‘Here,’ said Lucas, sounding suddenly amused as he leaned across her to click a button. ‘Let me.’
Of course. The door slid noiselessly open because it was an electronic door and didn’t actually have a handle! What a stupid country girl she must seem. But Tara’s embarrassment at her lack of savvy was exacerbated by a heart-stopping awareness as Lucas’s arm brushed against hers. She swallowed. He’d touched her. He’d actually touched her. He might not have meant to but his fingers had made contact and where they had it felt like fire flickering against her skin.
Scrambling out of the car into an atmosphere even stickier than earlier, she cast a longing look towards the heavy sky, wishing it would rain and shatter this strange tension which seemed to be building inside her, as well as in the atmosphere. She scrabbled around in her handbag to fish out her key but her fingers were trembling as she heard a footfall behind her and Lucas’s shadow loomed over her as she inserted it tremblingly into the lock.
‘You’re shaking, Tara,’ he observed as she opened the door and stepped into the house.
‘It’s a cold night,’ she said automatically, even though that wasn’t true. But he didn’t correct her with a caustic comment as he might normally have done.
And the strange thing was that neither of them moved to put on the main light once the heavy front door had swung shut behind them, and the gloom of the vast hallway seemed to increase the sense of unreality which had been building between them all evening.
There was something in the air. Something indefinable. Tara felt acutely aware of just how close Lucas was. His eyes were dark and gleaming as he stared down at her and she held her breath as, for one heart-stopping moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. She felt as if he was going to pull her into his arms and crush his lips down on hers.
But he didn’t.
Of course he didn’t.
Had she taken complete leave of her senses? He simply clicked the switch so that they were flooded with a golden light, which felt like a torch being shone straight into her eyes, and the atmosphere shattered as dramatically as a bubble being burst. A hard smile was playing at the edges of his lips and he nodded, as if her reaction was very familiar to him.
‘Goodnight, Tara,’ he said in an odd kind of voice. And as he turned away from her, she could hear the distant rumble of thunder.
CHAPTER THREE
THE NEXT FEW days were an agony of indecision as Tara tried to make up her mind whether or not to accept Lucas’s job offer. She tried drawing up a list of pros and cons—which came up firmly weighted in favour of an unexpected trip to America with her boss. Next she canvassed her friend Stella, who told her she’d be mad not to jump at the chance of joining Lucas in New York.
‘Why wouldn’t you go?’ Stella demanded as she folded up one of the tiny smocked dresses belonging to the twin baby girls she nannied for. ‘You loved New York when we went last Christmas. Apart from the ice-rink incident, of course,’ she added hastily. ‘And that man really should have been looking where he was going. It’s a no-brainer as far as I can see, so why the hesitation?’
Tara didn’t answer. She thought how lame it would sound if she confessed that something felt different between her and Lucas and that something unspoken and sexual seemed to have flowered between them that night. Or would it simply seem deluded and possibly arrogant to imply that Dublin’s sexiest billionaire might be interested in someone like her?
But something had changed. She wasn’t imagining it. The new awkwardness between them. The shadowed look around his eyes when she’d brought in his breakfast the morning after that crazy dinner, which had made her wonder if his night had been as sleepless as hers. The flickering glance he’d given her when she’d put the coffee pot down with trembling fingers before he’d announced that he was flying to Berlin later that morning and would be back in a couple of days—and could she possibly give him her answer about accompanying him to America by then?
‘Yes, of course,’ she’d answered stiffly, wondering why she was dragging her feet so much when she knew what she ought to say. She practised saying it over and over in her head.
It’s a very kind offer, Lucas—but I’m going to have to say no.
Why?
Because... Because I’ve fallen in lust with you.
How ridiculous would that sound, even if it weren’t coming from someone who could measure her sexual experience on the little finger of one hand?
But it was easier to shelve the decision and even easier when he wasn’t around So Tara just carried on working and when she wasn’t working, she did the kind of things she always did when Lucas was away. She swam in his basement pool and began to tidy up the garden for winter. She made cupcakes for a local charity coffee morning and went to Phoenix Park with Stella and her young charges. She listened to Lucas’s voicemail telling her he’d be late back on Thursday night and not to bother making dinner for him.
And still the wretched weather wouldn’t break. It was so heavy and sticky that you felt you couldn’t breathe properly. As if it was pressing against your throat like an invisible pair of hands. Sweat kept trickling down the back of her neck and despite piling her rampant curls on top of her head, nothing she did seemed to make her cool.
On Thursday evening she washed her hair and went to bed, listening out for the sound of Lucas’s chauffeur, who had gone to collect him from the airport. It wasn’t even that late, but several days of accumulated sleeplessness demanded respite and Tara immediately fell into a deep sleep, from which she was woken by a sudden loud crack, followed by a booming bang. Sitting bolt upright in bed, she tried to orientate herself, before the monochrome firework display taking place outside her bedroom window began to make sense. Of course. It was the storm. The long-awaited storm which had been building for days. Thank heavens. At least now the atmosphere might get a bit lighter.
Another flash of lightning illuminated her bedroom so that it looked like an old-fashioned horror film and almost immediately a clap of thunder echoed through the big house. The storm must be right overhead, she thought, just as heavy rain began to teem down outside the window. It sounded loud and rhythmical and oddly soothing and Tara sank back down onto the pillows and lay there with her eyes wide open, when she heard another crash. But this time it didn’t sound like thunder. Her body tensed. This time it sounded distinctly like the sound of breaking glass.
Quickly, she got out of bed, her heart pounding and her bare toes gripping the floorboards. What if it was a burglar? This was a big house in a wealthy area and didn’t they say thieves always chose opportunistic moments to break in? What better time than amid the dramatic chaos of a wild thunderstorm?
Pulling on her dressing gown, she knotted the belt tightly around her waist and wondered if she should go and wake Lucas. Of course she should—if he was back. Yet she was dreading knocking on his bedroom door in a way she would never have done before she’d agreed to have dinner with him. Back then—in that unenlightened and innocent time before she’d started to fantasise about him—she wouldn’t have been in an angsty state of excitement, wondering what she’d find. She knew he didn’t wear pyjamas because she did his laundry for him. And that was the trouble. She knew so much about him and yet not nearly enough.
Quietly, she pushed open her bedroom door and crept along the corridor, her head buzzing. At least she’d made up her mind about how to deal with his job offer—because no way could she join Lucas in America now, not if she was harbouring stupid ideas about what it would be like to...to...
She cocked her head and listened. Was that the creak of a footstep on the stairwell she could hear, or just the normal sounds of the big house settling down for the night? It was difficult to tell above the sound of the drumming rain. Peering over the bannister, she could see light streaming from Lucas’s room on the floor below and she crept downstairs towards it.
She had just reached his
door when a figure appeared at the top of the stairs and Tara nearly jumped out of her skin when she realised that Lucas was standing there wearing nothing but a pair of faded denims, which he had clearly just slung on, because the top button was undone. And his chest was bare. Gloriously and deliciously bare—his washboard abs as beautifully defined as the powerful curves of his forearms. Tara felt the sudden flip of her heart and was furious with herself—because wasn’t it shocking to be noticing something like that at a time like this? She was supposed to be investigating a night-time disturbance, not eying up her half-naked boss like some kind of man-hungry desperado.
‘Lucas!’ she breathed. ‘It’s you.’
‘Of course it’s me—who else did you think it would be? Father Christmas?’ he snapped. ‘And what the hell are you doing, creeping around the place like a damned wraith?’
She was still flustered by the sight of him wearing so few clothes, and her reply came blurting out, the words tumbling over themselves in their eagerness to be said. ‘I... I heard a crash from downstairs and I thought it might be...’ she shrugged ‘...a burglar!’
‘And you thought the best way to deal with some potentially violent nutter was to confront him with nothing more effective than an indignant look in your eyes?’ His gaze bored into her. ‘Are you out of your mind, Tara?’
Tara licked her bone-dry lips. Yes, that was a pretty accurate description of the way she was feeling right now. But she could hardly tell him the reason why, could she? She could hardly explain that her fixation about him had been so great that it hadn’t left room in her head for anything else, and certainly not common sense. ‘So what was the crash?’ she questioned. ‘Did you find out?’
Lucas scowled, aware that his body was hardening in a way which was not what he wanted to happen. And the reason for his suddenly urgent desire was the most perplexing thing of all. Tara was standing there in some passion-killer of a dressing gown, which looked as if it had been made from an old bedspread, and yet a powerful sexual hunger was pumping through his veins. It defied all logic, he thought—just as his behaviour had done in the few days since they’d been apart. He’d been busy in Berlin, buying fleets of electric cars and planning to lease them out to businesses at a highly profitable rate. He’d had several high-powered meetings with the German transport minister and had been taken to an entrancing Schloss, situated outside the capital, where busty blondes had served them foaming tankards of beer. Yet all the time there had been a constant soundtrack playing in his mind as if it was on some infernal loop and giving him no peace. It had begun with Tara and ended with Tara and had involved plenty of X-rated images of how her pale and freckled body might look if it were naked in his bed.
Why the hell was he thinking so graphically about a woman he’d never even given a second glance to before?
Somehow he managed to drag his thoughts back to the present, realising that she was regarding him with a question in her eyes, and somehow he managed to dredge up a memory of what she’d asked him. ‘It was something breaking in the kitchen,’ he informed her tightly. ‘You’d left a window in the pantry open and the wind made some figurine fall.’
‘Oh, dear.’ She bit her lip. ‘I’d better go and tidy it up.’
‘No. Leave it until morning,’ he said firmly. ‘You shouldn’t be clearing up broken china at this time of night—though the ornament is beyond repair, I’m afraid.’
Tara nodded, her mouth working with an unexpected flare of emotion, despite all her mixed feelings about where that little statue had come from. She’d only put it there because she’d been planning to clean it tomorrow. ‘Can’t be helped.’
‘Was it something special?’
It wasn’t the kind of thing he usually asked and for a moment she almost told him about the figurine of St Christopher—the patron saint of travellers—which her mother had taken with her when she’d left for England, setting out on a life which was supposed to be so different from what she’d left behind. But why would you start explaining a woman’s broken dreams to a man who probably wasn’t really interested—and a man who was only half dressed? Wouldn’t that lead to questions and then yet more questions, which might end up with her revealing telltale details about her background? And nobody wanted to hear those, least of all herself. She might as well write on a placard: This is why I am such a freak. She shook her head and turned away but not before the salty prickle of tears had stung her eyes.
Had Lucas seen it? Was that why his voice suddenly gentled in a way she’d never heard before?
‘Tara?’ he said.
Impatiently fisting away the tears, Tara didn’t know what she’d been expecting but it wasn’t for Lucas to turn her around to look at him. It was just a hand placed on her upper arm, through the thick barrier of her dressing gown. The type of reassuring gesture anyone might make to someone who was on the verge of crying, but it didn’t feel remotely like that. It felt...electric. Tara had grown up in a house where physical contact was frowned upon, where nobody actually touched each other—and nobody had touched her in years. Was it that which made her response to Lucas so instant? Her blood was heating, like syrup on an open flame, and her body felt as if it were dissolving from the inside out. She sucked in a shuddered breath and somehow it seemed inevitable he should pull her into his arms. It was comfort, she told herself. That was all.
But it didn’t feel like comfort. It felt like heaven. Like a taste of something she’d never quite believed in. He was so big and powerful—so warm and strong—that it seemed only natural to let her head fall to his shoulder and for her breath to fan the silken skin of his neck. Tara had no idea how long that wordless embrace lasted. It might have been a few seconds but, there again, it could have been longer. Suddenly he pushed her head away so he could look at her, his eyes searching her face long and hard, and she’d never seen him look so disorientated. As if he were in some weird kind of dream and was expecting to wake up at any minute.
But he didn’t wake up—and neither did she. They remained standing in the same spot, staring into each other’s eyes as if it were the first time they’d ever seen each other.
‘You’d better go back to your own room,’ he said unsteadily.
Afterwards, Tara would ask herself what had possessed her to behave in such an uncharacteristic way. Was it the certainty of knowing she wasn’t going to be working for him much longer which made her throw caution to the wind? Or just the fact that she’d never felt like this before—as if her body were on fire with a burning need too powerful to be ignored? For once she wanted to cast aside the roles she’d been given in life. To forget the person she’d been taught to become. Obedient Tara. Wary Tara. The woman who had never stepped out of line because that way lay danger and she had been fearful of what might happen if she refused to comply.
But now there was no fear, only an audacity which felt newly minted and exhilarating.
‘Why?’ she questioned.
Her question hung in the air.
‘You know why,’ he ground out.
And somehow she did. Even though she had no experience of such matters, Tara could tell that Lucas Conway wanted her in exactly the same way as she wanted him. It was explicit in the tension which radiated from his powerful body and the hectic gleam which was glittering from his eyes. Her mouth was dry as she gazed at his lips and the temptation to kiss them was just too strong to resist. Because those lips held the tantalising promise of something else—something she was keen to explore. Suddenly she reached up to wind her arms around his neck, her thumbs stroking the dark waves of hair which covered the base of his neck, and she heard him suck in a breath.
‘Go to bed, Tara,’ he growled.
Again, that boldness. That strange, uncharacteristic boldness as she repeated her own guileless question. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t want to take advantage of you.’
‘We’re not playing a game
of tennis, Lucas.’
‘You know what I mean,’ he growled. ‘I’m your employer.’
‘Not right now you’re not,’ she declared fiercely. ‘Unless you’re planning on demanding I go and fix you a midnight snack or iron a shirt for you.’
An unexpected smile curved at his lips as Lucas realised how his humble housekeeper seemed determined to confound all his expectations tonight—in fact, to blow them clean away. She’d fearlessly come downstairs to tackle a potential thief like some kind of modern-day warrior queen. With her pale skin and red curls streaming down her back like a pre-Raphaelite painting, she looked fragile and ethereal and yet she was turning him on. Very, very much. And suddenly he couldn’t stem his desire any longer, not with her slim body so near and her mouth so tantalisingly close. He angled his head to kiss her, wondering if he was breaking some kind of fundamental rule. Some unspoken moral code. And then he cursed himself for even posing such a stupid question. Of course he was. Big time. He knew that. But knowing didn’t change anything—how could it when she was kissing him back with a hunger which felt as fierce as anything he’d ever encountered?
Her lips were as soft as petals and he could sense all the sweet promise in her slim young body. Already he felt as if he wanted to explode. As if he could tear that ugly dressing gown from her body and do it to her right there, up against the wall outside his bedroom. Yet something held him back and not just because this was the first time and instinct told him to savour it, in case there wasn’t a repeat. There was also part of him—a growingly distant part of him, admittedly—which wondered if one of them was going to suddenly come to their senses. As if something would suddenly shatter this strange spell and leave them facing each other with an air of disbelief and embarrassment.
But that wasn’t happening. The only thing on the agenda right now was that the kiss was growing deeper—and the first tentative thrust of her tongue was making his groin grow deliciously hard. Hell. What kind of sorcery was she wielding when she was doing so little? And why was her body still hidden from his hungry gaze, beneath the folds of that unspeakable dressing gown?
The Argentinian's Baby Of Scandal Page 4
