Her host moved past her, seating himself on the same couch about a metre away but turned towards her, his arm hooking over the backrest, his hand dangling within easy reach of hers. Although she was acutely aware of his close presence, Emily resolutely ignored it, watching the mangrove swamp being left behind as the boat carved through the water towards the exit from the harbour.
‘Do not be disturbed. We shall return,’ Zageo assured her, apparently not insensitive to her inner tension.
‘Why are you taking me with you to Pemba Island?’ she asked, still not looking at him, afraid of revealing just how vulnerable he made her feel.
‘The reefs around it are largely in a pristine condition, unspoilt coral gardens supporting a vast array of marine life,’ he informed her. ‘As a professional diver yourself, you may well have heard that this area is an underwater naturalist’s dream.’
‘No. I hadn’t heard.’
‘I am surprised,’ he drawled. ‘Pemba is now listed as one of the top dive spots in the world.’
The taunt over her ignorance of this fact goaded Emily into locking eyes with him. ‘I didn’t come to Zanzibar for diving,’ she stated belligerently, resenting his forceful interruption of her personal mission. ‘Why don’t you just let me go to get about my own business?’
‘What is there for you to do?’ he retorted reasonably. ‘Your sister has not yet checked in at The Salamander Inn. I have instructed the management there to notify me the moment Hannah Coleman arrives and identifies herself. In the meantime, what better way for you to spend today than taking up a superb diving opportunity?’
His logic was difficult to fault, yet undermining it was the undeniable fact she had been given no choice. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? You still think I’m a drug-running belly-dancer. And this—’ she waved an arm at her luxurious surroundings ‘—is just another gilded prison.’
The hand lying close to hers on the backrest of the couch moved in a lazy dismissive gesture. ‘I believe that most things reveal themselves, given enough time, Emily.’ His eyes glinted a very direct challenge. ‘If you are a professional diver, for example, I should have no doubt whatsoever about it after our visit to Pemba.’
‘You want me to prove myself to you?’
His smile was slow in forming and caused her pulse to quicken. ‘Perhaps I simply want to share a pleasure with you,’ he suggested seductively, stirring a whole hornets’s nest of hormones that buzzed their insistent message that he wanted more than an underwater pleasure with her.
Emily jumped to her feet, too agitated to remain seated beside him. ‘Why are you doing this?’ Her hands flapped in wild incomprehension of his motivation as she directly confronted him. ‘I’m nobody to you. Just a passing blip on your radar screen. Totally insignificant. Why put your personal time into…?’
He surged to his feet, seeming to tower over her, causing her throat to close up, cutting off her ability to communicate by speech. He took her waving hands and planted them palm flat against his chest, holding them still with his, forcing them to feel the heat of his body through the thin cotton of his T-shirt, feel the strong beat of his heart, feel the rise and fall of his breathing, which all made her feel a terribly, terribly intimate connection with this man.
‘An accident of fate?’ he finished for her, though it wasn’t what she’d meant to say.
Emily couldn’t remember what she’d meant to say. She found herself staring at his mouth as it shaped more words—soft, silky words that slid into her ears and infiltrated her mind, somehow deactivating her own thought processes.
‘Sometimes things happen for a reason—a time, a place, a meeting which no one can foresee—and it is a huge mistake to deny it any significance. It may not be random factors driving the seemingly accidental collision, but forces of nature which we would do well to ride, Emily, because they were meant to be…meant to gain a result that would not be achieved otherwise.’
What result?
How could anything significant come from this…this mad attraction?
He slid her hands up to his shoulders and even though he released them, did she pluck them away from the tensile strength of the muscles supporting the breadth of those extremely masculine shoulders? No, she didn’t! Her hands were stuck in self-indulgent mode, wanting to feel what he’d silently commanded her to feel.
And the mouth she was staring at was coming closer, still shaping words but she no longer heard them. Her heart was thundering in her ears. A wild wantonness gripped her mind and rippled through her entire body, urging an eagerness to experience whatever was about to come her way.
His lips brushed hers, the softest possible contact yet it started an electric tingling that begged for a continuation of the exciting sensation. Emily didn’t move away from it. She closed her eyes and concentrated on her response to what was barely a kiss, yet it was sparking some volatile chemistry which was surprising, stunning, mesmerising.
Another brushing.
A slow glide of the tip of his tongue, sensually persuasive in parting her lips, caressing the soft inner tissues.
She felt him move, stepping closer to her, hands sliding around her waist, arms drawing her into a full body contact embrace. One part of her mind warned that she shouldn’t be allowing this, but the clamouring need to feel and know the full extent of her response to him overrode any niggling sense of caution.
All her nerve ends seemed to be humming in vibrant anticipation of more and more stimulation. To deny the desire he stirred was impossible and she couldn’t find a strong enough reason to fight it. The sheer, dizzying maleness of him called to her female instincts to revel in his strength, exult in his desire for her, savour the potency of the sexual chemistry that obliterated the differences between them—the differences that should keep them apart.
His mouth took possession of hers, no longer seductively intent, but ruthlessly confident of kissing her in whatever way he willed, smashing any inhibitions Emily might have, arousing mind-blowing excitement, inciting highly erotic passion that shot quivers of need through her entire body—a thrilling need, an aching need, a rampant all-consuming need.
She felt his fingers entangling themselves in her hair, tugging her head in whatever direction his mouth wanted to take in kissing her, felt his other hand tracing the curve of her back, reaching the pit of it, applying the pressure to mould the softness of her stomach around the hard thrust of his erection.