effort to keep his eyes on her face instead.
Her hair hung damply to her shoulders, and her skin was bare and already slightly marked from the mask. She was pretty enough, but not stunning, Tom told himself, reassured that he could be so objective.
Barely had he decided that he could relax after all when Imogen lifted her face to the sun with a sigh of pure pleasure, closed her eyes and smiled, and his hand promptly slipped on the helm, making the boat swing round.
Imogen’s eyes snapped open at the sudden movement and Tom’s muffled curse. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing,’ he said curtly instead and pointed at the reef as if he had been planning to end up at that place anyway. ‘We’ll anchor over there.’
When the boat was secured, he handed Imogen her flippers and waited until her mask and snorkel were in place before he helped her over the side and into the water. He couldn’t do it without touching her, and he was very aware of her arm beneath his hand as he steadied her.
Imogen hung on to the edge of the boat, getting used to the feel of the mask clamped tightly to her face and the snorkel that filled her mouth awkwardly. She watched Tom put on his own flippers and drop neatly into the water beside her, and couldn’t help contrasting it with her own lumbering efforts.
Tom surfaced, pulling the snorkel from his mouth and pushing the mask up onto his forehead. ‘OK?’
He was very close. Through her mask, Imogen could see him in startling, stomach-clenching detail. His pale eyes were extraordinarily clear in the bright light, contrasting with the darkness of his lashes and the heavy brows. His hair was wet, and droplets of water clung to his face.
She stared at them, half mesmerised by the way they accentuated the texture of his skin, the lines creasing beside his eyes, the roughness of his jaw, and as a drop trickled down towards that firm, cool mouth, Imogen felt as if a hard fist had closed around her lungs and was methodically squeezing out all the air.
Confused by the snorkel, she pulled it out of her mouth so that she could draw a fresh lungful of air and felt immediately better.
‘OK,’ she confirmed, using her flippers to move away from him in what she hoped was a casual gesture.
He was too close, too overwhelming. It seemed impossible that this was Tom Maddison, that only four days ago they had been in the London office, and he had just been her boss.
He was still just her boss, Imogen reminded herself firmly.
‘OK,’ she said again.
‘Stay close,’ said Tom, pulling down his mask. ‘And don’t touch anything. Just look.’
Imogen nodded, took a breath and replaced the snorkel. She had a momentary panic when she put her face into the water, but then she remembered to breathe as Tom had taught her and the next moment she was floating in the water and looking down at a different world.
Entranced, she drifted along the reef, needing only the occasional gentle movement of the flippers to propel her through the water. It was cooler here, and a lovely deep, dark blue that somehow managed to be clear at the same time so that through the mask she could look right down to the bottom of the lagoon far below. If these were the shallows, how deep was the ocean on the other side of the reef?
Imogen had never seen so many fish before or such vividly coloured creatures. She was a city girl, and in her limited experience British wildlife tended to be brown and grey and black, colours that blended into a drab winter landscape. In comparison, the reef was startlingly bright, with a palatte to rival that of the most colourful of fashion designers. The fish swimming beneath her were coloured in blues, greens, yellows, reds and every shade in between, as if a child had been let loose with a box of crayons. They were extraordinarily patterned too, with bold stripes and pretty speckles and strange splodges in a spectacularly gaudy combination of colours.
She had always imagined that coral would be white and bony, but it, too, came in a bizarre range of colours and shapes as it dropped away into the depths. The sun bounced on the surface of the water, filtering down until it caught shoals of tiny fish, invisible until they flashed in the light. Tom touched her arm and pointed down and Imogen’s eyes widened at the sight of a huge green fish with a ponderous pout that seemed to be lumbering around the coral outcrops in comparison with the smaller fish that flickered around it.
Imogen was enthralled, but acutely aware at the same time of the sound of her breathing, abnormally loud and eerily laboured through the snorkel, of the feel of the T-shirt wafting around her as she drifted, and of Tom’s reassuring presence beside her.
Every now and then a fish would swim up to stare dispassionately into her mask but for the most part they seemed oblivious of the humans hanging in the water above them. There were fish everywhere, swimming along the reef with stately grace, some moving languorously amongst the coral, others darting, drifting, nibbling at tiny plants, flicking busily to and fro. Whole shoals moved as if they were one, accelerating at some unseen signal, and turning together in a shimmer of light.
Absorbed in the magic world beneath her, Imogen was disappointed when Tom touched her arm again and pointed back to the boat but, remembering the deal they had made, she followed him reluctantly.
‘That was
She talked on, squeezing the worst of the wetness from her T-shirt and tipping her head from one side to the other to shake the water out of her ears.
There was a big red mark on her face where the rubber mask had been clamped to her skin, but her eyes were shining and her expression so vivid with delight that Tom felt his throat tighten.
‘We can come out again tomorrow if you like, but you’ve had enough for today,’ he said gruffly. ‘You’d get burnt if you stayed out much longer.’
‘I think you might be right,’ said Imogen reluctantly, twisting her legs round as far as she could. ‘I can already feel the backs of my thighs tingling.’
Tom couldn’t afford to let himself think about her thighs, or about the way that wet T-shirt clung to her body again. He started the motor with an unnecessarily vigorous jerk of the cord and for the umpteenth time reminded himself what he was doing there.
‘We’ve got work to do, too,’ he told Imogen, who was clearly having trouble mustering any enthusiasm at the prospect, although she nodded readily enough.
‘Of course,’ she said in her best PA voice.
Ali had been in while they were out, and the house was beautifully clean and tidy. The fridge was full of wonderful things to eat, and the bed made with crisp, fresh sheets. Imogen wondered if Ali had noticed that the bed was strangely unrumpled for a honeymoon suite.
‘It’s like living in a magic castle where jobs get done before you think of them,’ she said, helping herself to some fruit. ‘I wish I could take Ali home with me.’
‘I don’t suppose he’s checked the stock markets or caught up on all those reports yet,’ said Tom caustically. ‘There are still some jobs we’ll have to do ourselves.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Reminded of what she was supposed to be doing, Imogen licked pineapple juice off her fingers. ‘Is it OK if I have a quick shower first?’
‘Good idea,’ said Tom, who didn’t fancy his chances of concentrating on work if she was sitting there in that wet T-shirt.
It was time to be professional, he decided, opening his laptop a little while later, after he had had a shower of his own. In spite of the heat, he wished he could put on his suit and tie, instead of shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, which was the best he could do for now. He wished he were back in his office in London, in fact, where he was never distracted and where Imogen only ever wore…well, he didn’t know what she wore, but that was the whole point. He never noticed her there at all.
As it was, Imogen had appeared in loose trousers and a sleeveless top. She had done her best to find something appropriate to wear, Tom supposed grudgingly. It wasn’t her fault that her hair was still wet, or that her top only seemed to emphasise the shadow of her cleavage. Or that he couldn’t stop remembering the sheer delight in her face, the smoothness of her skin when he’d steadied her in the boat.
It wasn’t her fault that, for the first time in his life, he didn’t know exactly what he wanted, and being unable to focus on a goal left him feeling restless and faintly uneasy.
