Or on top of a bare chest.
She had known that he was tall and lean, and she had assumed that he would have a decent body, but Imogen hadn’t realised quite how good until he had appeared by the lounger wearing only those swimming shorts. It had been impossible not to notice that his legs were long and straight, his chest broad and wonderfully solid-looking, with dark hairs arrowing down to an enviably flat, hard stomach. He had powerful shoulders too, and his skin looked tantalisingly wet and touchable.
Imogen’s mouth dried. She was desperately aware of him sitting in the water beside her. Normally she had no problem chatting to anyone, but Tom was hard work at the best of times and now that he was practically naked she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
The next three weeks were going to be awkward if she was going to feel stupidly shy like this the whole time. She wanted to treat Tom exactly the same as always, but how could she when he was sitting there with that body? She wished he would go and put his suit back on. It might not be very practical for the beach, but at least she would feel as if she knew where she was.
The silence lengthened uncomfortably. Imogen was still searching desperately for a neutral topic of conversation when a flash of light beneath the water caught her eye and she leant forward to see another, and then another. ‘Look!’ she cried, pointing at the tiny fish that darted over the sand and heartily relieved at the distraction. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’
‘There’ll be a lot more out there.’ Tom seized gratefully on the conversational gambit. Narrowing his eyes against the glare, he nodded towards the reef. ‘I hear the snorkelling is spectacular.’
‘I’d love to do that,’ she said wistfully.
‘You could get out there easily enough. I noticed a boat earlier.’
Imogen looked doubtful. ‘I wouldn’t know one end of a boat from another. I think I’d be better off swimming! Is snorkelling easy? I’ve never done it before.’
‘I’ll teach you if you like,’ said Tom, who only moments before had decided that the only way to get through three weeks of Imogen in a bikini was to go their separate ways as much as possible.
‘Really?’
So much for keeping his distance! Tom cursed himself for a fool. He couldn’t have found a surer way to get close to her in that damned bikini if he’d tried. He was supposed to be getting back to a work relationship, not fooling around in the water.
‘We’ll have a go tomorrow. After we’ve done some work,’ he added.
‘I’d like that,’ said Imogen, brightening. Perhaps it would be easier if they did something together. At least then they would have something to talk about.
She leant back on her elbows and looked at him curiously. There was little money in snorkelling, few deals to be negotiated on a coral reef. It seemed an unlikely activity for Tom to take part in. ‘Where did you learn to snorkel?’
‘In the Caribbean. I had a girlfriend once who went on and on about having a holiday together,’ Tom remembered. ‘I only went to shut her up, but it wasn’t a success. We’d got on fine in London, but I suppose the truth was that we hadn’t seen that much of each other. As soon as we got out there, we realised that we had nothing to say to each other. She lay on the beach and I went snorkelling, and once we got back to London I never saw her again!’
Imogen spread her hands, sliding them beneath the silvery sand. ‘They say holidays are a real test of a relationship.’
‘It certainly was for Helena and I, although according to Helena it was all my fault. She complained I didn’t know how to relax, and there’s some truth in that. I never know what to do with myself on holiday. I don’t think I ever learnt. We never had holidays when we were growing up.’
‘What, never?’
‘Not the kind of holiday where you go away somewhere different, anyway. I had school holidays, of course, but my mother died when I was small and my father was always working, so I was pretty much left to my own devices.’
‘Poor little boy,’ said Imogen, but he shrugged off her sympathy.
‘I liked it. I started my first business at the age of ten. I used to knock on neighbours’ doors and offer to wash cars for a quid, until I realised that I was undercharging!’ He smiled wryly at the memory.
‘What did you do with your earnings?’ she asked, intrigued by the idea of him as a little boy.
‘I bought some extra buckets and some more cloths, and gave them to friends in exchange for a percentage of their earnings. By the end of the summer, I had quite a team!’
Imogen laughed. She was feeling better now that they were actually having a conversation. Perhaps this wouldn’t be so bad after all. ‘It sounds like you were always an entrepreneur!’
‘I learnt early on that if I wanted anything, I had to get it for myself,’ said Tom. ‘Even at ten I could work out the laws of supply and demand. To get what I wanted, I needed money, but to get money all I had to do was work out what everyone else wanted and then make it easy for them to have it.’
‘You make it sound so simple,’ said Imogen with a touch of bitterness, and he raised his brows.
‘It is simple.’
‘Working out what people want? Not in my experience!’
He shrugged. ‘I never had any trouble knowing what I wanted. It seems to me a lot of people don’t
‘That might work in business, but strategies are no use when emotions are involved.’
‘No.’ Tom thought about Julia and how messy everything had become once he had forgotten just that. ‘That’s why I stick to business as much as possible. Whenever I venture into emotional territory, it turns into a disaster.’
He hadn’t meant to sound bitter, but Imogen shot him a quick glance of concern.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to remind you of Julia. I was thinking of myself.’
‘Oh?’ Tom was glad to turn the conversation away from his inadequacies on the emotional front.
‘I always knew what I wanted too, but much good it did me.’
‘What
Imogen sighed and clasped her arms around her knees. ‘I wanted my boyfriend to love me again, that was all. I even had a strategy, as you call it. I was going to give him time, and then he’d realise that he missed me.’
‘And he didn’t?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He married someone else.’
Tom studied her profile. She had pushed her wet hair behind her ears and she was staring out to the horizon, lost in memories.
‘There’s no point in wanting something that depends on someone else,’ he said after a moment. ‘You can only succeed if you want things that you can achieve by yourself.’
Something he should have remembered before he’d asked Julia to marry him.
‘But what if what you want is not to be by yourself?’ asked Imogen, turning her head to look at him, and Tom found himself trapped by the directness of her gaze.
Had her eyes always been that blue? he wondered, almost startled by the depth of colour. Surely he would have noticed them before if they had?
It must be just the sea and the sky making them look so blue, he decided. A trick of the light.
‘Then you probably won’t succeed,’ he said.
‘Success isn’t everything,’ she pointed out.
‘It is to me.’
Imogen didn’t answer directly. To Tom’s secret relief, she looked away once more to where the ocean surged and sighed beyond the reef.
‘I remember in my last year at school, an older girl came to give us a talk,’ she said eventually. ‘I thought it was going to be really boring. She was a high-flying lawyer, very glamorous, and she seemed to have everything. We were all expecting her to tell us how we had to work hard to succeed, but she said something completely different.
‘I’ve never forgotten,’ Imogen remembered. ‘She told us that the most important lesson we had to learn was
