Freedom To Love. Кэрол Мортимер

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СКАЧАТЬ in his seat to glare at her with angry blue eyes. ‘Don’t you know how to sit still?’

      ‘Of course I do!’ Katy was angry herself now, having put up with his boorishness long enough. ‘But it isn’t easy when you want to go to the loo!’ She blushed at having to talk about such intimacies to this stranger.

      ‘Why the hell didn’t you just say so?’ he snapped, already beginning to stand up to let her pass.

      She drew a deep angry breath. ‘Maybe because I knew this would be your reaction. You are without doubt the rudest man I’ve ever met!’ With this comment she flounced off.

      Her bravado lasted her as long as it took her to reach the privacy of the toilets, staying there much longer than she needed to because she dreaded returning to her seat. She took her time over renewing her make-up and tidying her hair, finally bracing herself to go back and face that awful man.

      The blinds had been lifted and the lights were fully back on, and people were wandering about the plane talking to each other. Kate almost heaved a sigh of relief as she saw the seat next to hers was empty.

      ‘What’s his name?’ Her sister turned to look at her.

      Katy looked startled. ‘Whose?’

      Gemma gave her an impatient look. ‘The man sitting next to you. I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before. Gerald thinks he has too.’

      Now she came to think of it he did look slightly familiar, although she felt sure she wouldn’t have forgotten him if she had ever met him before. He wasn’t the sort of man you could forget! ‘Why should I know his name?’ she asked tersely.

      ‘You seem to have been talking to him.’

      Talking? What they had been doing certainly couldn’t be called talking, it was more like an argument. ‘A few casual words,’ she evaded. ‘Nothing as revealing as names.’

      ‘Yours wouldn’t reveal much,’ Gemma scorned, turning back to her boy-friend.

      Charming! Katy was surrounded by them. She had even been dismissed as a nonentity by her sister now. She was getting a definite feeling of rejection.

      The long length of her arrogant stranger coiled down into the seat next to her and she forced herself not to even look at him. She wasn’t risking any more rebuffs from him. She stared rigidly down at the paperback in her hand, not taking in a word of it.

      ‘You aren’t safe to be let out on your own,’ that silky voice taunted as he bent to retrieve something off the floor. ‘Here,’ he held out her purse to her. ‘It is yours, I presume?’

      Katy paled, almost snatching it out of his hand. All her money was in here, all her travellers cheques. The only things she had kept separate were her passport and her return air ticket. ‘Thank you,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I—It must have fallen out when I got my book out.’

      ‘Obviously,’ he said dryly. ‘Is someone meeting you at the other end?’ he added thoughtfully.

      Her eyes widened. ‘I beg your pardon?’

      Her reaction seemed to amuse him. ‘I wasn’t propositioning you. But you don’t appear to be safe to let cross the road, let alone the Atlantic,’ he said insultingly.

      ‘No one is meeting me,’ she answered stiltedly. ‘I happen to be going to Canada on holiday—with my sister and her boy-friend. They’re sitting the other side of me,’ she added at his sceptical look.

      He glanced around her, sitting back with a shrug. ‘She’s nothing like you to look at.’

      Katy knew that, had always known that Gemma was the beautiful one of the family. Gemma was honey-blonde where she was caramel, had deep green eyes where Katy’s were grey, and her sister had never been troubled by spots or puppy fat, seeming to the younger Katy to have always been slim and petite.

      ‘I know that,’ she snapped at this man. ‘But that doesn’t make it any less a fact that she is my sister.’

      ‘Prickly little thing, aren’t you?’ he taunted. ‘Rather like the wild rose the Canadians are so fond of.’

      ‘Are they?’ Katy frowned.

      ‘Mm,’ he nodded. ‘Especially where we’re going. Alberta is its home. It’s very common up there on the mountains just below the timberline.’

      ‘Timberline?’ she echoed dazedly.

      ‘Tut, tut, tut,’ he mocked, seemingly fully awake now, and even more taunting than he had been before. ‘You haven’t done your homework on Alberta. I take it you intend touring the National Parks there?’

      ‘Yes,’ she nodded.

      ‘Then you should know that the timberline is where it becomes too cold up in the mountains for the trees to survive, they just suddenly stop growing, hence the term timberline. Make sense?’ he quirked an eyebrow questioningly.

      ‘Oh yes,’ her eyes glowed. ‘Thank you.’

      ‘Don’t mention it,’ he dismissed. ‘Your name wouldn’t happen to be Rose?’

      She shook her head. ‘Katy—Katy Harris.’

      ‘Shame. Rose suits you so much better.’

      ‘I don’t think so,’ she said crossly. ‘I don’t consider it prickly just because I don’t like your taunting behaviour.’

      ‘Was I taunting you?’ He sounded amused again.

      ‘You know you were.’

      ‘Maybe.’ He frowned. ‘Where’s your boy-friend?’

      She flushed. ‘I don’t have one,’ she told him resentfully.

      ‘No? So it’s just a cosy little threesome, is it?’

      ‘I don’t like your implication,’ Katy snapped. ‘Gemma and Gerald are engaged to be married. It was very kind of them to invite me on this holiday with them.’ She knew that kindness hadn’t entered into it, but she wasn’t about to tell this man that.

      ‘Gemma and Gerald!’ he taunted mockingly. ‘How nice.’

      ‘God, you’re sarcastic!’ She turned her back on him, hearing his throaty chuckle behind her.

      What an unpleasant creature he was! But how dangerously attractive, with that wicked gleam of amusement in his blue eyes, albeit cruel amusement.

      ‘You lucky devil,’ Gemma told her in a fierce whisper. ‘Gerald and I have just realised who you’re sitting next to,’ she explained at Katy’s puzzled look. ‘Well, Gerald realised it first,’ she grudgingly admitted.

      ‘Well?’ Katy asked patiently.

      ‘He’s Adam Wild!’ Gemma announced triumphantly.

      ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Katy instantly dismissed the idea. ‘He would be in the first class, not back here with the rabble.’ СКАЧАТЬ