Free Taken by the Pirate Tycoon by Daphne Clair Page B

into the passenger seat again he gave her a critical all-over glance and said, with a glimmer of laughter still in his eyes, “Feel better?”
    “A bit. Considering I still must look like something the tide washed in.”
    Startling her, he put a hand under her chin and turned her face to his. The laughter faded. Almost roughly, he said, “You looked real—and alive—back there. Nothing wrong with that.”
    Before she could move, he lowered his head and kissed her, his lips firm, lingering only briefly on hers, slightly parted, subtly increasing the pressure on her mouth as if testing for her reaction.
    She lifted her hand and pushed his light hold away, what he’d said still in her mind. As though he had the right to judge her, decide she was somehow less than fully human.
    The seeming experimental nature of the kiss, and the way his too-penetrating gaze was obviously gauging her response now, added to her chagrin.
    Did she normally look un real?
    Sometimes she felt that way, as though she was playing a part, that the real Samantha Magnussen was hidden away from the world. Like the crabs in the rock pool, she had borrowed a hard shell that wasn’t really hers so she could protect herself. Underneath was a soft, vulnerable being, hiding from attack, from exposure, pretending to be something it was not. If anyone penetrated her disguise she would die inside.
    “I’m a woman,” she said defensively, “in a man’s world. It’s all very well for you to go round looking like…the way you do.”
    “The way I do?”
    “Um…casual.”
    “You mean scruffy.” He didn’t seem offended.
    “I didn’t say that.” It was what she’d once thought, but the unruly hair and the chin-halo of his beard actually made him appear disturbingly male and sexy. “I just mean that I need to look professional if I want to be taken seriously.”
    He seemed to consider that. “It’s still like that for women?”
    “Some men think that because I’m female I’m not capable of running a company like Magnussen’s. If I’d had a brother—”
    She stopped abruptly and Jase said, “You’re an only child, aren’t you?”
    “Yes. My father would have preferred a son, but he had to make do with me.” Why had she blurted that out now? She’d never put it into words before.
    Jase’s gaze sharpened. “Did he say that?”
    “He didn’t need to.” It was just something she’d known ever since she was barely school age, a conviction that became stronger as she grew older. No matter how much she tried to be what her father wanted she couldn’t change her sex. She was never able to take the place of the son Fate had denied him.
    She stirred, her eyes going to the low dunes with their sparse covering of tough, pale grasses and creeping plants. “Can we go now? I don’t want to be too late getting home.”
    “Someone waiting for you?”
    The question sounded idle, but she felt the razor-sharpness of his gaze.
    “I have things to do,” she said. “And my car’s still parked at the office.”
    He nodded and started the engine.
    They didn’t speak much on the way back to the city. Samantha was preoccupied, thinking she should be careful what she said around this man. He had a knack of pickingup on unguarded remarks, reading into them more than she’d expected or intended. And even the briefest of kisses set her pulse thundering and her body melting like chocolate in the sun.
    She could still feel the warm pressure of his mouth on hers, and didn’t dare wipe away the lingering, too-pleasant taste of it while he sat beside her.
    It meant nothing, she told herself. A casual, spur-of-the-moment kiss that he might have given to any woman he’d spent a pleasant, leisurely hour or two with. He’d probably forgotten it already. Certainly he’d shown no sign of being upset by her rejection. And that was no reason for a niggling irritation on her part.
    When he drew up outside the Magnussen Building she said, putting a hand on the