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distraction she may have felt vanished in an instant.
                  How had she not noticed it before? The bunched muscles of Simon's back relaxed as soon as he was back on dry land…revealing a tortured network of old scars that crossed and re-crossed the naked canvas of the man's flesh. The raised marks covered his entire left side, although they must not have extended all the way to the front—Cara was sure she would have noticed them before if they had—they trailed as far as his right shoulder before dissipating.
                  Simon crossed to pull open a tall cabinet and remove two silk robes. He donned one, concealing the scars from view once more, before turning to offer her the other. By this time, Cara had glided the length of the pool and was making her way slowly up the stairs in the shallows. Simon met her at the top of the pool, and she paused, hand still on the slick railing, her legs ankle-deep in the water. She met his eyes, and saw something strange pass across his expression. Was it remorse?
                  She took the offered robe eventually, and he politely turned his gaze away as she put it on. Like that was going to make a difference now to either of them.
                  "Of course we don't mind having you stay with us another night," he added quickly. "I'll see to the dinner preparations, shall I? …All right. Miss Langford."
                  He dismissed himself in a jumble of good manners and left. Cara gripped the shoulders of the robe, searching around her for something to find fault with. Her eyes alighted on the drained pitcher of mimosa and she glared at it. Mainly, she wanted to find fault with Simon's dutiful butler, Gerald, but the latter wasn't here at the moment. He had departed, just as Simon had, leaving her alone and physically frustrated beyond belief.
     

CHAPTER 6
     
    Two things had been made clear to Cara in the course of that afternoon.
                  One: intermittent breaks or not, the rain wasn't about to let up long enough for any tow company in the county to risk coming to her rescue.
                  Two: Simon Banning, the mystery man who housed her, was an amazing lover.
    True, they hadn't gotten anywhere close to doing the deed—at least, not as close as Cara in that moment would have wanted—but she felt that there were plenty of clues to lead her to this conclusion all the same. She tried not to imagine that it was her journalist's instincts that were being put to use now, but the evidence was increasingly being stacked against him: evidence like the sinfully skillful way he had first kissed; the way he had pinned her beneath him against the wall without an ounce of reservation about it; the expert way his fingers had caressed and opened her to him. He had made her crave the treatment, crave his touch and his touch alone, and now he had left Cara high and dry in every maddening sense of the words.
                  "'Sorry'?" she hissed to her reflection in the mirror. "'I haven't had company in a while'?"
                  She was currently holed up in her quarters and sitting in front of the vanity. It had taken a while to find her way back, admittedly, considering that Simon had just left her there alone in the basement story of the mansion. It was only after she had wandered the upper halls for ten minutes in nothing but an expensive bathrobe that she had managed to grab hold of a servant and request a guide back to her room.
                  Her aggravation with her host was full-bodied. Any positive thoughts she had been entertaining about the man now seemed to have vanished completely; the only credit she would grudgingly admit to giving him was that he knew what he was doing when it came to making love. Her body still burned with the echoes of his touch. She might have felt extremely cross and annoyed by him, but there was no part of her