Rendezvous (2 page)

Still gripping her wrists, he crossed her arms over her stomach and drew her tight against him. The soft curve of her bottom fit into the cradle of his thighs. A fire sparked in his loins, heating his balls and making his dick twitch. She might have murder in mind, but his mind was on another tangent, and if she moved even a millimetre, he was going to develop a full-blown hard-on.

Cassie struggled in his hold, wiggling her bottom in ways that didn’t help his situation at all. Reed clenched his teeth. “Cass, stop struggling, will ya?”

She ignored him and continued to writhe in his arms. “Let me go!”

“So you can try and deck me again? No, thanks.”

“I won’t, I swear.”

“Calm down and I might start to believe you”

Cassie issued a muted scream of frustration and stamped on his foot. She got in a good shot, and Reed winced as her heel connected with his bare toe. The momentary flash of pain was nowhere near enough to counter the impact of having her pressed so intimately against him. His cock stretched to its full size. Desire and frustration warred inside him, making every muscle in his frame tense.

“Damn it, Cassie. Stop struggling.”

She must have heard something in his tone because she at last grew still. She was panting with exertion, reminding Reed how she used to pant like that for other reasons, back when they’d shared a bed. After a year apart, he must have kidded himself her effect on him would have lessened. He hadn’t counted on being blindsided by this level of lust. If anything, his need for her had intensified, turning into something almost frantic.

Perhaps because he’d finally woken up to the fact he could lose her forever.

She remained immobile in his arms for long seconds, long enough for Reed to realize she must have become aware of the problem in his cargo shorts. She grew unnaturally still and her breathing shallowed. The raspy exhalations turned Reed on even more. Every part of him strained with the effort not to take her right where they stood.

It would be so easy. Slip a hand inside her shirt, use the other to yank down her shorts and his. He was so hard they wouldn’t need preliminaries, and Cassie hadn’t always needed them anyway. She’d so often been ready for him whenever he’d come to her, and something in the quality of her stillness made Reed think, despite her anger at first seeing him, that now would be no different.

“Reed, please.”

Reed’s body shook with the need to claim her, a need he had to deny. She was pleading with him, once again, to release her, not to make love to her.

His heart laden, his erection throbbing, Reed let her go. Cassie immediately put as much distance between them as she could given the cramped quarters of the cabin. “What are you doing here, Reed?”

She squared her shoulders and turned to face him. The haughty toss of her head and imperious question didn’t hide the fact her nipples were poking against the white cotton of her polo shirt. Reed let his gaze drop and linger, letting her know he was aware of her situation. When he raised his eyes to her face once more, her cheeks were flushed.

“I came to see you.”

Her expression was genuinely puzzled. “Why?”

“Why?” Reed parroted, incredulous. “Because you’re my wife and I thought it was about time I reminded you of that.”

*****

As if I could ever forget.
Not a day had gone by in the past year when some thought of Reed hadn’t come into Cassie’s head. Even with the time and distance, she’d never stopped thinking of herself as married, which was why she’d finally decided she had to do something to clarify her circumstances, once and for all.

Her body, apparently, wasn’t confused about anything. It still wanted Reed Dalton with a hot, pulsing force that made her heart gallop and her breasts tingle and ache. When she’d been trapped in his arms, it had reminded her too acutely of being trapped there willingly, of being held in all the ways Reed had held her during their three-year marriage. Tenderly, passionately, even forcefully.

Base want still coursed through her as the implication of his words set in. Her heart rate tripled. “Are you saying you didn’t come here to tell me you signed the papers?”

Reed scoffed. “Now why in hell would I let you divorce me like that—without so much as a conversation?”

“Oh, now you want to have a conversation?” Cassie planted her hands on her hips. “Where was that willingness twelve months ago when I begged you to go to couples counselling?”

“Therapy is not a conversation, Cass.”

“What else was I supposed to suggest? You wouldn’t talk to me about anything. Not about your job or what was going on between us.”

“What do you mean, what was going on between us? We were fine, until you decided to run away and play skipper.”

“Uncle Shane died and left me the boat.” It might explain what had prompted her to fly back to the town of Airlie Beach where she’d grown up, but not why she’d decided to stay. She could have sold
The Rendezvous
, gone back to Sydney to be with her husband like a loyal wife was supposed to. But she hadn’t. She couldn’t go back to the three-way relationship she’d fallen into in Sydney—a relationship between her, Reed and his job. “And good sex isn’t proof that everything is going swimmingly.”

“We didn’t have good sex, Cass.” Reed let his gaze wander over her again, taking in her stubbornly hard nipples with an insolent quirk of his lips. “We had
great
sex.”

Cassie needn’t be reminded of that either. Her pussy fluttered in response to his words, to the memory of being held in his arms moments ago. For a second there, she’d wanted nothing more than for Reed to take her, without preamble, without asking, as he had so many times during their marriage. When he’d come home and she’d sense it had been a particularly gruelling day—or night—on the job, when he’d looked at her with such raw need in his eyes, she’d never hesitated to offer her body as comfort.

A memory, raw and graphic, of Reed ripping off her panties, bending her over the dining table and entering her with one solid thrust flashed through Cassie’s mind. Her blood heated farther, practically hitting boiling point. Their sexual life hadn’t merely been good or great. It had been intensely hot, so hot it had overshadowed their problems—for a while.

Cassie crossed her arms over her chest, willing her body’s eager response to Reed’s nearness to cool. “Even so, I needed more than a husband who came home only when he felt like it and thought sex was a substitute for communication.”

Reed pushed out a sigh and dragged a hand through his dark-brown hair until the ends spiked up. He always did that when they argued, and in the very beginning she’d thought it was cute. Cassie had once loved smoothing those abused strands back down before rising to her tip toes and kissing her husband’s beleaguered face.

Unbelievably, that urge remained. Cassie had to clench her fists to keep from acting on it.

“I’m here now, Cass. And if it’s communication you want, that’s what you’re going to get,” Reed said. “We have six days to communicate, if that’s
all
you want to do.”

“Six days?” Cassie blinked in surprise. “You mean you really intend to charter
The Rendezvous
?”

“I made a booking, didn’t I?”

“For Robin Sherwood and his wife,” Cassie pointed out. “If I’d known who you were, I would never have taken the booking.”

“I figured that, hence the cover name.”

Now that she thought about it, Cassie couldn’t believe she hadn’t picked that name as fake. Robin Sherwood.
Ha!
At the time she’d taken the booking online, she’d been far too thrilled at the prospect of a full-paying customer to question it.

“If you don’t take me on the trip, I won’t pay your fee,” Reed told her. “And I figure you need the money, am I right?”

Cassie narrowed her eyes. Since she’d had the Sherwoods slotted in, she hadn’t been able to take any other bookings, and it was too late now. She couldn’t afford to take no income at all for the entire week. From the smug expression on Reed’s face, he knew it. It seemed she didn’t really have a choice but to spend the week in close quarters with the infuriating man, the one man who made her forget all common sense as easily as he smiled.

What if he really does want to talk, to really talk?

Cassie couldn’t prevent a seed of hope from germinating in her heart, even though she was deathly afraid she’d be disappointed with Reed’s definition of communication—whatever it was. Yet the hope was there, and she had to give it a chance—she had to give them a chance, one last one, before they decided once and for all if they had a future.

After all, he was still her husband.

“All right, Reed. You’ve hired yourself a captain.”

As it turned out, Reed was prone to sea sickness.

Something he would have loved to have known before he got stuck on the open water of the Whitsunday Passage on a forty-something-foot sailboat that never seemed to stop moving. Up and down, up and down…
ugh
. This was not something his stomach was used to.

He’d lived all of his life in land-locked locations. He’d moved from his parents’ three-bedroom fibro house in Penrith to the police academy, then on to a series of postings in inner-city Sydney. He’d been on a joint task force with the water police when he’d met Cassie at a pub at The Rocks, Sydney’s famous harbour-side tourist precinct.

To say it was love at first sight was too cheesy for Reed’s taste, but after talking and flirting with her all that night he would have been willing to crawl over broken glass for her phone number. Cassie hadn’t made him go that far, but he’d nearly been reduced to begging before she’d relented. She’d only been planning to stay in Sydney two weeks, while visiting her brother.

Ten days later, Reed had asked her to marry him, and to his surprised delight she’d agreed. She’d ended up staying in Sydney three years.

Up until last November, when apparently the fact he lived there was no longer reason enough for her to stay.

“You all right up there?”

Reed turned his gaze from the blue water rushing beneath the boat to the cockpit where Cassie was steering the boat. The act made a bout of dizziness assail him, but he grinned in the hope that Cassie wouldn’t realise how green around the gills he was. “All good.”

Her gaze remained on him, and Reed fancied he could sense her assessing him from behind her wrap-around sunglasses. He gave her a thumbs-up signal. “Are you sure you don’t want me to do anything?” he asked, while mentally praying she didn’t tell him to get up and try to walk around on the rolling deck.

To his relief, Cassie shook her head. “You’re a paying passenger. You don’t need to help out.”

Inwardly, Reed winced. Technically it was true, but he felt useless sitting on his butt while Cassie moved around deck doing things with ropes and winches that he didn’t understand. The fact that Cassie had grown up around boats couldn’t be more evident. Here on the water, she was in her element.

As she hadn’t been in Sydney. Had she felt back then as he did now—unbalanced and ineffectual? If so, how come she’d never said anything?

Maybe she hadn’t wanted to burden him. Or maybe she had tried to tell him, and he’d been too busy with his own stuff to listen.

They sailed for hours, Cassie filling him in on some of the area’s history like she was a tour guide and he any other tourist. Reed was too focussed on the pitching of his stomach to insist she treat him any differently. Finally, Cassie told him she was going to anchor and take the dingy to a nearby island.

Thank Christ,
Reed thought.

But in the dingy, the motion was even more pronounced than it had been on the yacht, and afterward the stillness of the sandy beach they landed on seemed alien. After only half a day sailing. How was he going to manage the entire week?

Somehow, he had to. He couldn’t wuss out now or Cassie would never give him another chance to patch things up with her.

Cassie led him to a stretch of shady sand beneath a palm tree. Once there, she opened up the small cooler he’d insisted on carrying for her and pulled out a bottle of soda water and some plain crackers. She handed them to him. “They’ll settle your stomach.”

Chagrined, Reed took a grateful gulp from the bottle. Then he looked at Cassie. “How did you know?”

Her lips tilted. “Experience. And I know you. I’ve never seen you sit still for that long.”

“Speaking of sitting,” Reed said, and dropped his butt onto the cool sand. He gestured to the spot beside him. “Will you sit with me for a minute?”

She looked as though she wanted to refuse, but then she lowered herself beside him—just far enough away to prevent any accidental contact from occurring. Then, for good measure, she placed the cooler between them.

Reed might have laughed if he were feeling better. “Relax, I’m not up to starting anything at the moment. I only want to sit and talk for a minute.”

“You?” Cassie enquired archly “Talk?”

“I talk, Cass. I talk all the time.”

“Not to me,” she said. “You always talked to your mates about what was going on with you, but never to me.”

“My mates were in the job too. They understood what I was going through.”

“And it wasn’t possible for me to understand simply because I didn’t drive a patrol car?”

“I don’t drive a patrol car anymore,” Reed said. “I made detective nine months ago.”

For a moment, Cassie must have forgotten they were separated and on the path to divorce. Her face lit up with her smile. She touched his arm and his skin tingled beneath her slim, slightly callused fingers. “Oh, Reed. I’m so happy for you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Reed studied her. He put his hand over hers and traced the line of her ring finger where the gold wedding band he’d placed there still sat. She hadn’t taken it off, and the realization made his heart dance, even as it lurched a little at the words he spoke next. “I figured you left because of the job, because you hated that I was a cop. I didn’t think you’d want to know.”

Cassie’s expression darkened, took on the characteristics of a tropical thunderstorm. She scowled down at the place where he touched her before snatching her hand away. “I did not leave because you were a cop. I was proud of you, you idiot!”