Free In Bed With a Stranger by India Grey Page B

who was hurt. Surely he would talk to her when he was ready?
    Having soaped her upper body all over, the masseuse took up an innocuous-looking sponge. Sophie stiffened and gave a little cry of surprise and pain as the girl began to rub her
shoulders with it and she realised it was made of something scratchy. Sandpaper perhaps. Or steel wool.
    She bit her lip. It hurt, but at the same time it felt good. Like loving Kit.
    Defiantly she gritted her teeth against the pain.
    He loved her too—every touch, every kiss told her that. Words were unnecessary. Didn’t their bodies say it all?
    Kit reached the end of the long swimming pool and surfaced for air before twisting beneath the water to begin another length.
    In that brief second he got a glimpse of the faded sky and realised that he’d been in the water for a long time. Initially he had focused all his energy on not thinking—on forgetting about Lewis and what had happened in the medina that morning—and instead thought of nothing beyond blankly counting the number of lengths. After a while even that blurred into meaninglessness and he just swam.
    And that was what you had to do, he told himself wearily, ploughing through the water. You just had to keep going, keep shutting it out and eventually it would go away. An image of Lewis’s girlfriend hung in the greenish water in front of his eyes for a second before he pushed it away with a stroke of his arm.
    He couldn’t spill it all out to Sophie. She was so sweet and sure and easy-going; there was no way he was going to inflict on her the dark thoughts that kept him awake at nights and had now begun to seep into his waking hours too. He’d sort it out alone, in his own way.
    Reaching the other end of the pool, he broke the surface of the water again, took a lungful of air and was just about to turn around again when a movement caught his eye.
    Sophie was coming down the path from the hotel, the afternoon sun making her hair dance with auburn lights and turning her skin to warm honey. She was wearing the embroidered
tunic they’d bought earlier, a thick leather belt slung around her hips, and as she walked the thin silk rippled against her, showing off every line and curve. Suddenly his body seemed to forget that it was sated from the most intense sex of his life and that he’d been swimming for heaven knew how long.
    If only his head were as good at overlooking stuff.
    As she got nearer she raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, and the hem of the tunic rose to reveal another inch of pale gold thigh.
    ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
    ‘I’ve been trying to forget a lot of things,’ he drawled, vaulting out of the pool and looking her over speculatively as he reached for a towel. ‘It’s a whole lot easier now you’ve appeared looking like that.’
    ‘Like what?’ she asked distractedly, looking down at the olive-green silk tunic and frowning. ‘Oh—yes, I know, this is far too short to wear on its own, but I’m going to wait until the last minute to put on my white trousers or—’
    He reached out a dripping hand and took hold of her chin, tipping her face up and stopping her from saying any more.
    ‘Like you’ve been lit up from the inside.’
    It was true. Maybe it was the low, syrupy sunlight or some clever kind of cosmetic he knew nothing about, or maybe it was just her smile and the sparkle of her eyes and the sheen on her hair, but she seemed to glow. To radiate beauty.
    She rolled her eyes. ‘Ah. That would be the industrial sander the masseuse used to remove the top five layers of my skin.’
    Kit slid his hand up her arm, beneath the loose sleeve. ‘So underneath this you’re even more naked than before?’ he asked, lazily caressing her skin as he smiled into her eyes.
    ‘You could say that … But we don’t have time. That’s what I came to remind you—that it’s nearly six o’clock. We need to go.’
    Of course. To meet the mother he hadn’t seen for almost
thirty