In McGillivray's Bed by Anne McAllister Read Free Book Online

then glowered down at her. “Do I look like I’m gay, sweetheart?” he drawled.
    From her vantage point, at the level of his hairy, tanned knees, Syd looked slowly up—and came to the very obvious evidence that he was not.
    â€œOh,” she said in a very small voice.
    McGillivray looked somewhere between pained and gratified at her realization. “Exactly,” he muttered.
    Syd knew her face was burning. “Um…sorry. Is there…anything I can do?”
    McGillivray goggled at her. “Are you for real?”
    God, she might go up in flames! “I didn’t mean that! ” she protested. “I just—never mind!” Obviously, she wasn’t good at this sort of thing.
    â€œI’ll live,” McGillivray said dryly in the face of her confusion. Then he reached out a hand. “Here. Can you stand on your own two feet?”
    â€œYes, of course.” She would have declined his hand altogether but she was afraid she might fall over if she did. But somehow, touching him, knowing the effect she’d had on him, made her let go the second she was upright. “I’m all right,” she assured him. “Really. I just got a bit light-headed for a moment. I didn’t faint!” she added when she saw the gleam in his eyes.
    â€œWhatever you say,” he replied gravely, but the gleam was still there.
    And something else.
    Attraction? Certainly it was something electric. Awareness seemed to sizzle between them for just a moment.
    Abruptly, McGillivray looked away. His jaw tightened, and he wiped his hands down the sides of his shorts and turned toward the door.
    â€œHurry up,” he told her, his voice raspy. “I’m burning the bacon.”
    The door banged shut behind him, and Syd was left in the same bathroom she’d been in moments before.
    But something had changed. Something was different. There was an electricity lingering in the air. Syd was used to electricity. She felt it whenever she was in the midst of closing a business deal, when things were coming together, when an energy seemed to take over of its own accord.
    It felt like that now.
    And there was no business deal. No business at all.
    Just awareness. Man-woman awareness. McGillivray had wanted her. Physically.
    Intellectually, of course, Syd knew all about that sort of thing. Men—heterosexual ones—lusted after women. But, generally speaking, men had never really lusted after her.
    They had mostly been interested in her as her father’s daughter. Roland certainly hadn’t given her cause for believing that his interest in marrying her had anything to dowith her innate attractiveness. He had been going to marry her because it was good for business.
    He’d never even pretended otherwise.
    How mortifying was that?
    Pretty mortifying. But it would have been even more so if McGillivray hadn’t so clearly felt otherwise.
    She felt suddenly, exquisitely, aware of her own nakedness.
    She’d stripped her dress off in the boat without even thinking, without expecting a reaction at all. She’d never even considered he might react. Roland had been impervious to her charms. Why should she have expected anyone else to succumb?
    Not that McGillivray had succumbed, she reminded herself, as she stepped beneath the shower spray. But he had been interested. Physically responsive.
    The knowledge made her smile. It made her feel alive. It made her feel desirable in her own right—as a woman—and not just as an asset to the St. John Electronics company.
    She tipped some of McGillivray’s shampoo into her hands and began rubbing it into her hair. It smelled of lime and the sea and something else she couldn’t quite put a name to. But it was fresh and sharp, and she liked it more than she liked the flowery English-garden stuff she was accustomed to.
    It was a new beginning.
    She liked the sound of that. She stuck her head under the showerhead and lathered