Free Sun Kissed (Crane Series) by Nancy Warren Page A

is control me.”
    His eyes narrowed, and she saw the passion head to anger. “I want some time with you. You think a week’s enough? Not for what I’ve got in mind, it isn’t.”
    “I am not some company ripe for takeover. If I sleep with you, I’ll sleep with you because I want to. If I leave in a week, I leave in a week.”
    His eyes had grown hard. “I don’t think I’m the only one who likes control. Face it, darl, you like to call the shots. What’s your plan? Shag me for a week and then run home to your tame boyfriend whose idea of an intimate gift is a bloody pen?”
    “He doesn’t own me. And neither do you. Forget it,” she said. “Just forget it.”
    “Fine.”
     

8
    All the millions in the bank, his photo on the cover of Business Review Weekly—even an honorary degree from Macquarie University—and Cam couldn’t figure out how to bring one stubborn woman to her senses. After downing one beer, he cracked open another. She was probably packing right now. Running home scared, to the man she could control and the life that would bore her senseless. And because he couldn’t keep his bloody great mouth shut, she’d bolted. The morning would have been the time to mention about putting off her flight. Yeah. He saw that now. Brilliant. Bloody brilliant. He’d all but had her and then made her bolt.
    “God damn it,” he said to himself.
    Well, it wasn’t in his nature to give up easily, not give up something he really wanted, and he wanted Jennifer Bloody Talbot more than he’d ever wanted anything. What he needed was a plan of attack. He tapped the bottle lightly against his teeth, thinking. Bron, he decided, was the next person he needed to enlist in his campaign. He’d seen her and Jen hanging about together. She might have some ideas.
    So the next day, when Bron wandered in late as usual, he was waiting for her in her office.
    “Don’t start,” she said, raising her hands. “I’ve been working like a maniac on swimwear all week. I can’t get the right fabric, and the right color, and the right price. You do not want to give me any aggro.”
    “Partying late again, I see. You’ve still got some of that sparkly makeup stuff on your shoulders.”
    But he said it mildly. He needed her help. Since she’d known him all her life, she put her hands on her hips and stared down at him. “All right. What do you want?”
    “Jennifer Talbot.”
    Bron’s impish grin dawned and she threw herself onto the bright pink sofa she kept in her office. “I knew it. You’re mad for her, aren’t you?”
    He nodded. “And now she’s pissed off with me.”
    Once more she threw her hands in the air. “I’m not acting as a go-between.”
    She shuffled among the piles of paper on the long counter behind the sofa which, in theory, was her work area. In reality, it was where she stored all her rubbish. How she produced anything in such chaos he could never work out.
    “But while you’re here, I’ll show you the color samples for the new wet suits. If I can bloody find them.”
    “I don’t want you for a go-between,” he said, fairly certain, given the mess, that he wasn’t going to be looking at color samples any time soon. “I want your advice.”
    She stopped mid-pile. “You do?”
    “Yeah. What does she like? How can I make her stay?”
    “She’s a woman, you great git. She wants romance.”
    He wished he hadn’t bothered asking Bron for advice. “Romance.”
    “Yes. Flowers, chocolates, champagne, moonlight.” She laughed at him. “I know you can do it. You’ve got a real soft spot; you just hide it mostly.”
    “Do you think?” He stopped and put her desktop calendar to today’s date, updating it a couple of months. “Does she say anything about me?”
    “No.” Then she laughed again. “It’s what she doesn’t say that’s important. You ask me, she’s crazy about you, but she doesn’t know how to give in. She’s like you. She doesn’t know how to say she’s made a