It was a security-camera mount. A gray steel pole with a remote scanning head, part of the island defenses Chris had mentioned. Currently, however, the unit had a nylon cover drawn over its camera. As Harconan had promised, she would have her privacy here.
Amanda returned to the open beach, walking a few more yards farther down. Kicking off her sandals, she found the sand was soft and pleasantly hot under the sun. Shedding her beach jacket, she took a step toward the surf. Then she hesitated, glancing down at herself.
Damn that man!
She remembered the lazy, condescending smile he had given her when she had asked about borrowing a suit. “If you feel the need for one.”
This beach, the setup, putting her alone like this.
The bastard was daring her!
Aloud, she gave an angry, frustrated yip.
If she did, he would have won yet again, maneuvering her into it. And if she didn’t, she’d lose for not having the nerve to accept the challenge.
Damn, damn, damn the man!
She fought the battle for a minute more, then the sun and the brush of the warm wind on her skin won. Her hands came up and crossed, slipping the straps from her shoulders. The discarded satin whispered off her body and pooled at her feet. Stepping out of the suit, she yielded to the pleasure and freedom of her nudity and ran down to the sea.
Plunging into the blood-temperature water, she reveled in the infinite difference between swimming in even the most minimal of clothing and swimming in nothing at all, wondering if it were possible for Harconan to have learned of her secret passion for skinny-dipping.
There was a reef some twenty yards offshore and she swam parallel with it, keeping a safe distance from its jagged coral and defending army of spiny sea urchins, yet diving intermittently to sight see the brilliant swarms of reef fish that flickered and danced among the multicolored sea fans. She should have forgotten about the suit and asked for swim fins and a face mask. Next time, that’s how she would do it.
Next time?
Before Amanda realized, she had swum a quarter mile up the beach and noticed that early-warning glow of too much skin, sun, and saltwater exposure. Paddling ashore, she sought the shelter of the shade line at the head of the sand. She was going to have to walk back to her suit bare, but that prospect wasn’t particularly unpleasant. She picked wild-growing scarlet hibiscus and tucked it into her hair as she ambled back toward the path.
She was so deep in daydreaming that she overshot the mark. She looked back in puzzlement. No, she couldn’t be mistaken: There were her sandals. This was the place she had left her suit. The beach jacket too.
They were gone, and suddenly Amanda found herself no longer merely nude but naked.
He’d done it to her again! Amanda’s hands started to move in the two classic gestures of a female caught in the predicament. Angrily she straightened and forced them down to her sides. It was not as if he had not already seen everything that was available. She was not going to lose her dignity on top of her clothing.
“Makara!” she yelled at the top of her lungs.
“Yes,” he replied casually coming down out of the deeper shade of the seaside grove. He was barefoot and wearing a beach jacket, and his gray eyes studied her with frank and open appreciation. Instinctively she started to cover herself again, catching herself once more. Angrily, she snapped at herself that this was just like having her clothes taken in escape-and-evasion training.
Only it wasn’t and she was fully aware of it.
“All right, Makara, what happened to my suit?”
“Nothing happened to it,” he said matter-of-factly, “You neither needed it nor wanted it anymore so I simply sent it back to the house. You are very lovely as you are now and I intend to keep you this way for a time.”
“That was a dirty trick!”
He sighed as if explaining something to an obstinate child. “Amanda, be reasonable, nobody tricked you except yourself.”
“Are you going to deny you set this whole thing, and me, up?”
“I admit to recognizing a potential,” he replied, grinning. “Recognizing potential is what I do best. Be fair: At most I can be accused of opening a series of doors for you, and in each case you stepped through of your volition, of your own desire.”
“I did not!”
“Of course you did. You could have stopped my stripping you like this at any time. Have you been forced, coerced, had a hand lifted against you? I think not. Even now it’s not too late. We can lie and say that this is something neither of us want. You may have my beach jacket to walk back to the house in.”
He lifted a hand now, to reach out and brush the petal of the flower in her hair against her cheek. She found her knees trembling, and her own hands came up, trying vainly to shield herself, to hide the hardening of her nipples and the other signs of the growing, uncontrollable fire within her.
“Makara, please,” she whispered. “I’m naked out here.”
The back of his fingers caressed her cheek directly this time. “Of course you are. Naked and very beautiful and vulnerable and helpless, as you wished to be, just for a little while.”
The sunset was awesome in its gold and flame grandeur. They watched it together on the scratch bed made out of the lounge mattresses. They lay on their sides, spoon fashion, Makara’s right arm under her head as a pillow, his face buried in her slightly salt-sticky hair. Both of them finally satiated after an almost frightening time when neither of them could seem to have enough of the other. And yet, the hunger for more still lived, the fires banked by sheer exhaustion.
“You’re right,” Amanda said, the first conscious word she had spoken in many hours. “I did want this, but I don’t know why.”
“I could take that as an insult, you know,” Harconan replied his voice slurring slightly as he kissed the back of her neck.
“That’s not what I mean, love,” she replied wryly, reaching back to administer a caress. “I’ll acknowledge that your very obvious charms impressed me from the beginning. I mean, why was I drawn to this particular scenario you set up? I’m usually more… straightforward about such things.”
“Must you always be so analytical?” he inquired, delivering a nip to her shoulder blade.
“Yes,” Amanda replied honestly, starting to move the backs of her thighs in a gentle massaging motion.
“Mm, well, I’d tell you my theory, but I don’t want to interrupt what you are doing.”
“I’ll stop cold right now if you don’t, mister.”
“I hear the captain coming back already. Very well, woman, here is my theory. You fell into my trap because you wished to do so. You wanted to dice with the Devil and be defeated. You wanted to lose the game and quite literally be stripped of all your control, all of your considerable power, to be left as you are now, naked and helpless. In short, you wished to lose.”
She stopped moving her hips and looked back over her shoulder, her eyes wide. “That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not. Not for people like you and me.” Harconan closed both of his arms around her, drawing her back against him in a fond hug. “Losing is a natural human experience, a part of living. We learn from it. But you and I are different from the normal herd.”
“How so?”
“We are, as they say in your country, high rollers. We live large and the stakes are high when we gamble. When we lose, the losses are great, in money, in policy, and in lives. We must win — anyway we can, whenever we step to the table. Thus, the battlefields where we dare to lose are few and far between. You found one on my beach this day. I hope the experience was interesting for you.”
“Yes… very. Makara?”
“What, beauty?”