‘Why?’ Elizabeth demanded, not bothering to look at him, because one look always seemed to be enough to make her whirl off-course. ‘Have you rushed down here to give me another health warning about other men? Or do you really still think you can get me into bed by scaring off everyone else because you just can’t let go of the challenge?’
‘What kind of cheapskate takes a woman out and buys her water?’
‘Maybe,’ she answered grittily, spinning round to look at him with her hands on her hips, ‘the kind of cheapskate who isn’t terrified at the thought of a relationship that might actually go somewhere!’ As if there had been any chance of that! Why kid herself? Andreas had infiltrated every pore in her body, and shaking him off was going to be nigh-on impossible. Wild horses, however, wouldn’t have dragged that out of her.
Andreas was suddenly struck by the blinding possibility that he might have blown it, that a couple of seconds in the company of a complete wimp might have been his undoing. Complete wimps weren’t scared of talking about a future, even if it was only the occasional throwaway remark about a holiday down the line, or plans for the next weekend. Elizabeth didn’t want hot sex, no strings attached; maybe it was too late to start compromising on the strings.
‘Anyway! What do you care?’
‘I’m jealous as hell.’
That brought Elizabeth to a complete standstill. Andreas was most definitely not the jealous type.
‘You’re jealous?’
‘So why don’t you just go ahead and laugh?’ He gazed at her with silent, aggressively masculine defiance. ‘I am not ashamed of that,’ he added in a challenging voice.
‘Why would you be jealous?’
‘I don’t want to have this conversation with you here.’ His car was just within sight, and without waiting for input from her he strode towards it. Elizabeth tripped along behind him, angry that her curiosity was definitely in overdrive.
‘Why would you be jealous?’ she repeated the second they were sitting in his car, where at least there was the advantage of warmth. Unfortunately, there was also the danger of intimacy in their confined surroundings.
Andreas felt like a man with one foot dangling over the edge of the precipice. Worse, he was a man who no longer had a choice. Even worse than that was the grim reality that he was a man who didn’t want a choice. ‘I don’t like thinking of you with other men,’ he stated baldly, firing up the engine because it gave him something to do. He eased his car out of its parking space and began driving towards the house.
Elizabeth thumped hard on the warm glow that filled her. She reminded herself that Andreas’s jealousy, glorious though it might be, didn’t amount to love. Andreas was driven by lust and a perverse need to be the one to do the breaking off. He didn’t like the thought of her with other men because he still wanted her. When he stopped wanting her, he would have no difficulty at all in thinking of her with other men because her time would be up. And she just wouldn’t allow herself to start thinking that any relationship with Andreas was better than no relationship at all. It would be far too easy to be swept along on the misconception that there was no man on the face of the earth comparable to him. Tom might just be a pleasant guy, rather than relationship material, but there were plenty of other fish in the sea. And aiming to catch one that wasn’t a Great White would be altogether better for her well being. Maybe not just yet, but in time.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Not to the house,’ Andreas said heavily. ‘I don’t need James lurking behind corners, spying on our every move.’
‘There’ll be nothing to spy on. I’ve said everything I have to say.’
‘Well, maybe I haven’t.’ He pulled into one of the lay bys and killed his engine, then he angled his long body so that he was facing her.
Elizabeth braced herself for an attack on her senses of which only he was capable. The sudden silence was hot and oppressive, as was his disturbingly steady gaze. She cleared her throat, but her thoroughly scrambled brains were failing to function.
‘I’m sorry if I screwed up your lunch date,’ he admitted, fishing for information, but she looked at him in silence. ‘Did I screw up your lunch date?’ Never at a loss for words, Andreas was finding it difficult to collate his thoughts. It didn’t make sense that she would meet some guy for ten minutes and see her future in him, but stranger things had been known to happen. Tom might seem like God’s gift to womankind if compared to some other guy who had refused to discuss a relationship and had vetoed anything permanent. As he had. Andreas broke out in a film of perspiration in the vortex of her continuing silence.
‘He’d be no good for you anyway,’ Andreas heard himself say.
‘You have no idea who would be good for me and who wouldn’t!’ Elizabeth said fiercely, swinging round to face him. ‘How dare you sit there and dictate my life?’
‘You belong to me!’
She gave a wild, disbelieving, incredulous screech of laughter. ‘I can’t believe you just said that! Who do you think you are?’
‘I…’ Andreas ran his fingers through his hair. He wanted to pull her to him and never let her go. When he thought of her with another man, when he even considered the possibility that he had suffered in comparison to someone else—someone ridiculous who had taken her out and treated her to a glass of water—he saw red. ‘I…’
The anger seeped out of Elizabeth, replaced by genuine confusion. She didn’t know where he was going or what he was trying to say.
‘I haven’t been honest with you or with myself,’ Andreas muttered thickly. ‘Can you blame me? How was I supposed to know that falling in love was like a punch in the gut?’
‘Falling in love?’ Elizabeth asked, all at sea.
‘I’ve dated a lot of women, and I really thought I knew what I wanted from life.’
‘Which was what?’ Elizabeth didn’t want to say too much just in case she ruined the momentum, which had her pulses racing and her heart pounding, but the thirst for detail was too much to resist.
‘Work, first and foremost,’ Andreas said in a thoughtful voice, because the fact that work had been pushed into a poor second place was still astounding. ‘Like I once told you, I always knew where I came from, and always knew that what I got out of life had to be independent of what James was more than happy to provide. Women were an enjoyable sideline, a bonus that came with the accumulation of power and money.’
‘Do you really think that that’s all they would have been attracted to?’
Andreas shrugged. ‘I never questioned it. Until you came along and threw the whole neat equation into holy disarray.’
Elizabeth smiled. An ability to throw things into disarray now seemed the most wonderful ability in the world.
‘I thought that it was just the novelty of having a relationship with a real woman that was the attraction. I thought that it would pass in time, just like all the rest. But then I found myself asking you to move in with me. It was the first time I had ever asked anything like that of any woman.’ He laughed and stared broodingly off into the distance, before refocusing on her upturned face. ‘When you turned me down…’
‘I didn’t want to be your mistress, and I was smarting from thinking that Amanda…’
‘I’m sure she’ll make a fine partner for some guy out there, but for me she was less than nothing. In fact, the minute you came along, I couldn’t even remember what the point of any other woman could be. It just took me a long time to work that out.’
Elizabeth’s face was glowing. She was finally understanding the depth of emotion it must have taken for him to ask her to move in with him, all the more powerful because he would not have recognised its source at the time.
‘When James told me about that party, hell, I didn’t want to come but I couldn’t help myself. I had to com
e. I realised that I had to do something to get you back. Anything. But I wouldn’t rush you. Then Mr Water Boy came along. James hinted that he might have been after your money. I didn’t believe him, but I wasn’t going to pass up a golden opportunity to come down here…to see you again. Now you know why I’m insane with jealousy.’
Elizabeth smiled a broad, goofy smile. ‘I never thought I’d hear you say something like that.’
‘Frankly, neither did I. Just goes to show that, when you think you’ve got life mapped out, you turn your back and the directions have all changed.’ He rested his stunning eyes on her shining face and finally succumbed to the temptation to reach out and caress her satin-smooth cheek. ‘I don’t want to ask you to live with me. I want you to marry me. That’s the only way I won’t go crazy thinking that I might lose you. But there’s one little condition.’
Elizabeth tensed, but he smiled at her, and in that smile she could see love and tenderness and an awkward vulnerability that stole all his natural arrogance.
‘You have to tell me that you love me as much I love you.’
‘You know I do.’ She leaned across the space dividing them, and as his firm mouth touched hers she gave a little whimper of pure ecstasy.
‘Good,’ Andreas growled, pulling her towards him. ‘I’ve never made love in a lay by off a country lane in my car, but I think I’m about to change that…’
Against his mouth, Elizabeth giggled, and gasped as his hand made its way under her clothes to find her burning skin underneath. ‘What,’ she asked breathlessly, ‘do you think James is going to make of this?’
‘I think,’ Andreas replied, while still capable of coherent speech, ‘that the wily old fox will think that his best-laid plans have gone exactly as he hoped.’
* * * * *
ISBN: 9781459227217
Copyright © 2010 by Cathy Williams
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