“Did you enjoy your parasailing?” he asked inconsequentially.
“I chickened out,” she said wryly. “They were strapping me into the harness when I suddenly knew I couldn’t go through with it. I kept picturing myself falling into the open mouth of a shark. Stupid, I know
. The others laughed at me.”
Damien, thankfully, had been very patient with her. A bit condescending, but she supposed she couldn’t blame him for that when she’d been so silly.
Reed searched her face as though looking for another meaning to her words. And then he smiled faintly. “What happened to that adventurous streak of yours?”
“It decided it liked having both feet attached to something steady. Like a boat. Or, even better, solid ground.”
Reed chuckled. And then he bent his head and kissed her.
It wasn’t like the last time. There was heat—but it was firmly reined. Reed permitted himself no more than a leisurely taste of her lips, and granted her only an unsatisfying sample of his own, before he stepped away.
“Go home, Celia.” The gentleness was gone from his voice again. Might never have been there.
She blinked, trying to clear her mind. The change of mood was too abrupt for immediate comprehension. “To my room, you mean?”
He shook his head. “Home. To Percy, where you’re safe.”
Her chin lifted. Was he calling her a coward? Telling her she didn’t belong here? Reminding her that she wasn’t the adventurous type—and never would be? “I’m not ready to go home,” she answered flatly.
He stepped back into the shadows, and she had the oddest sensation that he dissolved into them. As though he had never been real, but only an illusion. She shook off the strange fantasy impatiently. He was real, all right. And he was proving to be as irritating as he was disturbing.
“Think about it,” he suggested. Before she could answer—whatever she might have said—he was gone, vanished into the darkness as smoothly and silently as a passing breeze.
“What the—?”
Go home, Celia.
Why did he keep telling her to go home? One could almost get the impression that he didn’t want her here, she thought with a weary attempt at humor.
She wasn’t going home, of course. Not just yet. Something was keeping her here.
She no longer even tried to convince herself it had much to do with her obligation to her host.
Chapter Nine
Celia dressed in bright colors the next morning, pairing a red silk shell with a bright purple raw silk vest and skorts and a red, purple and yellow tie belt. Her earrings were a tinkling cascade of red and purple stars and she wore a chunky red-stained wood bracelet and red flats.
Maybe, she thought with a final glance in the mirror, the bright colors of her clothing would detract from the paleness of her complexion. Nearly sleepless nights always left her looking rather washed out.
Though she’d hurried, she still reached the restaurant ten minutes later than she’d agreed to meet Damien there. She was greeted with the usual fawning enthusiasm and led immediately to Damien’s table. She was less than three feet away when she came to a sudden stop, her jaw dropping at the sight of the man sitting at the table with Damien and Mark Chenault.
“Chuck?” she said uncertainly, though there was no doubt of the man’s identity. “Chuck Novotny?”
The middle-aged man she’d known for years from her hometown seemed as startled as she was. He started to say something to Celia, then turned to Damien, instead. “What is she doing here?”
Standing to hold Celia’s chair, Damien lifted an eyebrow at Novotny in subtle reproof of the discourtesy. “Celia is my guest. I assume you two know each other.”
“Of course we do,” Celia explained, taking her seat. “Percy is a very small town, Damien. There are few people there I don’t know. Chuck’s a longtime customer of the bank where I work.”
Now that she’d had a moment to think about it, she realized why Chuck was at the resort. The Novotnys owned the spreading acres of lakeside property that Damien found most tempting for his potential Arkansas resort.
Everyone in town had speculated about whether Chuck would sell the land that had been in his family for many generations. Chuck was a shrewd businessman, notoriously miserly and money-hungry, but he was a very conservative, almost reactionary man who caustically, and vocally, rejected “modern values”—often in long, vitriolic letters to the editor of the statewide newspaper.
Celia had always gotten along well enough with the man—generally exchanging little more than distantly courteous greetings upon passing—but her brother detested Chuck. How many times had Celia heard Cody refer to Chuck’s ilk as “a bigoted, big-mouthed, small-minded bunch of fascist rednecks”?