by Julia James
But it was impossible to remember that as he leant across her, reaching for her seatbelt, invading her body space just as he invaded her senses. She could feel the hardness of his chest wall against her arm, see the cords of his strong neck, the sable feathering of his hair, the hard-edged jawline and the incised lines around his mouth. She could catch the expensive masculine scent of his aftershave. His own masculine scent...
Then, in a swift, assured movement, he was reaching for the seatbelt and pulling it across her. And in those few brief seconds the breath stopped in her lungs.
Oh, God, what has he got—what has he got?
But it was a futile question. She knew exactly what he had.
Raw, overpowering sexuality. Effortless, unconscious, and knocking her for six.
It was all over in a moment and he was back in his position in the middle of the wide, capacious seat, turning his attention to Blondie, who was relentlessly talking away to him in rapid French. Tara could see her long red nails pressed over Marc Derenz’s sleeve, her face upturned to his—claiming his attention. Ignoring Tara.
The woman’s rudeness started to annoy her—adding to her resentment of the way she’d been commandeered for this uninvited role. Well, if she was supposed to be riding shotgun, she had better behave as if she were!
Cutting right across Blondie’s voluble chatter, she deliberately brushed her hand down Marc Derenz’s sleeve. It was an effort to do so, but she forced herself. She had to recover from her ludicrous reaction to his fastening her seatbelt for her. She had to recover from her ludicrous reaction to his overpowering masculinity full-stop.
After all, she told herself robustly, she’d lived with her looks all her life and had been a model for years—she was a hardened operator, able to give short shrift to men importuning her. No way was this guy going to cow her just because he had the looks to melt her bones. No, it was time to prove to herself—and, damn it, to him too!—that she wasn’t just going to meekly and mildly put up and shut up. Whatever it was about him that riled her so, she wasn’t going to let him call all the shots.
In which case...
‘Marc, baby, I’m sorry I gave you a hard time over leaving early. Forgive me?’ She leant into him just a fraction, quite deliberately, and put a husky, cajoling note into her voice.
His head swivelled. For a moment she saw an expression in his eyes that should have been a warning to her. But it was too late to regret drawing his attention to her.
‘You’ll have to accept, mon ange, that I have severe time constraints in my life. Hélas, I have to be in Geneva tomorrow, so I wanted to make the most of tonight.’
He sounded regretful. And intimate. It was an intimacy that curled right down her body. He didn’t have a strong French accent, but, boy, what he had worked...
And then Blondie was jabbering in German, and he turned to her to reply.
Relief drenched through Tara. If that was him simply acting the role of attentive lover...
She dragged her mind away, steadied her breathing. Oh, sweet Lord, whatever he had, he definitely had what it took to get past her defences.
Her expression changed. It was just as well that his personality didn’t match his looks—he had all the winning charm of a ten-ton boulder, crushing everyone around him! And it was even more just as well, she was honest enough to admit, that her acquaintance with this man was going to be extremely short-lived.
She’d see this exercise through, get back to work, and be a useful five hundred pounds the richer for it. All feeding into the Escape to My Cottage in the Country fund. She made herself focus on that subject for the remainder of the thankfully short journey, doing her best to ignore the very difficult to ignore presence of the man sitting next to her, and grateful that he was being monopolised by Blondie, who was clearly making the most of him.
As the car pulled up under the portico of the woman’s hotel Tara sat meekly while the other two got out. Marc Derenz escorted Blondie indoors, to emerge some minutes later and throw himself back into the car, this time on the far side vacated by Blondie.
‘Thank God!’ Tara heard him say—and he sounded as if he meant it.
Tara couldn’t resist. He was such a charmless specimen, however ludicrously good-looking. ‘Such a bore, aren’t they?’ she said sweetly. ‘Women who don’t get the message.’
Dark eyes immediately swivelled to her, and Tara reeled inwardly with the impact. It was like being seared by a laser set to stun. Despite the effort it cost her, she gritted her teeth, refusing to blink or back down.
He didn’t deign to answer, merely flicked out his phone and jabbed at it. A moment later he was in full flood to someone he clearly wanted to talk to—unlike herself—and Tara assumed from his businesslike tone, that business was what it was.
She leant back, not sure if she was feeling irritated by his manner or just glad the whole escapade was almost over. Even so, she unconsciously felt her head twist slightly as the car moved back out into the traffic, so she could behold his profile. Again, she felt that annoyingly vulnerable reaction to him, that skip in her pulse. She jerked her head away.
Oh, damn the man! He might radiate raw sexuality on every wavelength, but his granite personality was a total turn-off. The minute she was out of here and had the money he’d promised her she would never think about him again.
Five minutes later they were back at the hotel where the fashion show was being held and she was climbing out of the limo. Pointedly, she held her door open—no way was he driving off without paying her.
‘You said five hundred,’ she said, holding out her hand expectantly. The only reason, she reminded herself grimly, that she had anything to do with this man was for money! No other reason.
For a moment he just looked at her, his face closed. Then he got out of the car, standing in front of her. He was taller than her, even with her high heels, and it wasn’t something she was accustomed to in men.
She felt her jaw set. There was something about the way he was looking at her. As if he were considering something. She lifted her chin that much higher, eyeballing him, hand still outstretched for her pay-off.
His dark eyes were veiled, unreadable.
‘My money, please,’ she said crisply. What was going on? Was he going to try and welch on the deal? For a sum that would be utterly trivial to a man like him?
Then, abruptly, she realised why he was not reaching for his wallet. Because he was reaching for her hand.
Before she could stop him, or step away, he’d taken hold of it and was raising it to his mouth. His expression as he did so had changed. Changed devastatingly.
Tara felt her lungs seize—felt everything seize.
Oh, God, she heard her inner voice say, silently and faintly and with absolute dismay, don’t do this to me...
But it was too late. With a glint in his obsidian eyes, as if he knew perfectly well that what he was doing would sideswipe her totally, he turned her hand over in his, exposing the tender skin of her wrist.
Eyelashes far too long for a man with a face that tough swept down, veiling those dark, mordant eyes of his. And then his mouth, like silken velvet, was brushing that oh-so-delicate skin, gliding across it with deliberate slowness. Soft, sensuous, devastating.
She felt her eyelids flutter shut, felt a ludicrous weakness flood her body. Desperately she tried to negate it. It was just skin touching skin! But her attempt to reduce it to such banality was futile. Totally futile. The warm, grazing caress of his mouth on the sensitive surface of her skin focussed every nerve-ending in her entire body just on her wrist. She was melting, dissolving...
He dropped her hand, straightened. ‘Thank you,’ he murmured, his voice low, his eyes holding hers. The darkling glint in them was still there, but there was something more to it—something that kept her lungs immobile. ‘Thank you for your co-operation this evening.’
> There was the merest hint of amusement in his voice. She snatched her hand away, as if it had been touched by a red-hot bar of iron, not by the sensuous, seductive glide of his mouth.
She had to recover—any way she could. ‘I only did it for the money!’ she gritted, going back to eyeballing him, defying him to think otherwise.
She saw his expression harden. Close. Whatever had been there, even if only to taunt her, had vanished. Now there was only the personality of that crushing boulder back in evidence.
With a clearly deliberate gesture he reached for his wallet in the inner pocket of his tailored dinner jacket, and an equally deliberately flicked it open. Stone-faced—determinedly so—Tara watched him peel off the requisite number of fifty-pound notes and hold them out to her.
She took them from him, her colour heightened. There was something about standing here and having a man handing her money—any man, let alone this damn one!
He was looking at her with that deliberately impassive expression on his face, but there was something in the depths of those dark veiled eyes of his that made her react on total impulse. The man was so totally charmless, so totally forbidding, and yet he had so totally shot to pieces her usual cool-as-ice reaction to any kind of physical contact with a man. She’d let him do all that wrist-kissing, let him taunt her as he had and hadn’t even tried to pull away from him.
Now, in an overpowering impulse to get some kind of retaliation, she lifted the topmost fifty-pound note from the wad in her hand. Stepping forward, she gave her saccharine smile again and with deliberate insolence tucked the fifty-pound note into his front jacket pocket and patted it.
‘Buy yourself a drink, Mr Derenz,’ she told him sweetly. ‘You look like you could use one!’
She turned on her high heel, stalking away back into the hotel, not caring about his reaction. If she never saw Marc Derenz again it would be too soon! A man like him could only be bad, bad news.
A man who, like no other man she’d ever met, could turn her into melting ice-cream with a taunting wrist-kiss and a veiled glance from those dark eyes—and who could equally swiftly make her mad as fire with his imperious manner and rock-like personality.
Yes, she thought darkly, definitely bad news.
On so many counts.
* * *
Behind her, stock-still on the pavement, knowing the doorman had been covertly observing the exchange and not giving a damn, Marc watched her disappear from sight, the skirts of her gown billowing around her long, long legs, that glorious chestnut hair catching the light. In his memory he could still taste the silken scent of the pale skin at her wrist, the warmth of the pulse beneath the surface.
Then, his expression still mask-like, he turned away to climb back into his car, and be driven to his own hotel.
As if mentally rousing himself, he reached for the crumpled note in his breast pocket. He slipped it back into his wallet, depleted now of the four hundred and fifty pounds that were in her possession. As his wallet held his gaze, he felt as if the contents were reminding him of something important to him. That he would be wise not to forget.
How much he had wanted to silence that acidly saccharine mouth of hers, taunting him in a way that right now, in the mood he’d been in all evening, had not been wise at all... Silence it in the only way he wanted...
No. Tara Mackenzie was not for him—not on any terms. All his life he’d played the game of romance by the rules he’d set out for himself, to keep himself safe, and it was out of the question to consider breaking them. Not even for a woman like that.
After all, he mused, had it not been for the wretched Celine he would never even have encountered her. Now all he wanted was to put both of them behind him. For good.
It would be less than a fortnight later, however, that he would be forced to do neither. And it would blacken his mood to new depths of exasperatedly irate displeasure...
* * *
Tara was looking at kitchens and bathrooms online, trying to budget for the best bargains. However she calculated it, she still definitely needed at least another ten thousand pounds to get it all done. And even living in London as cheaply as she could—including staying in this run-down flat-share—it would take, she reckoned, a good six months to save that much.
What I need is some nice source of quick, easy dosh!
She gave a wry twist of a smile tinged with acerbity. Well, she’d made that five hundred pounds quickly enough—just for keeping the oh-so-charmless Marc Derenz safe from Blondie.
Memory swooped on her—that velvet touch of his mouth on the tender inside of her wrist...
A rasp of annoyance broke from her—with herself, for remembering it, for feeling that tremor that it had aroused go through her again now.
He only did it to taunt you! No other reason.
With an impatient resolve to put the wretched man out of her thoughts, she went back to her online perusal. Moving to Dorset—that was important to her. Not some obnoxious zillionaire who’d put her back up from the very first. Nor some man who could set her pulse racing...a man who was so, so wrong for her...
A thought sifted across her mind. Would there ever be a man who was right for her, though?
Yes, she thought determinedly—one day there would be. But she wasn’t going to find him here in London, in her life as a model. No, it would be someone she’d meet when she’d started her new life in the country. Someone who didn’t know her as a model at all, and who didn’t see her as a trophy to show off with. Her thoughts ran on. Someone who was, oh, maybe a vet—or a farmer, even—at home in the countryside...
She pressed her lips together, giving a smothered snort. Well, one thing was for sure, it would not be Marc Derenz. And, anyway, she was never going to set eyes on him again.
A sharp rapping on the front door of the flat made her jump. She gave a sigh of irritation. Probably one of her flatmates had forgotten her keys.
She put her laptop aside, padded to the door, and opened it.
And stepped back in total shock.
It was the last person on earth she’d ever expected to see again.
Marc Derenz.
CHAPTER THREE
MARC’S MOOD WAS BLACK. Blacker even than it had been that torturous evening at the fashion show, with Celine trying to corner him. He’d hoped the brush-off he’d given her would mean she’d give up. He’d been wrong.
She was still plaguing him—still set on inviting herself to the Villa Derenz on the blatant pretext of house-hunting. It had been impossible to refuse Hans’s apologetic request—and now he’d been landed with them arriving this week.
Marc’s reaction had been instant—and implacable. He’d blocked her before—he would just have to do it again. However damn irritating it was to have to do so.
His eyes rested now on the means he was going to have to use. Tara Mackenzie.
He knew her name, and it had been easy enough to find out where she lived. He cast a disparaging eye around the dingy apartment. The front door opened on to the lounge, which was cheaply furnished and messy—belongings were scattered on battered settees, and a rack of washing was drying in front of the window.
His gaze swept round to the woman he’d tracked down.
And he veiled it immediately.
Even casually dressed, in jeans and a loose shirt, Tara Mackenzie was a complete knockout. Every bit as stunning as he remembered her. The same insistent, visceral response to her that he’d felt at that fashion show, that he’d been doing his damnedest to expel from his memory, flared in him again. Deplorable, but powerful. Far too powerful.
He crushed it down.
She was staring at him now, with those amazing blue-green eyes of hers, and had opened her mouth to speak. He pre-empted her. He wanted this sorted as swiftly as possible.
* * *
‘I need to talk to you. I have a business
proposition to put to you.’
His voice was clipped to the point of curtness. Just as it had been before at the fashion show. Tara’s hackles rose automatically. She was still reeling from seeing him again—still reeling from the overpowering impact he was having on her, that seemed to be jacking up the voltage of her body’s electricity as if she’d suddenly been plugged into the mains.
This time he was not in a hand-made tux, but in a dark grey killer business suit that screamed Mr Rich and Powerful! Don’t mess me about!
Just as the look on his face did. That closed expression on his hard-planed, utterly unfairly devastating features and the obvious aura of impatience about him. His automatic expectation that she would meekly listen to whatever it was he was about to say.
He went on in the same curt, clipped voice, his faint accent almost totally supressed. ‘Extend the role you adopted at the fashion show and you can make five thousand pounds out of it,’ he said, not bothering with any preamble.
Tara frowned, and then she smiled, enlightenment dawning. It wasn’t a genuine smile, but it helped her control that voltage hammering through her.
‘Blondie still pestering you, is she?’ she put to him.
She saw his expression tighten at her sardonic observation. Obviously he was annoyed, but he was acknowledging, tacitly, what she had said.
‘Well?’ It was his only response.
‘Tell me more.’ Tara smiled sweetly.
The electricity kindled by his utterly unexpected arrival had sparked a kind of exhilaration in her. It dawned on her that he was resenting having to approach her. And that, she knew, feeling another spark inside her, was really quite gratifying...
Just why that should be so she did not pause to examine.
He took a short breath, his eyes still like lasers on her. ‘A week of your time—ten days at the most. It would be...residential,’ he said, ‘but entirely...’ His eyes suddenly closed over their previous expression. ‘Entirely synthetically so. In other words, on the same basis as before.’ A tight, non-humorous smile tightened his mouth. ‘For appearances only.’
