No, we’re not, Sara thought fiercely. We are not going to run around in circles, getting nowhere. I am not going to abort my plan and let you get away with using me. I won’t be hurt by you and allow myself to run away.
It was so tempting to ask him why, to ask him whether he had felt anything for her at all, that she had to lower her eyes and take a few deep, steadying breaths.
‘So we are. Silly, isn’t it? When there’s so much else to talk about.’
‘For instance?’
‘For instance I could tell you that you look good, that I’d forgotten just how good you look.’ She quietly closed her knife and fork, leaving her food unfinished, and met his eyes steadily.
‘What are you playing at?’ He pushed his plate away, deposited his napkin on it and sat back, staring at her, willing himself to get a grip, knowing that nothing was showing on his face but that his bloody nervous system was in a state of chaos.
‘I’m talking.’
‘Talking.’
‘That’s right. That’s why I got in touch with you. So that we could have a conversation, although…’
‘Although what…?’ he asked, his words dropping softly into the silence between them.
‘Although I can think of much more interesting things to do…’
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘OH, REALLY?’
‘Really. To be perfectly honest, I could have handled everything with my banker and the estate agents by phone or e-mail. There was no real need to travel down here to London, but…’ Those intent blue eyes could make a girl think she was drowning, Sara thought.
‘But you just couldn’t resist the desire to feast your eyes on my magnificent self.’
‘No, that isn’t all there is to it. And it’s rude to draw attention to yourself like that. Makes you sound egotistic. Which, of course, you are.’
James glanced away but she could see that he wanted to smile and that little glimpse of humour made her heart contract.
‘So I am rude, egotistic…I cannot imagine why you would make a trip to London to communicate with someone with those personality traits.’
‘I really did want to talk to you, James. I really did think that it would have been crazy to just cease communication completely when we’re going to inevitably keep bumping into one another. And you may be rude and egotistic but you’re also interesting and fairly amusing.’
‘Fairly amusing. Well, we’re stepping up the ladder of compliments. Now that you’ve had your way telling me what you think of me, I feel it’s only right that I tell you what I think of you…’
A little shiver of apprehension raced down her spine. She didn’t want him to tell her anything of the sort. She just didn’t need any more of his lies, any more pretence that he was interested enough in her to have formed opinions of her at all.
‘You look alarmed,’ he murmured, letting his eyes wander away from hers, to her mouth, to her breasts. ‘I think you’re immensely complex and a complete mystery. One minute you’re lecturing to me like a minister on a pulpit, the next minute you’re flirting with me and inviting me back into your bed. Now, that makes no sense, does it?’
‘Does it have to?’ Sara laughed and tossed her head. She had never tossed her head in her life before and was surprised that the gesture seemed to come so naturally. ‘Women are allowed to be unpredictable, aren’t they?’ She rested her head on her hand and gazed at him with a half-smile.
Unbelievably, she was enjoying this.
‘I thought men loved unpredictability in women. Besides, if I’m mysterious and complex, then I must also be unpredictable. They go hand in hand.’
‘Not all men love unpredictability.’ He didn’t. It appeared, though, that she was the exception because the way she was looking at him now was making his senses reel and it was all he could do to keep his hands in check.
‘You mean you don’t?’
‘I mean I should get the bill and…’
‘And…?’
She could sense the wary restlessness in him and on the spur of the moment she reached out her hand and covered his, very, very lightly and very, very briefly, just long enough to stroke the side of his thumb with her finger. Then her hand was back in place and burning. His power over her could threaten everything, but she wouldn’t let it.
‘You’re skating on thin ice, Sara.’ He raked his fingers through his hair, but his eyes never left her face, not for one single second.
‘Care to explain?’
‘What if I decide to take you up on your very generous offer? Are you really going to feel any differently about me if we sleep together again? And again after that? Am I not still going to be the big, bad wolf who should keep away from your door?’
‘It’s all a question of choices, isn’t it?’
‘Choices?’
‘I can choose to foresee the difficulties and walk away before they arise, or I can choose to run headlong into whatever lies ahead and realise that experience, whatever the outcome, counts for a lot.’ Too much talk and too much truth. She smiled seductively. Another little talent she didn’t know she possessed. Whatever this man brought out in her, he was unique. ‘I choose the latter.’
Who the hell was he to talk about skating on thin ice when he could barely think straight with those feline eyes looking at him?
The circular table separating them was small bordering on tiny and he had to fight the temptation to slouch slightly further down into his chair, just far enough so that he could insert his thigh underneath that very short, very sexy skirt of hers. Feel the softness of her crotch against the hardness of his knee. God, he wanted her.
‘I don’t think this is the place to have a prolonged conversation, though…’ She was unaware that the lowering of her eyelids and the flick of her tongue over her lips was as erotic as a striptease.
‘Where,’ he heard himself saying, ‘do you have in mind, in that case…?’
Sara shrugged and looked down as she casually traced the rim of her glass with one finger. ‘Any suggestions?’
Several, he knew he should say, and all involve two minutes on the end of a phone while you’re heading back up to Scotland and I’m here, working, going out with women I can predict and getting on with life before you came along and managed to clutter it up. He was as cynical as they came! Jaded from experience and permanently watchful of the dangers of losing his massive self-control.
He signalled to a waiter for the bill.
Sara could see the questions racing through that clever brain of his. But his questions didn’t matter. He was going to pay the bill, no dessert, no coffees, no chatting over liqueurs, and that could only mean one thing. He was going to come with her. She felt a kick of satisfaction and, hard on the heels of that, a rush of undiluted, naked longing.
This was going to be a learning curve for her, she thought a little wildly. She couldn’t go through life choosing men who thought nothing of pulling the rug out from under her feet. She would toughen up and if it was at his expense then that was just too bad. He deserved everything he got.
Knowing what she now knew, she should have been left cold by him, but the minute she had laid eyes on him she had felt her body begin to react, and as he paid the bill, ignoring her insistence on paying half, she felt the lick of excitement steadily getting stronger.
The silence between them was electric. As was the fact that he didn’t touch her. Once outside the restaurant, he shoved his hands in his pockets, only withdrawing one to hail a black cab. He leaned down, gave the driver an address in Chelsea, and once they were both inside he sprawled against his side of the car so that he could look at her.
‘So, are you going to tell me what brought about this change of heart?’
‘I already told you,’ Sara said, taking quick breaths, ‘I thought things over and, well…you were right. It’s crazy to go through life being affected by what Phillip did. We’re adults and we were…’ She sighed with remembered pleasure and that sigh had nothing to do
with revenge or bitterness.
‘Good together in bed? Fantastic, in fact?’
Sara raised her eyebrows in unexpected amusement. ‘I think I can hear your ego again.’
‘Tut, tut. Now, that’s not very nice considering you’re the seductress trying to woo me back between the sheets, is it?’ His deep, velvety voice caught her amusement and shared it. It gave her an uneasy premonition of how simple it would be to fall right back into the trap of opening up to him, because on a very basic level she just seemed to click with him.
‘I’ve never been called a seductress before.’ Uneasy premonitions didn’t have a part to play.
‘Mm. I can understand why. Brutal honesty isn’t usually the mark of the seductress.’
His voice was wickedly smooth and she dared to extend her hand so that it was resting lightly on his thigh.
‘Blame my job,’ Sara murmured, her pulses leaping at the casual physical contact. ‘Being brutally honest becomes a habit after a while. Does it scare you?’ She moved her hand fractionally higher and was almost disappointed when he covered it firmly with his own before she could take her explorations further.
‘Oh, I don’t scare easily. Not,’ he added in a drawl, ‘that you won’t have to use other feminine wiles to tempt me…’
‘Other feminine wiles such as what…?’ Was this really her talking? Flirting outrageously and loving every minute of it? Good lord.
His response to that was to remove his hand from where it had been covering hers. Sara thought that if she listened hard enough she might just be able to hear the wild beat of her heart and the leap of her pulses as she edged her hand higher until it lay over the hard rod of his erection, which she could feel throbbing beneath the fabric of his trousers.
He shifted slightly. ‘Now, if I’d had my driver I might just have asked you to take your technique a little further.’ He could almost smell the musky aroma of her excitement, filling his nostrils and making him want to unzip his trousers and push her hand harder against him.
‘But regrettably,’ he said roughly, ‘no driver and we’re just about here at my apartment.’ On cue, the taxi slowed down and Sara’s pulse rate returned to something approaching normality as she slipped out of the cab and watched with her arms folded across her as he paid the fare and then turned to look at her.
‘This time,’ he murmured, walking up to her and positioning himself directly in front of her with his legs slightly parted, ‘no turning back. If you think you’re going to suffer with agonies of conscience afterwards, or even before for that matter, then you can leave in the next cab. This isn’t going to be a one-night stand.’
‘You mean you want an affair.’
‘If you want to call it that.’
‘What else can we call it?’
‘We can call it whatever we want to,’ he informed her silkily, ‘after all, it’s just a matter of vocabulary. But we both know what we’re talking about.’
‘What about a relationship, then?’ Sara threw at him. She knew that he wouldn’t like the idea of that, for all his talk about it just being a matter of vocabulary. An affair was something frothy and light that dissolved in a puff of wind, but a relationship was something more than that and, considering that he had his own hidden agenda for sleeping with her, then going beyond a bit of froth would not be something he would even contemplate for a minute. Oh, no, that would be just a little too much like hard work for him.
‘I don’t have a problem with that,’ he surprised her by saying. In the dim pool of light reflected from the nearest street lamp, he could see her startled expression. She wasn’t interested in a relationship, he thought. Never mind what she said about moving away from her past, she was still as trapped in it as she ever was. He felt a sudden, searing determination to snap her out of it, focus her entirely on him, as a lover and as a man as well.
‘Feeling a little scared at the thought of getting to know me, Sara?’ he murmured mockingly and she tilted her chin up defensively.
‘Not at all,’ she lied.
‘Good, so shall we go up to my apartment? I don’t know about you, but it’s a little too chilly to stand out here debating points of detail.’
The building was severe and imposing from the outside. The white façade was broken by intricate black wrought-iron railings around the long windows, and apart from a few window-boxes there was a total absence of green. It was as different from his mansion in Scotland as it was possible to get. Somehow it summarised the life in London that had woven such a magical spell over her when she had left it behind, but which, now that she was in it once more even if only for a couple of days, was already beginning to impinge uncomfortably on her.
Two of the four-storeyed buildings had obviously been cleverly knocked into one so that the reception area was not a small hallway, leading up to a single staircase, but a large central area, impeccably tiled, and at one end there was a small walnut desk manned by a uniformed middle-aged man who half stood when James walked in.
‘I thought you’d given up the night shift,’ James said, grinning as he collected his mail.
‘I had, sir.’ The weathered face returned the grin. ‘But then I discovered that it beats being at home with the wife, the mother-in-law, the daughter and the little nipper. Soon as the mother-in-law goes back to Oz and Gary finishes the house repairs so that Ellie and little Tommy can move in, then I’ll take back up my day post. Be able to watch a little night-time telly in peace and quiet.’
‘And I guess you spend all day sleeping?’ James raised his eyebrows and tapped the wad of post against the open palm of one hand.
‘Not all, sir. There’s a limit to what the wife will tolerate.’
James was still grinning as the elevator door purred shut on them. ‘He’s an institution here,’ he explained with a devastating smile. ‘Been here as long as I have.’
‘Which is how long, exactly?’ Sara asked curiously.
‘Almost six years. Before that I had a mews house in Richmond but this is a helluva lot more convenient for central London.’
‘And no troublesome garden to take care of.’
‘And no troublesome garden to take care of,’ he agreed, standing back to allow her to exit first. ‘I presume that was your reason for an apartment as well?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘although with a child, a garden would have been ideal. But I just would never have had the time to look after it and it would have been too small in central London, anyway, to employ the use of a gardener.’
‘So you went from one extreme to the other.’
‘Simon adores it.’ She shrugged, watching him as he smoothly unlocked his door and pushed it open, automatically turning to deactivate his alarm.
‘And you?’
Sara pretended to ignore the question. It wasn’t difficult. He had switched on the light and she was quite literally speechless at what she saw. Acres of space. Acres of space for a London apartment at any rate. Shallow stairs led away from the door and down to a superb sunken sitting area which rose on one side to give an open view of yet another sitting area, less formal, with a television set at one end and alongside that a desk with a complex array of office equipment. On the other side, the sunken area led up to a spacious dining area and beyond that the kitchen, which was, unheard of in a London flat, large enough to house a kitchen table as well as all the usual culinary paraphernalia. A long counter, topped with black granite, separated the kitchen from the dining area, but aside from that one division the eye could travel the width of the room without being obstructed by any doors. And the gleaming wooden flooring emphasised the illusion of vast space.
Stretching behind were the doors that led to the bedrooms and bathrooms. It was elegant but understated, as only truly very expensive places were. The paintings on the walls were small, discreet and vaguely familiar.
‘And I thought that my apartment was luxurious,’ she commented drily, stepping tentatively down the stairs to the sitting area and looking a
round her slowly.
‘Something to drink?’ Which reminded her of the reason she was here in the first place, and an unexpected flutter of nerves rippled up to the surface.
‘Please.’
‘Coffee? Tea?’
‘A glass of wine, if you have it.’ She followed him up to the kitchen and perched awkwardly on one of the softly padded chairs by the table. ‘It’s an amazing place,’ she said, watching as he poured her a glass of wine and one for himself, before sitting opposite her at the table. Her eyes skittered away from the aggressive planes of his face and the only thing running through her head was the fact that she needed to keep talking. She was no longer the seductress out to even scores. She just felt like a nervous, timid young girl out on her first date with a man who was light-years ahead of her in the sophistication stakes.
‘How on earth did you find it? A place like this is like gold dust in London. You must have spent months, years searching.’
‘I own the building, actually.’ James watched the changing expressions on her face with amusement. ‘Or, rather, it’s been in the family for as long as I can remember. We used to own quite a bit more as a matter of fact but a lot’s been sold along the way to help cover the costs of running the estate in Scotland.’
‘Oh, indeed. Don’t we all have to flog a few of our London assets so that we can keep our country estates running?’
He grinned at the sarcasm, which Sara half wished he hadn’t done because she then became all too uncomfortably aware that, manipulator or not, the man had bags of charm, too much for his own good.
‘Where were you before you lived in London?’ she asked hurriedly.
‘Oh, a bit of here and a bit of there.’ Those amazing eyes! They would have held her captive if she wasn’t so intent on avoiding them. ‘Building up my businesses, handling my father’s investments. I liked the idea of being fairly rootless.’
‘I thought you still were…fairly rootless.’
‘I have this place,’ he made an expansive gesture to encompass the apartment, ‘and Scotland. I’m as rooted as it’s possible for any man to be.’
His Convenient Mistress Page 11
