by Kim Lawrence
Nik smiled. The quiver he’d felt run through her body as he’d kissed her reminded him of just how receptive she’d been that night...how giving she’d been. And he’d taken... He countered the irrational slug of guilt with a reminder that she was the one who had taken the initiative that night, she’d made all the running and she hadn’t acted like a woman who would take no for an answer.
His smile, the glimmer of dark danger glittering deep in his eyes, elicited an involuntary spasm of excitement in her belly that made Chloe feel ashamed.
‘You look well.’ She looked incredible, though up close there was less of the outdoorsy golden glow he remembered. Her skin was creamy, the faint touch of colour in her cheeks highlighting the smooth contours, the freckles along her cheekbones paler too, but she was, if anything, even more delicious than he remembered.
‘Thank you, and how are you—sorry, Nik, wasn’t it?’
The composed words aimed somewhere close to his left ear were prim, but the message shining in her deep cobalt-blue eyes as they glittered up at him was neither prim nor polite.
They said quite clearly, Go to hell!
Her reaction threw him off his stride, in the same way he realised he’d have been thrown if he’d reread a favourite book and found a main character had suddenly been given a different personality.
Except the woman in his dreams had never had a personality beyond being warm, giving, passionate and available when he had needed her, and he had not been curious about what lay beyond those qualities.
Realising that there was a beyond came with a sense of shock as Nik struggled to consider her negative reaction to him dispassionately, but got sidetracked by his own reaction to her.
The problem being there was very little room left for dispassion after the explosive blast of primal desire that obliterated everything else when he looked at her. It was like walking...no, running full pelt into a ten-foot wall of lust.
The time it took his stupefied brain to push past this fresh blast of raw hunger was only moments but it felt longer, and the mere fact that he had to make the effort deepened the frown lines in Nik’s broad forehead.
In his previous life, he had cultivated dispassion until it required no effort, and it was second nature. He’d seen men and women in his old line of work who hadn’t managed to do that, and the personal toll it had taken on them had not been good to see. You needed to be able to keep an emotional distance.
He had witnessed acts of bravery and self-sacrifice that were humbling, but for every one of those inspiring acts there were a hundred acts and images of suffering and inhumanity. You carried those nightmare images around with you and they ate you from the inside.
The sheer absurdity of comparing a war zone to a dinner party where people were toting glasses of wine instead of automatic weapons almost dredged up a smile. Almost.
CHAPTER THREE
‘I’M—’
‘With Lucy Cavendish...’ Chloe paused, head tilted in challenge, to let the reminder sink in and had the satisfaction of seeing an expression of shock chase across his handsome face.
‘Lucy...hell, I forgot about her!’ A quick glance located the model, who was deep in conversation with another guest. Nik dragged a hand across his hair-roughened jaw in annoyance; he must have left her standing there looking like... He gritted out a curse. ‘I’m never going to hear the end of this.’
The wrathful, choking gasp of sheer disbelief that escaped Chloe’s lips drew his attention back to her face.
If there had been even the faintest suggestion of guilt in his reaction, she thought it would have gone some way to redeeming him...actually, no, it wouldn’t!
Wanting to make excuses for him made her even angrier—as if there could be any excuse for a man who arrived with one woman and then came on to another with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer!
It made her wonder whose bed he had walked straight into after being in hers.
There had been a time when the thought would have hurt...now it simply made her stomach quiver queasily.
‘It’s so inconsiderate of a woman to expect you to remember that you came with her.’ She produced a saccharine-sweet sympathetic smile, waiting until he frowned slightly in response to her comment before slinging out sarcastically, ‘I suppose she even expects you to be there when she wakes up in the morning.’
The words hung there, every syllable oozing with exactly the sort of subtext Chloe had wanted to avoid. She sounded just like what she hated most: a victim.
Someone to pity.
Her narrow-eyed glare dared him to show it, but, although her comment had surprised a flicker of reaction, it was something else she saw move at the backs of his eyes. Fine, she could deal with something else, actually anything else, but pity.
‘You were asleep.’ This was the reason he avoided one-night stands; there was the potential for the stranger you went to bed with assuming that one night of sex connected you in some deep and meaningful way.
‘I’m not talking about me.’ She lifted her feathery brows in an attitude of mild surprise that he should think otherwise, then, willing herself not to blush, she pronounced bluntly, ‘We had sex but we were not in a relationship. Although it would have been useful if you had woken me as I had somewhere I needed to be.’ She wrinkled her brow, giving the impression she was trying to recall the sequence of events—events that couldn’t have been more indelibly imprinted on her had someone branded them into her soul. ‘I’m pretty sure I was late.’ In her head she clutched the invisible award to her chest as a voice pronounced, And the award for most convincing liar goes to... Chloe Summerville!
The dream had once more become a nightmare before he’d ever reached the moment where he’d made the choice to leave her sleeping, not that waking her had ever really been an option. Good manners versus getting to his dying father’s bedside after receiving the call about his stroke had been a no brainer.
And yes, he’d been relieved not to have to speak to her again.
Relieved to avoid the potential morning-after awkwardness and recriminations. It hadn’t been his first one-night stand, but those other encounters had all been with fellow journalists, and there had been some mutual respect on a professional level between him and the smart, independent women who had shared his bunk. There had been no need to explain the desire he had felt to escape the sights and sounds of war for a few hours and let passion drown it all out. The connections had been brief, pleasurable, but nothing deeper remained.
He wouldn’t have cared if any of them had forgotten his name, or implied that the memory they’d walked away with after sleeping with him was that they’d had somewhere else to be but had overslept! His ego took a few startled seconds to recover from the blow while recognising the irrationality of his reaction. Chloe Summerville’s cool attitude was exactly what he looked for in women he gravitated towards. Women who had a male approach to sex; women who did not expect or even welcome sentiment in their liaisons, but enjoyed sex in an uncluttered and simple way.
‘Sorry, I had someplace I needed to be too...but unlike you I wasn’t too late.’
His father’s prognosis had been grim. The doctors had been all for calling time and letting nature take its inevitable and cruel course, but his mother had insisted they try a third lot of clot-busting drugs. When Nik had walked into the room, his father had been sitting up with nothing but a slight hesitation in his speech to show he’d even had a stroke and people had been talking about miracles.
‘Well, it’s...nice to see you again, lovely to catch up...’ Chloe said absently, adopting the tone you used when you bumped into someone whose name you kept forgetting. ‘But if you’ll excuse me, tonight is about work and I need to circulate.’ Giving her best impression of a woman with her priorities firmly sorted, she flashed him a generic smile and turned back towards where Spiros stood talking to a small group of guests.
Even if he’d taken everything else out of the equation the dismissal would have awoken his
interest, if only for the fact that it was new territory for Nik. Women did not usually walk away from him. His curiosity overcame his irritation... So, all right, it was something a lot stronger than irritation, but he didn’t need to waste energy trying to identify it as it morphed seamlessly into the much easier to deal with lust and his eyes became riveted on her long, sinuous curves and the gentle sway of her hips.
If sleeping with her again was the way to finally lay his nightmares to rest, great. If not, the trying was going to be fun. Not trying at all had stopped being a possibility the second he’d set eyes on her.
The frustration raging through his veins made it hard for him to formulate a plan of action, as there had been no plan required in his dreams. On a conservative estimate he’d been making love to Chloe every other night for the past year...except this wasn’t a dream, it—she—was the real deal! And Chloe Summerville was more in every way than the woman he remembered. A halfwit could have worked that out in thirty seconds.
And Nik was accounted to be quite intelligent.
She had been pulled into a group several feet away from where he stood alone, and he watched like a hawk as she lowered her lashes over a smile in response to something Spiros had said. In profile he could see the little quiver of the fine muscles in her throat and along the delicate line of her jaw, and he wondered why he found it so fascinating.
Was he finally losing his mind?
* * *
Chloe’s legs were still shaking but, as there was no longer any imminent possibility they would give out beneath her, she let go of the image of herself lying on the floor and people staring down at her. Sad, they’d say, she used to be able to stand on her own two feet... She suddenly realised a moment too late to avoid awkwardness that the extended silence was one she was meant to fill. Chloe gave an apologetic smile.
‘Sorry. I wasn’t following; I was just trying to remember if I put an aspirin in my bag.’ She delved into the limited depths of her bag, her hair falling in a concealing curtain around her face.
Still she couldn’t quite escape the conversation replaying in her head... When he had asked her how long it had been since they’d met, she’d had a nasty shock. Up to that point she hadn’t known that she knew the answer even to the day and hour, but she clearly did... God, but it was terminally depressing.
What, she asked herself, had she ever seen in him?
Beyond of course the face, the body, the high-voltage charge of raw, scalp-tingling sensuality he had oozed... Beyond that, nothing at all!
Other than the dark brooding aura tinged with danger and a touch of vulnerability.
Well, he wasn’t vulnerable now and she was no longer the romantic little fool she had been, but, considering her reaction to Nik just now, it was lucky that she had decided celibacy was the way to go... Not for ever—just short term. Who knew what the future held?
But one of the advantages of celibacy was that she could stand here now and look at this incredibly...really incredibly sexy man, and remember, in a way that sort of felt as if it had happened to someone else, how it had felt to have his warm, no, hot flesh slide over hers and it wasn’t a problem.
God, you are such a liar, Chloe Summerville.
In fact, if she had truly believed she was cut out for celibacy long term, it would have simplified life in general, she concluded, studiedly ignoring the scornful voice in her head.
‘You have a headache?’ a woman whose name Chloe couldn’t recall, despite being normally good about that sort of thing, asked.
‘It’s not that bad.’
Then Nik touched her arm. She knew it was him without even looking at his long fingers brown against her skin, and suddenly it was extremely bad. The thump, thump in her temples was keeping time with her heartbeat as Chloe felt a primitive thrill run along her nerve endings. Deeply ashamed, she waited for the fluttering inside her to subside and, under cover of looking in her bag again, calmed her breathing.
‘Lost something?’ he asked.
‘Just an aspirin; I’m getting a headache.’ And I’m looking at it. But she wasn’t. She looked everywhere but at the tall dynamic figure towering over her, which was not something that happened often when you were five feet ten.
Eyes she had control over, but not her thoughts that drifted back to the moment she had first seen him, as if she were stuck in some sort of mind-destroying time loop. The last thing she had anticipated when they had crowded into the almost empty bar was that she would leave with a total stranger. She’d never been a person who was led by her hormones and, while she’d had any number of male friends, she’d not had a lover.
She had dated, obviously, but things had usually ended in an it’s me not you sort of way. And she had started to think it was—that she was simply one of those women who weren’t highly sexed.
Until that night.
Whatever had been lying dormant within her had surfaced with a vengeance!
‘Oh, Chloe, have you met Olivia?’ Spiros asked, oblivious to any atmosphere, drawing a striking middle-aged woman into the group.
Chloe shook her head, welcoming the opportunity to turn her back on the biggest mistake of her life to this point.
‘Olivia, this is the young woman I was telling you about. Olivia was very interested when I told her about your project; her husband, who isn’t here tonight, is a plastic surgeon.’
Chloe beamed. ‘That’s why you look familiar!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve seen the photo of you that your husband has on his desk at work.’
Listening to her, Nik twisted his lips in a cynical smile. The plastic surgeon must be very good at his job because you really couldn’t tell Chloe had had any work done at all. Whatever it had been, he decided, watching her expressive face as she chatted with animation to the older woman, it hadn’t been Botox.
Though now he thought about it there were changes, though not those he associated with surgical intervention. Some of the youthful softness he remembered in her face had gone, had become more refined, revealing a breathtaking bone structure. As he continued to study her the therapeutic benefits having sex with her might bring to him slid to the back of his mind, leaving having sex with her as soon as possible just because he wanted to very much in the forefront.
‘So sorry,’ he interjected.
This time with the touch of his cool hand on her wrist Chloe couldn’t stop herself turning towards him; the intention was defensive, the result was not!
He was standing very close to her and she stiffened, her chest lifting as she took a deep breath and held it while, inside her ribcage, her heart rate climbed like that of an athlete waiting for the starter’s pistol.
Fighting the impulse to cover her mouth with her hand as his eyes drifted to her lips and stayed there, she waited until he had stepped back far enough for her to escape the heat from his body to release the air trapped in her lungs, but unfortunately his aura of sexuality had a wider radius.
‘You don’t mind if I steal Chloe, do you?’ he asked, taking her elbow. To an observer his attitude as much as his body language was suggestive of a long and intimate relationship with her.
The suggestion might have drawn a smile from her if her facial muscles were not locked in what she sincerely hoped was an expression of indifference. What they had shared had been little more than a collision! Granted, an extremely intimate collision... As a series of freeze-frame images flashed through her head they had an almost out-of-body quality to them.
She had fallen asleep in his arms, and as she’d drifted off she’d found herself thinking that she had never felt more comfortable with anyone in her life.
Comfortable was something she didn’t feel right now as he half dragged her across the room; if she could, she would happily have crawled out of her skin. But pulling away would have made her look even more conspicuous.
He came to a halt in one of the deep window embrasures where the half-drawn curtains gave it an element of privacy that Chloe could have done without.
She immediately pulled away, retreating as far as physically possible. He countered her action by raising one sardonic brow.
Chloe embraced the anger that prickled through her with something approaching relief, while simultaneously ignoring the worrying excitement that popped like champagne bubbles in her bloodstream, making her feel light-headed, which probably made the little head toss with attitude she gave a mistake, but she did it anyway.
‘What the hell do you think you are you doing?’ she muttered under her breath.
The silky fair hair that streamed down her slender back settled into attractive waves around her face. As he watched the process he suddenly remembered it had taken a long time to gather it all up in his hand and each time his fingers had brushed her skin she had shivered.
Good question, Nik. What the hell was he doing?
He said the first thing that came into his head. ‘So you’re a royal of where?’
‘Do you mind? I was having an important conversation back there!’
He shrugged his magnificent shoulders. ‘So have a conversation with me.’ So I can look at you. ‘And if by important you mean you were about to get a donation for whatever charity it is... I’ll double it,’ he said casually.
She expelled a hissing sigh. ‘Am I meant to be impressed by your altruism, seeing as you don’t even know what the money is for?’
‘Does it matter?’
She gritted her teeth and fought the impulse to slap him—anything that would break through his armour of sheer selfishness.
‘Clearly not to you!’ she countered contemptuously.
‘You still haven’t told me...’
‘Told you what?’
‘Royal how?’
She gave a growling sound of aggravation through her clenched teeth. ‘My family,’ she said finally in a bored, reading-the-telephone-directory voice, ‘lives on East Vela; it’s an island.’ Most people didn’t have a clue where it was, though most had watched the recent royal wedding on the television.
