeks, soft, sweet against her sun warmed skin. It made his throat ache.

‘I don’t think I’d better after all. I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sure the motel will have a laundry.’

‘Tiffany, don’t be ridiculous. Of course you can do your washing at my place.’

‘I’ll see you at nine,’ Tiffany said stiffly. ‘I’m sorry, I have to go now. I have a dinner engagement.’

‘Who with?’ exclaimed Miles in astonishment before he could stop himself.

‘None of your business,’ she replied smartly and stepped around him to march across the sand with her straw tote bag slung over her shoulder, hips swaying with each electric blue stride.

‘Fleur,’ he yelled after her retreating figure. ‘I bet you’re going out with Fleur. Don’t drink too much like last time. I want my accountant sharp in the morning, not hung over.’

She ignored him.

But Miles’s voice resounded in her head as she tramped through the soft sand as forcefully as she could.
Fleur!
Hadn’t she indirectly promised to spend the evening with Fleur trying on lipsticks? ‘Maybe we could get together sometime?’ ‘Fleur maybe in tonight.’