“Hungry?” he asked.
Cristy couldn’t trust herself to say anything, she was so overwhelmed by the surge of emotion that powered through her. All she could do was nod.
“You okay?” he asked, concern warming his eyes.
“Fine,” she managed to get out.
“You sure?”
Why did he have to be so darn nice about it? She’d have to try to harden her heart, reveal no hint of her awkward, unexpected love for him.
With an effort, she schooled her face to look casual, her voice light hearted. “I was, uh, just knocked out by seeing you cook that fish. You know, that fish you caught with your bare hands. That and the crab catch was real Tarzan stuff.”
He paused. She thought he looked disconcerted at her flippant reply. Did he expect to hear something more heartfelt?
But he only missed one beat and his flippancy matched hers as he replied. “Hey, it was nothing. All part of the service. Just call me Castaways Inc.”
So she’d been right to mask her feelings.
Cristy pummeled down her disappointment and kept the banter light. “I sure chose the right guy to be shipwrecked with.”
“Aw, heck,” Matt said with mock modesty.
Cristy forced a laugh. “Seriously, I’m impressed. Some guys might be able to catch the fish, not many would be able to cook it.”
“I’m used to looking after myself,” he said, turning back to the fish he was frying.
Was that another warning? Like, back off, I don’t need anyone in my life?
“Just you and your trusty dog, huh?”
Matt pushed the pan to the back of the kerosene burner and switched it off. Then he turned back to face her. “At one time it was me and my trusty eagle,” he said, straight-faced.
Cristy’s eyes widened. “An eagle? You’re kidding me, right? You think I’m that gullible?”
“I’m serious.”
“I don’t know too many places you can have a pet eagle,” she said. “C’mon, pull the other leg.”
Matt looked down at her bare legs, her thighs scarcely covered by the remnants of her ragged wedding gown. His voice was deep and suggestive. “I’d love to play with your legs.”
Cristy flushed, flustered, as she remembered their hot lovemaking of the afternoon. And the morning. And the night before. “I didn’t mean that, and you know it.”
He feigned affront. “I was telling you about my eagle but you don’t seem to believe me.”
“Okay, tell me about how your eagle, uh, flew into your life.” She pulled a wry face to show her disbelief. She wondered if this eagle had anything to do with that impressive tattoo.
“He wasn’t flying. He was injured. I found him by the side of the road.”
“In Sydney? Yeah, right. Like the Aussies who told me there’d be kangaroos hopping down the main street. In a city of more than three million people. As I said, I’m not that gullible.”
“You’re not a good listener, are you?” Matt’s tone was teasing, almost indulgent.
“I am, I—” she started indignantly.
“Did I say anything about Sydney? Or Brisbane, for that matter, which is my hometown. I found him when I was working up in the Northern Territory. On a dirt road that stretched four hundred miles to nowhere.”
Cristy paused. “The Northern Territory? Isn’t that like the last frontier in Australia?”
“It can be rough and ready in places,” he said, deadpan.
“Tell me I’m right—you were in the rough bit?”
He nodded. “It was rough all right. I left home at fifteen and went to work in the mines.”
“In the mines?”
“Not exactly in the mines,” Matt amended. “Working for the company that was constructing the town that supported the mines.”
“But you were only fifteen.”
He shrugged. “So? That’s old enough to earn your own living. I started as laborer to a team of bricklayers—that meant big bucks.”
Cristy thought back to when she was fifteen. Earning her own living had been the last thing on her mind. How to smuggle a mascara onto the commune, maybe, but having her parents support her had been an unquestioned given.
“Shouldn’t you have been at school?” No way would her parents have let her leave school at fifteen, cut her education short.
“Do you really want to hear all this stuff? Why don’t I just cut straight to the eagle?”
“No! I mean yes. I mean don’t cut straight to the eagle. I want to hear the other stuff.”
Cristy stopped herself. She sounded too urgent. Like a woman in love, desperate to find out everything about her man.
She forced herself to sound more casual. “Your life story sounds very interesting. Please go on. So why did you leave school so young?”
“You make it sound like a hardship. It wasn’t. I was itching to get out of the classroom. Then Danny’s father left and it was up to me to support the family.”
Cristy hissed in a breath. Danny again.
“So why couldn’t Danny help?”
“He was eleven years old. They’d banned child labor in the mines by then.”
Cristy couldn’t help a smile. “I’m laughing but actually I don’t think it’s that funny. I can’t imagine a mine site in the Northern Territory would be a great place for a teenage boy.”
“Yeah, well, you could put it like that. It was hot and it was hellish. But we needed the money.”
“We?”
“My family. My mother was working but she didn’t earn enough to keep Danny at his private school. He was on a scholarship but he needed extra—”
“So to keep precious Danny in luxuries, you had to go slave in a mine.” She couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice.
“It was a perfectly okay building site. And I learned the trade that’s given me a good living ever since. You make it sound worse than it was. I wasn’t great at school. Danny was the smart one.”
“Danny. It’s always Danny.” Cristy couldn’t help but steam up with indignation on Matt’s behalf.
Matt took a step closer to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “Hey, your nose is getting all red again. C’mon, you want to say what a creep Danny is.”
Cristy colored further. Was she really that obvious? She was very aware of Matt’s closeness, the heat of him. “Creep. Jerk. Yeah. Let me think of some more names.”
“I wouldn’t have helped Danny if I didn’t want to. I’m proud of him. Proud I helped him through law school.” His mouth tightened. “Or I was…”
His eyes darkened with the hurt he seemed determined not to admit to. His hands were warm on her shoulders and she longed to press herself close to him. But that might reveal what she was feeling. She couldn’t risk that. Instead she shrugged off his hands and turned away from him. “You’re so generous. You make me seem mean. Selfish.”
Matt took her shoulders again and turned her back to face him. His brows were drawn together in puzzlement. “I don’t get it. Mean? Selfish?”
Cristy looked down at Matt’s feet, unable to meet his eye. “I feel like a spoiled brat—complaining about my parents taking me away to a commune when I never lacked for anything. Except red meat of course.”
Matt’s frown deepened. “Neither did I. Lack for anything.”
Slowly Cristy raised her head to meet him in the eye and this time all note of flippancy had left her voice.
Her parents might have stinted on the turkey at Thanksgiving but they were never short on love and encouragement for each of their four children. “I think you did. It seems to me that you were short changed when it came to family affection.”
Matt’s brows rose in what seemed like genuine bewilderment. “Me? Short changed? I’ve never noticed.”
“What? That your mom put Danny ahead of you all the time?”
“Yeah… she did. But it didn’t bother me. Besides, I had Maggie all to myself.”
“Maggie?” Matt’s voice was warm as he spoke the name and Cristy’s stomach seemed to drop to her toes. “Another… another girlfriend?”
Matt laughed and pulled her to a warm hug before releasing her. “Maggie was my grandmother.”
Cristy’s stomach settled back into the right place. Crazy to feel so jealous of other women in his life. But a grandmother? That she could cope with.
“Maggie was my father’s mother. She insisted she stayed part of my life after my parents split. Maggie was always there for me.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “But I still think you’ve had it tough.”
Matt looked very serious. “Don’t feel sorry for me. My life has been no tougher than many other people.”
“It’s been a heck of a lot tougher than mine.”
“That might be so, though toughness is relative. But I’ve got where I am on my own merits and that’s what counts to me.”
Cristy snuggled against his shoulder, breathing in his salty, male smell. The sandalwood was there, too, fainter now. Never again would she smell it without thinking about him. She screwed her eyes shut so tightly that it hurt.
With an intensity so powerful that it nearly overwhelmed her, she longed to tell Matt Slade that she loved him. But she couldn’t. He didn’t want her pity for his life—and she didn’t want his pity for her love.
She swallowed hard and forced her voice back into its light-hearted tone. She muttered against his shoulder. “That still doesn’t tell me about the eagle.”
Matt stood back from her and she prayed he wouldn’t be able to read the emotion on her face. But his eyes assumed a far away look.
“My eagle,” he said in reverent tones. “He was a magnificent creature—at least I think he was a he, no one ever taught me how to tell the sex of an eagle. He was big, fierce, proud. You should have seen the wingspan on him. I’ve never forgotten him and how he looked as he soared off into the desert sky when I let him go.”
He was silent for a long moment.
Moved by the image of the fifteen-year-old Matt with only an injured bird for company in a harsh, hostile environment, Cristy was hesitant when she spoke. “You must have been sad to see him go.”
Matt shook his head as if to bring himself back to the present. “Yeah, I was. It got lonely up there. Most of the guys moved on quickly. And there weren’t any women.”
Good. She didn’t want to think of him with anyone else, even in his past. Couldn’t bear to think about how he had learned to be such a skilled lover. She forced the light tone back into her voice. “But I won’t feel sorry for you—right?”
He grinned. “I soon got another pet. A snake.”
“No way. You’re making that one up.”
“I did have a snake. Another road kill rescue. Someone had run it down deliberately, I think, poor thing. It was nearly dead. Kept it in a bucket in my room, handled it with a stick, until one of the older guys saw it and told me it was a taipan.”
“Really? A taipan?”
“Yep, the most venomous snake in the world. You should have seen that guy run from my room.”
“I bet you became a legend at the mine after that,” Cristy said dryly, still not quite sure whether or not to believe him.
Snakes. Eagles. Seasick dogs. And runaway brides.
She was the newest casualty on the Matt Slade rescue list. How lucky she was to have run into him in that elevator. He was big hearted as well as sexy. Compassionate as well as tough. The type of guy she’d never dreamed existed. But now she’d met him, she was painfully certain he was the man for her.
He’d been happy to heal his injured animal friends and let them go free while he went on with his life. No doubt he’d give her a push back into the big wide world when they were rescued from this island. But she didn’t want to spread her wings and fly away. She wanted to stay with him, love him, and be his woman.
But, for fear of his pity and turning away from her, she still couldn’t bring herself to tell him that. Instead she forced a smile and asked Matt how she could help him with the dinner.
M
att had never considered himself a coward. Okay, he’d freaked when his foreman had told him about the taipan. He’d got out of that room so fast he’d thought his boots had been jet assisted. Apart from that, he considered himself a fearless kind of guy.
So why was he sitting opposite Cristy and feeling so damn tongue-tied?
He wanted to tell her how special she’d become to him. Bring up the subject of seeing each other after they were rescued. She’d been different since that mind-blowing lovemaking session that afternoon—aloof almost. The body talk strategy obviously wasn’t working so well. But he was still too damn uncertain of how she would react to declare himself.
From across the table, he watched Cristy as she finished off the last of her meal of fish and the bananas he had found on the plant still flourishing in the remnants of Seth’s garden. She’d been hungry and all that was left on her enamel plate was a pile of small bones and some banana skins.
She put down her fork—there was only one and he’d let her use it. “My compliments to the chef,” she said. “Crab and fish in one day. I’m spoiled.”
Fascinated, Matt watched her lick her lips with the tip of her pink, pointy tongue. He felt the heat rise. Again. Could he ever have enough of her?
The sex they’d shared this afternoon had been sensational. But it had been sensational because of his feelings toward Cristy. She was like no other woman he’d ever encountered. He ached to tell her that. But where to find the words?
“And now, may I see the dessert menu, please?” she said in the bantering tone she’d kept up since they’d returned to the hut.
She seemed determined to keep him at a distance, to maintain things on a light-hearted level. Her message was obvious—no heavy stuff required. How could he begin to talk about how he felt?
“Well, there’s chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate,” he replied in a mock serious tone to match hers. “What would madam care to choose?”
“Why the chocolate of course,” she replied with a delightful peal of laughter.
His fist tightened around his spoon. She was adorable. If only he could just tell her that. Open his mouth and let the words spill out.
But he was just no good at talking about emotions and feelings. Never had been. Maybe because he’d had to suppress the hurt of his mother’s indifference, his father’s desertion. It hadn’t ever bothered him. Until now.
He wanted Cristy in his life more than anything he’d ever wanted before. And yet he was too worried she’d laugh at him, and tell him not to take a casual fling so seriously, to take the risk of speaking out.