The loneliness in the soft voice tugged at Hailey’s conscience. She couldn’t take out her anger with the father on the child. “Of course not.
Do
you have a problem?”
“Well, sort of,” Faith hedged, and Hailey got the distinct impression that she was stalling, searching for an excuse to have called. “Do you think I should perm my hair? You know, kinda like Stevie Nicks.”
Hailey bit her lip to keep from laughing. “I think we should talk it over during dinner.”
“You mean it, Hailey? Gee, that would be terrific.” The whining had disappeared and exuberance had taken its place.
“Why don’t we drive over to Pigeon Forge and eat there?”
“Okay! What should we wear?” Faith asked with a grown-up inflection, and Hailey wondered if she were imitating her late mother.
“We’ll go sloppy in jeans and T-shirts. Let’s go to a place where they have a huge salad bar and then well have two desserts.”
Faith was giggling. “We’ll both get fat and then when Daddy comes back, he won’t know either of us.”
Hailey thought that Tyler certainly wouldn’t know her. She wouldn’t be cooperative and eager the way she’d been the night before, telling him with actions, if not with words, how much she craved his touch, his kiss. “I’ll pick you up at seven. I’m taking off early tonight.” If she were going to be rebellious, she was going all the way. “Tell the manager—”
“Harry.”
“Tell Harry I’ll have you back by ten.”
“Okay, see ya.” Just before she hung up, Faith added, “Daddy said you’d think up neat things for us to do.”
So, Hailey thought as she sat in her office tight-lipped and fuming, he had expected her to follow his wishes. He had foreseen no problems with her granting him this favor.
She had calmed down by the time she picked up Faith at the hotel. They had a fun evening, competing in a game of miniature golf after enjoying a huge country dinner. They spent each evening after that together. Hailey enjoyed the girl, who was beginning to talk about some of the heartaches she had suffered. Hailey listened and knew instinctively that no one had given the child such undivided attention before. Once the floodgate had been let down, Faith’s innermost anxieties spilled out.
The only fly in the ointment, for Hailey at least, was Faith’s constant references to her father. To her, Tyler was a paragon of the male sex—physically, intellectually, morally. Hailey pretended for the girl’s sake that she found him equally wonderful.
She had heard the word “Daddy” so often that when Faith shrieked it from across the indoor pool at Glenstone Lodge late one evening, Hailey didn’t at first realize that he was actually there, standing before her, looking down at her as she lounged on one of the pool-side chaises.
From the page of her novel, her eyes flew up to his with the same suicidal determination of a moth flying into a flame. For breathless seconds they stared at each other before he broke the eye contact to turn around and call to Faith. “Who is that graceful mermaid I see swimming out there?”
“Oh, Daddy,” Faith said, blushing. Then she called, “Watch me. Watch now.” With that she plunged beneath the surface and her two spindly legs pushed out of the water. They swayed like a pair of unsteady flagpoles as she did her handstand on the bottom of the pool.
When she was once again standing in the waist-deep water, beaming over her accomplishment, Tyler grinned broadly and applauded. “You’ve been practicing.” While Faith was swimming to the side of the pool, he turned back to Hailey. “How long have you been lying here, in that indecent swimsuit, providing the ogling yokels the kind of visions that dreams are made of?”
She didn’t want him to tease her with clever words, she didn’t want him to look thoroughly masculine, and sexy enough to turn the head of every woman who chanced to pass by. When he looked at her the way he did now and spoke with that soft, low, seductive purr, she couldn’t think. Her memory blurred and she had a hard time remembering why she despised him so.
Before she once again made a monumental fool of herself, she sat up, swung her legs over the edge of the chair and asked, “Did you have a nice trip?”
“Boring business meetings,” he said, tugging on Faith’s pigtails as she ran up to him. Playfully, he shook the water he squeezed out of them off his hands.
Hailey dumped her book into her large shoulder bag and stood up, pulling on her terry-cloth wrapper.
“Where are you going, Hailey?” Faith asked. Her chin was dripping water onto her bony chest. Her skin and lips were turning slightly blue as she shivered. Her eyes looked myopic without her glasses.
“I’d better go on home.”
“But we were—”
“What were your plans?” Tyler addressed the question to Faith rather than to Hailey.
“Hailey brought her clothes over and after we swam, we were going out to dinner.”
“Sounds good to me,” Tyler said heartily. “Can you wait for me to take a quick dip, too?”
“Sure!” Faith said. Then she looked hesitantly at Hailey. “Can’t we, Hailey?”
If Hailey refused either to wait for him or go to dinner, she would have to make explanations to Faith. At that moment she didn’t feel up to doing more than nodding her head in agreement “Sure, that’s fine.”
Tyler’s eyes were probing hers, but he looked away to chuck Faith under the chin before he said, “I’ll be right back.”
In minutes he had returned, entering the atrium by a side door and walking toward the pool with all the confidence and nonchalance of a pagan god. And almost as nakedly.
His swimming trunks were black with white piping around his trim legs. They hugged his hips with a fit that made Hailey want to stare when she knew propriety dictated she should glance away quickly. The muscles of his thighs were lean but hinted at tremendous strength beneath his hair-roughened skin.
Hailey tried to avert her eyes from his torso, but was powerless to do so. He had the physique of a man half his age; his maturity only heightened his virility. His shoulders and chest were muscular, but not bulky. His ribs and waist were trim, but not thin. He looked powerful, but was graceful as he executed a knife-blade dive that barely made a ripple on the surface of the water.
Hailey had gone to sit in the whirlpool at one corner of the poolroom. The atrium ceiling was three stories above her, yet the indoor pool with its grotto design, complete with waterfall and lavalike rocks, had an aura of intimacy about it. The tropical plants around the pool grew in profusion in the steamy atmosphere.
Tyler and Faith were playing and splashing boisterously in the larger pool. Hailey lay back in the hot, bubbly water and closed her eyes. Projected on the back of her lids was an image of Tyler. She knew what it was like to touch that dark, springy hair that grew at the top of his chest. But what of that narrow, silky line that grew straight as an arrow down his stomach and disappeared into the waistband of his trunks? What was it like to touch that?
“I’d like to be inside your head and see what naughty thought has brought such a sublime expression to your face.”
Her eyes sprang open, and she was disconcerted to see that he was in the whirlpool with her. The churning water had kept her from hearing him as he stepped in. He sat down beside her on the underwater bench and whispered, “In fact, I’d like to be inside you—period.”
She struggled to sit up straight and was almost unbalanced by the force of the swirling water. “Don’t talk to me like that!” she hissed.
He smiled lazily. “Why?”
“Why!
Because we’re in a public place, that’s why.”
“We have the place to ourselves.”
She looked around in desperation and saw that he was right. Where had everyone gone? “Your daughter is here.”
“She’s playing under the waterfall. She can’t hear us.”
“Still, you … Oh! What is that?”
“My hand.”
His boldness shocked her. “Tyler …” His name was spoken like a verbal caress and not the reprimand she had intended. Frantically she groped for the hand that wouldn’t be captured or deterred. Where was all that cool condescension she was going to treat him to? That well-planned contempt? The disparaging glances? Within minutes of his return he had her once again at his mercy—confused, breathless.
“Tyler, please. You shouldn’t.”
“Why?” he asked against the corner of her mouth.
“Because … because …” She searched her mind for a plausible reason but could find none. It felt so good to have his hand squeezing the tender flesh on the inside of her thigh. His fingers moved without discretion or shame, gliding over her skin as sleekly as did the soothing water. Her eyes closed and her head fell back against her shoulders. Unwilling to admit total surrender, she still denied his right to take such liberties. “Because you shouldn’t,” she argued lamely.
“You can touch any part of me you want to.”
That intriguing line of hair that ran from his chest to abdomen came unbidden to her mind. Her eyelids fluttered open to see him staring down into her face. One thick brow was raised in an amused query, while his lips twitched with controlled laughter. “Do you already have some part in mind?”
She struggled against him. His insolence infuriated her, and all the pent-up anger that had been simmering inside her boiled to the surface with volcanic force. “Let me go.” Extricating herself from his persistent hands, she managed to stand and walk up the shallow steps of the pool. “From now on, keep your hands to yourself,” she said with venom.
She waved to Faith from the side of the pool. “Come on out so we can dress for dinner.” When the girl climbed out of the water, Hailey wrapped a towel around her and together they walked to Tyler’s suite of rooms. A sitting room divided the two bedrooms, and the smaller of them had been given over for Faith’s use.
Faith had claimed the shower first, so Hailey was rinsing out their suits in the basin when she heard a knock on the connecting door. Cursing softly under her breath, she slipped her terry wrapper over her nakedness and went to the door. “Yes?”
“I came to borrow some soap.”
“Soap.”
“Yeah, you know that stuff that bubbles and foams in the water.”
She ignored his attempted humor. “Where is yours?”
“If I knew, would I be borrowing more?”
She stepped into the bathroom where Faith’s off-key rendition of a popular rock song could be heard over the shower’s spray. She picked up an unwrapped bar of hotel soap and opened the door a crack to offer it to him.
He moved with lightning speed. Her wrist was grasped in an iron grip and she was hauled through the door and tossed unceremoniously onto the sofa of the sitting room. He lay atop her, pinning her to the yielding cushions. Her robe fell open. His hard thighs moved against hers. Her arms were held on either side of her head by strong fingers locked around her wrists. Their breathing was loud and rapid in the still room where Faith’s singing was only a dim echo.
“Let’s have it,” he demanded.
“Let me up.”
“Not a chance. Not until I know what burr has gotten under your saddle.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Like hell you don’t. I knew something was wrong when I called you before I left for Atlanta, but I didn’t have time to pursue it then. Now I’m back and you’re as prickly as a porcupine again, shooting daggers every time those green eyes light on me. I want to know why.”
“Nothing’s the matter,” she declared vehemently and renewed her efforts at release. His hold only became more tenacious.
“Then you’ll be wanting to kiss me as much as I’ve been wanting to kiss you.”
His lips came down on hers hard and insistent. She resisted, clenching her jaws together, refusing to respond to the hateful desire that even now was winding through her body.
He lifted his head and stared down into her stormy eyes. “Okay, my stubborn lady. You want to be persuaded. I won’t disappoint you.”
He lowered his head and nibbled at the skin on the side of her neck. His hair was a silky caress itself as he moved his head lower to rest against her chest. He kissed his way to the underside of her arm. “I missed you. Obstinate as you are, I missed you like hell.”
She sucked in her breath sharply as his lips opened over her skin. How is it she had never heard of that erogenous zone? His tongue skimmed it, touching it with fire, and a moan issued out of her throat. Futilely, she struggled to lower her arm and end this torment, but he refused to allow it. “You like that? We’ve only just started, Hailey.”
She fought the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, fought the liquid heaviness that throbbed between her thighs. Her mind screamed that she hated him, but the only sound that formed in her heart and on her lips was his name, cate-chistically repeated.
“Yes, my love. Look at how beautiful you are.” His eyes swept her length. “All week I fantasized about seeing you naked beneath me. I wanted to see these breasts that I had only touched in the dark. You’re more beautiful than I ever anticipated.”
His mouth sampled the side of her breast and she writhed against him. One of his knees insinuated its way between her thighs. It was an invasion that met no resistance. His swimming trunks were still damp as his hips settled in a complementing position over hers. Behind that scant piece of cloth, she felt his desire.
“So sweet,” he whispered. His tongue painted a swathe of white heat on the undercurve of her breasts. She could feel his eyes touching her before his breath fanned the nipples that seemed to beg for his touch.
So lightly that she might have imagined it, his lips brushed one pink bud. But she didn’t imagine the second light touch of his mouth, nor the damp flicking of his tongue. “Tyler,” she said urgently as his mouth closed around her.
Her hands were freed, but they sought bondage of another kind in the thick mass of his hair. Her fingers plowed through it, holding his head against her, silently beseeching him never to cease that gentle tugging that transmitted tiny pinpricks of feeling to the center of her being.
Her other breast was blessed with the same ardent attention. He spoke love words against her warm, scented skin even as he rained kisses on it.