by Kim Lawrence
Sophie, who had ducked under the barrier the stonemasons connected their safety harnesses to while he was speaking, was already on the ladder. ‘All right, give me a chance!’
She slung the comment over her shoulder as she skipped her way casually down with, it seemed to a watching Marco, not a care in the world.
When he got hold of her he would…well, his intention was to throttle her, but his intentions were sometimes hard to follow through with this woman. Actually, he was not totally sure what he would do when he got his hands on her, as he knew by now that she could throw him wildly off course with a flippant comment or an inappropriate giggle.
When her feet touched the ground he was able to expel the breath trapped in his lungs on one sibilant sigh of relief. He released the icy anxiety in the same breath and fury flamed to fill the vacuum.
On the ground Sophie turned her head; the half-formed shy smile that tugged at the corners of her mouth faded abruptly as she encountered the icy glitter in his eyes.
She’d made a major miscalculation in assuming that he was irritated, arriving home to find no electricity and organised chaos, because it wasn’t irritation he saw stamped on his lean features—it was anger.
It seemed like a bit of an overreaction, though she could see that the casual observer might not get the organised part of the chaos unless they had it explained. Plus, Marco wasn’t a casual observer; he was very attached to his ancestral home and very protective.
She could feel the waves of hostility rolling off him; he’d seen the mess and he thought she was wrecking his home. Given her talent for saying the wrong thing around him she needed to choose her words with care.
Playing for time, Sophie bent forward and shook the dust out of her hair before straightening up and beginning to bang the dust from her hands on the seat of her jeans.
She might not have been quite thorough had she known that the action had drawn his attention to the curve of her bottom.
She turned slowly around and flashed an appeasing smile which abruptly lost focus.
He was standing a lot closer than she had anticipated, close enough for her to see the dark shadow on his jaw. Despite the hour he looked incredible.
Her eyes drifted over the angles of his face; drawn to the sensuous curve of his mouth, she felt something twist hard in her stomach and thought, Stop staring like you’ve never seen a man before.
She cleared her throat and managed a weak version of her smile. ‘I know it looks bad.’
Sophie’s glance moved around the ballroom. Actually, if you discounted the dust sheets, tools and equipment, it was an improvement on the retro sixties look it had been decorated in.
‘And if I’d let them have their way and sandblast everything in sight we’d be finished,’ she admitted.
The macho team who had arrived had laid down their blasting equipment only when they had realised she wasn’t going to be pressured. It would have been quicker but she had not been willing to risk the fabric of the building to save time.
He couldn’t believe she was acting as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. If he hadn’t come when he had, that neck of hers might be lying in a pool of blood… His big hands curled into fists at his sides as he pushed away the graphic images forming in his head.
His stormy silence did not bode well. And she wished that emerald gaze would stop boring into her. She resisted the impulse to smooth her hair again—like it would make any difference—and lifted her chin, smiled pleasantly even though he was a rude rat, and was glad she did not need his admiration to get a good night’s sleep. Then again, she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in quite a while, but there was absolutely no connection between her insomnia and her difficult client.
‘The fact is…you’ve got to crack a few eggs to make an omelette.’ She made a very good omelette—not as good as mum’s, but… She swallowed but before she could recognise the knot in her chest as homesickness, Marco’s deep scathing voice jolted her back to the here and now.
‘Omelettes!’ His voice was shaking with suppressed emotion. ‘I do not wish to talk about eggs!’
‘Look, calm down—there’s no need to be cranky.’
The growling noise that issued from his clenched lips suggested her advice had fallen on deaf ears. Unable to tear her eyes from the nerve that was clenching in his lean cheek she reached for one of the spare flashlights that were stacked on an upturned box.
Marco was trying, very hard, to calm himself. He was aware that he was overreacting, but she had looked so small and delicate, and thoughts of what might have happened to her were overwhelming him. He was also exhausted by constantly fighting the almost uncontrollable urge to take her in his arms.
Sophie held the flashlight out to him with a slightly shaking hand. Was she about to be fired?
He narrowed his eyes and dragged a hand through his dark hair mussing it up so that it stood up spikily on top.
The combustible quality she had always sensed was there under his urbane facade was no longer hidden.
‘Look, it’s not as bad as it looks. All you need is a little imagination, Mr Speranza, and you’ll see…’
His nostrils flared as he sucked in an outraged breath. ‘I do not lack imagination.’ His imagination was still providing an image of her broken body lying still on the marble floor. ‘And do not call me Mr Speranza!’ he blasted. With that explosion, his self-control snapped. ‘What did you think you were doing? Have you never heard of health and safety regulations? Of common sense?’
Sophie’s glance slid to the scaffold. ‘Oh, you mean the tower? Oh, I’ve got a great head for heights!’ As he continued to glower, she added hastily, ‘But I won’t break any regs next time, if it bothers you. I’ll wait until there is someone else around and use the harness.’
‘There won’t be a next time.’
The remaining colour left Sophie’s face. Her confidence had grown but not to the point where she could consider this possibility of losing her job with anything but total horror. ‘Are you sacking me?’
‘I should never have given you the contract to begin with.’
Marco watched her bite her quivering lip and fought the compelling urge to wrap her in his arms and tell her he was sorry… What was happening to him? His whole body seemed to be shaking! She was driving him to distraction. He had to end this before his irrational, apparently uncontrollable, emotions drove him to do or say something seriously stupid.
‘This is not the time to discuss the situation. It’s late, and we both need to sleep.’ It was not the only thing he needed and the constant ache of frustration was driving him slowly out of his mind.
Sophie gave a bitter laugh. ‘You think I’m going to sleep knowing you’re going to sack me?’
‘Do not,’ he gritted, ‘put words into my mouth.’
She felt a surge of relief. ‘Then you’re not…’ She stopped as he loosed a sigh of irritation between clenched teeth. ‘You’re right.’
Maybe, she thought, this was sleep deprivation. With luck he would be more reasonable in the morning. ‘This isn’t the time…’
It wasn’t the time and it never would be the time because he was too big, too male and, damn it, too everything…! And she was so tired and frustrated that she was having serious problems with processing what he was saying. As for reading between the lines…she’d given up. The man was just too confusing, complex and unreasonable.
And her dreams… A person could not feel responsible for their subconscious but she felt irrationally guilty and also slightly panicky at the mere possibility of him suspecting the things she dreamt about him.
He won’t guess unless you tell him, Sophie. And to reveal her dreams would be a quick route to not only humiliating herself but losing her job for sure. And she was becoming increasingly convinced that he was just looking for an excuse to get rid of her, and that hurt because she was knocking herself out to impress him.
She lifted a hand to her spinning head and thought,
Why else does he keep appearing at such unexpected times unless it was to catch her out?
She lowered her eyes and mumbled, ‘I’m tired.’
‘Why do you push yourself so hard?’ he asked, looking accusingly at the dark smudges under her eyes.
‘Not just me—the men have been incredible. They’ve done a marvellous job, haven’t they?’ She stopped, closed her eyes and thought, No, I can’t do this—I have to know.
She met his eyes squarely. ‘Look, you can tell me, I’m not going to break down or cry on you. Did you come here tonight to sack me?’ Her glance slid to his mouth and her hands clenched at her sides.
The lines of colour etched along the crests of his chiselled cheekbones deepened as he threw up his hands in a gesture of frustrated incredulity.
Like his body language, his accent too was more noticeably Latin as he pinned her with a glittering green glare and rasped in throaty outrage, ‘Sack you? I came here tonight because I would like to…’ His eyes settled on her mouth and he thought, Kiss you.
His jaw clenched as he battled against the impulse to follow through with the thought. This is not, he reminded himself yet again, what you came here for, Marco.
Wasn’t it?
Isn’t this exactly what you wanted?
Marco dragged a hand through his hair. He had always felt contemptuous of people who employed self-deception, and it was unpleasant to recognise suddenly that he’d been guilty of that very crime.
Five minutes in it had been obvious that despite her relative inexperience Sophie was more than capable of working without supervision; she knew exactly what she was doing, yet he had spent the past two weeks using the pretext of concerned employer to check up on her, phoning because he liked to hear her voice.
He took a deep breath; this had to stop. He was distracted and it was affecting his work—tonight’s successful business deal should have been clinched last night.
The choice was clear; he had faced similar choices before. He had weighed the advantages of having sex with a woman he was attracted to and either he’d followed through or walked away.
This was not rocket science.
For guidance he used a few simple rules, the most important being to avoid anything that pointed in the direction of emotional fireworks, and he had become quite good at spotting women who could not separate emotion from sex.
Nothing had changed; he had weighed the pros and cons in this case. In fact, he had actually weighed them several times but each time the result was the same: becoming involved with Sophie Balfour at a sexual level was a non-starter.
And yet here he was.
‘What?’ she asked, folding her arms across her chest and angling a cool, clear look of defiance at his face. ‘Why are you staring at me like that?’ A shiver moved through her body as he carried on staring. ‘What do you want to do?’
A number of replies to this question crossed Marco’s mind. He voiced none but that didn’t stop his body reacting to the images in his head with all the restraint of an adolescent boy in the grip of hormone overload.
Maybe he should tell her—then she’d run, which would solve his problem. Or maybe she wouldn’t… The chemistry was not, he was sure, one-sided.
‘Well, if you do want to sack me you’ll have to say it because I’m not walking.’
He ground his teeth. Why did this woman feel the need to constantly challenge him? She was incapable of compromise; she was pig-headed… As he opened his mouth to inform her that, although not fired, she was infuriating, there was a crunching sound. A small piece of debris from the platform above, dislodged by Sophie’s speedy departure, hit the ground almost at his feet. The plaster almost immediately disintegrated, spraying him liberally with powdery residue.
Sophie stepped forward and began to pat ineffectually at the front of his jacket, her efforts succeeded in grinding the dust into the expensive fabric and making her painfully aware of the hardness of his lean body; his torso had as much give as a rock face.
She took a step back, not looking at him. ‘Sorry.’ She was guiltily aware that she had continued to pat long after it became clear her efforts were not improving matters.
She was trying not to think about the addictive quality of the stolen moments of physical contact—my God, how pathetic does that make me—when he caught her wrist. Turning it over he looked at her dusty palm, displaying what seemed to her a bizarre fascination with her fingers and her unpolished, neatly trimmed nails.
I’m like my manicure, she thought, not decorative but suitable to purpose, and practical. She had often told herself that she much preferred to be useful rather than decorative and in this moment she recognised what a total sham that was!
Breathing hard, Sophie finally looked up from the brown fingers curled around her narrow bones to his face. She watched the emotions flicker across his dark face, and recalled an article she had read during her research that had said never play poker with Marco Speranza. The man has no emotions to hide; he is cold ice.
Well, the ice seemed very close to melting.
CHAPTER TEN
SHE had never imagined that it was possible to literally ache for someone’s touch. Even when they clashed—actually collided—it seemed as if there was a connection there. Why wouldn’t he stop looking at her? Did he feel something too? Was there something more to this than she’d thought?
‘No! It’s just physical.’ It’s only sex and it will go away when he does, which hopefully will be soon.
She cut short the inner dialogue because he was looking at her strangely.
‘What is just physical?’
She froze, her eyes widening in horror. Oh, my God. I said it out loud!
His eyes narrowed and his expression became suspicious. Sophie’s heart sank to somewhere below her knees. This is what you get when you let your imagination run away with you.
‘You are injured?’
She expelled a shaky relieved sigh. ‘No, I’m fine.’ As fine as someone who is in danger of getting fantasy and reality horribly confused can be.
‘The work the stonemasons do…it’s incredibly physical. They’re real craftsmen you know,’ she babbled nervously, because of the way he was staring at her…hungrily? No, surely that was her imagination. ‘I couldn’t sleep…too much caffeine.’ Too much thinking about the meaning of life and the fact it was possible she could die a virgin, which up until recently had not seemed such a terrible thing. ‘And the scaffold will be down tomorrow, so tonight was my last opportunity—’
‘To put yourself in danger?’
Sophie winced at the corrosive sarcasm in his voice. ‘To see the relief work up close—’
‘You were utterly reckless!’
The accusation made Sophie’s jaw drop; if he’d accused her of being cautious or careful or even boring she could have seen where he was coming from, but reckless!
‘Me?’ The image of herself as some sort of wild child made Sophie smile.
The smile made his fragile control snap. ‘You find this funny?’ he thundered, making her jump. ‘If I had not come when I did you could have…’
Too angry at being spoken to as if she was a naughty child, Sophie failed to notice the dramatic pallor that had robbed his vibrant skin of colour.
‘Why did you come?’ she interrupted, folding her arms across her chest and aiming a look of simmering dislike at his face.
‘I’m here…’ He stopped and dragged a hand through his dark hair. ‘I was working late.’
‘And it seemed a good idea to drive out here at, what, two in the morning…?’ She raised her brows and dug her hands in the pockets of her jeans. ‘Oh, sure, that sounds really likely.’
He didn’t even bother denying it and the tacit admission that he was checking up on her, that she didn’t have his trust, hurt her on a level that was personal, not professional.
‘You obviously don’t trust me.’
Marco, who had trust issues of his own—could he trust his control to with
stand the overwhelming desire to silence her by kissing those tormenting lips?—remained silent. To bring his mouth down…to taste…
‘At least you’ve got the grace to look guilty.’
‘I am not guilty! And I do not need to explain myself to—’
‘A mere employee,’ she cut in, with a laugh that hid another quite irrational stab of hurt. ‘Don’t worry, I’m in no danger of forgetting my position.’ But she was, that was the problem.
‘Just in danger of breaking your neck.’
Exasperated by his apparent fixation and exhausted by the constant effort of trying to behave normally around him, she lashed out.
‘You want me to fail! You don’t like me!’ In the act of pacing like a caged tiger in the opposite direction he stopped dead and spun back.
And small wonder! The mortified colour flew to her cheeks. ‘Not that you have to like me,’ she inserted quickly. ‘But,’ she mused, ‘most people do.’
‘I’m sure they do,’ he said, thinking of the faceless men who had seen through her disguise, men who had been tempted by her soft feminine curves and lush lips. He pressed his fingers to the pounding in his temples and continued to pace.
Sophie read scepticism in his taut response and snapped, ‘They do—I’m nice Sophie.’ A bitter note entered her voice as she added sarcastically, ‘I’m helpful Sophie, and I never cause a scene, or disagree or say no, even if I don’t particularly—’ She stopped as she reached mid-tirade and at the shrill limit of her vocal range, a look of horror spreading across her face.
‘So you say, yet you appear to have acquired the knack of scene making very easily. And, no, I don’t like you—you make my life…’ The blue iridescent sheen of unshed tears halted his outpouring and filled him with a sudden and urgent need to gather her in his arms.
Refusing to recognise the emotion swelling in his chest as tenderness he inhaled deeply and, pulling his crumpled tie from his pocket, began to loop it around his throat, in a slightly belated attempt to keep things on a business footing.
