by Kim Lawrence
‘What’s wrong is that Amber rang today. She mentioned that there is a job going at Purnells—they’re the biggest and most prestigious interior design firm in the country.’
‘The country being England.’
She assumed an expression of cheery brightness that gave no hint of the fact her heart was breaking.
Falling in love with Marco had been inevitable. She hadn’t even tried to fight it; instead she’d told herself that she could live in the here and now and leave later for another day.
Well, that other day had come and she was consumed by a bleak, black despair at the thought of never seeing him again.
‘Where else would I be looking for a job?’ Amber’s call had forced her hand. ‘I was wondering—it was Amber’s idea—if you’d mind if I gave your name as a reference. After all, I’ve got a lot to thank you for. Before this I’d never even have been considered for a job like yours. You’ve made my career.’ A few weeks ago this had been all she’d dreamed of; now the knowledge left her strangely flat. ‘Always supposing,’ she said, adding a downbeat note, ‘that I can repeat the formula with the next client…’
‘You plan to sleep with the next client?’
She recoiled as though he’d struck her.
She could think of very few things worse than getting yourself seduced by Marco Speranza and then compounding it by falling helplessly in love with the man. She stuck out her chin and said, ‘Isn’t that why you gave me the job?’
‘No, I gave you the job because I thought you had potential.’
Not fooled by his pleasantly conversational tone, Sophie read the inexplicable anger in his body language as he stalked towards the bureau. He picked up the notebook she had left lying there.
His glittering green gaze eyes remained on the smooth youthful freshness of Sophie’s face as he flicked the pages filled with her neat writing.
‘Have you put it in one of your lists—“get back home and find a lover,” or possibly lovers?’
As she contemplated a life of comparing every man with Marco and being inevitably disappointed, this angry charge struck her as particularly ironic.
What was he so mad about anyway? she wondered, directing a disgruntled scowl at Marco’s lean face.
‘And if I have?’ Her jaw fell as she watched Marco rip her notebook very neatly into four pieces before slinging them over his shoulder. ‘Try a little spontaneity,’ he advised. ‘I am bored with your lists.’
Sophie watched the pieces flutter to the ground and felt the heat climb into her cheeks. ‘And me too, no doubt. Well, tough!’ she yelled.
‘Tough?’ he echoed.
‘Yes, I’m a Balfour…’
Marco rolled his eyes and head back and muttered an imprecation in his native tongue. ‘Balfour…’ He lifted his head and gritted, ‘If I hear that name once more I swear…’
Eyes narrowed she cut across him. ‘A Balfour does not leave a job unfinished.’ She threw him a look of challenge.
‘Have you any idea how different you look from that day I found you asleep in my office?’
‘I had not slept for twenty-four—’
‘I’m not talking about the creases in your clothes. The fact is you are the sort of woman who will always look at her best without clothes.’
The matter-of-factly voiced aside drew a choked gasp from Sophie. ‘If that was meant to be a compliment…I know I’m not exactly model material—’
‘A fact,’ he cut back smoothly. ‘You fill out clothes very nicely, though obviously,’ he conceded, ‘you could never be a model.’
Rub salt in the wound, why don’t you? Sophie thought bitterly.
‘Because people would not look at the clothes you wear—they would be looking at your body…at least, men would be.’ He pinned her with an intense stare. ‘Don’t make any decisions about a job,’ he said abruptly. ‘Not until after the ball.’
‘But…’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘All right,’ she agreed. ‘It’s not as though I’ve long to wait.’
A week, to be precise.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE week passed and jobs were not mentioned.
Sophie shook out the dress that had arrived by courier the day before.
She didn’t know whether to bless Mia or curse her, but her sister had obviously picked up on her desperation in her last letter when she had admitted she didn’t have the faintest idea what to wear for the ball, where kitchen hiding was no option.
Mia, with typical thoughtful kindness, had used her magical skill with the needle to make Sophie a dress. And what a dress! Sophie thought, running a finger down the silk of the skirt.
It oozed old-Hollywood glamour; Ginger Rogers would have been happy to float around the dance floor in a dress like this. The bold dramatic red was a statement by itself. Add the suck-you-in, push-you-up bodice and the sexy swirly skirt, and it became a very loud statement!
The note Mia had sent with it said that from her letters she thought that this was the sort of thing Sophie should be wearing.
God knows what she wrote, although the postscript of you’ll knock his socks off in this might be a clue. It was possible she had mentioned Marco once or twice.
Leaving the dress, she went downstairs to make her last round of checks before she got dressed. As she whizzed at a trot past the ballroom, the orchestra were making discordant noises that Sophie sincerely hoped would be melodious later on.
Like her, they had to pull it all together in how many hours? She consulted the watch on her wrist and resisted the temptation to sit down and weep. Weeping would not make the team doing the lights in the garden willing to change the red bulbs she had just discovered they had wrapped around the trees beside the lake for a more tasteful white.
She was tactful and diplomatic with the lighting crew and left five minutes later confident that the lighting, at least, would be perfect—the rest, well, it was too late to worry about the rest.
She just hoped she could make it back to her room before another disaster occurred.
‘Where is Miss Balfour?’ The man supervising the men who were attaching arrangements of white flowers to the balustrade above the pool house turned at the sound of Marco’s voice.
Before the man could open his mouth he drawled, ‘No, don’t tell me, she’s just left?’
This had been his response the last six times he had made the same enquiry and Marco was growing increasingly irritated.
Anyone would think the woman was trying to avoid him.
‘She has not been here, sir, not since earlier,’ the other man said. ‘But I think that might be her over there.’ He nodded towards the expanse that had been a meadow until it had been transformed back into the south lawn by a team of gardeners.
Marco looked and, as he did so, noticed that the six men up ladders were staring in the same direction, staring at a running figure dressed in a T-shirt and shorts.
While he understood why they were staring—the men were only human and the T-shirt was tight—it did not improve his mood.
He caught up with Sophie before she reached the terrace.
‘Oh, hello…’ Sophie stopped at the sound of her name. Hands on her hips she waited for him to catch her up; her breathlessness was only partly associated with her sprint from the pool house.
Pretending an objectivity she was about a million miles from feeling, she looked Marco up and down. When she lingered too long and felt her objectivity slipping she lifted her face to his and observed with a reproachful scowl, ‘You’re not dressed.’
Marco’s gaze travelled up from her bare toes; the pink polish on her toenails was new, but the smooth firm creamy skin of her shapely calves and firm thighs was not. Her displaying them, however, was.
Her skin never failed to amaze and arouse him; it was satiny, smooth and soft.
‘That has never been a problem for you before,’ Marco observed with an earthy grin. ‘And you are not dressed either. I like the shorts.’
He
subjected her shapely curves to a narrow-eyed scrutiny and asked, not because he had any doubts but because he liked to see her blush, ‘Are you actually wearing any underclothes?’
She blushed.
‘While I have no objections, you are likely to cause an industrial accident.’
‘Me?’ She shook her head. ‘Why?’
He studied her puzzled face, a smile playing around his lips. ‘You do know you are unique.’
‘Unique as in freaky or unique as in—’
‘Unique as in you have a body that could stop traffic at rush hour.’
Her eyes flew wide open and a slow stain of colour spread across her skin. It was impossible to hide the glow of pleasure she felt at his words.
‘Not all might think so.’
But it was only one man whose opinion she cared about and he found her sexy! Inexplicable, but who was she to argue?
‘Oh, believe me, Sophie, they would.’ Marco found himself unable to raise even an ironic smile at the thought. ‘But let me say before I get chastised for treating you like a sex object: I want you for your mind too.’
Behind the mockery, Marco knew there was a grain of truth. Of course Sophie had a body that drove him wild and she responded to him like no other woman ever had, but it wasn’t just the sex he missed when they were apart.
Her unaffected enthusiasm was exhausting and occasionally irritating but also refreshing. She had a quirky irreverent sense of humour, she blurted out the first thing that came into her head and she had a deeply annoying habit of putting a positive spin on the most disheartening situations. But none of these flaws stopped him enjoying the sound of her voice…and the way she screwed up her nose…and now she was looking at him through her lashes with an almost wistful expression that made things shift inside. He frowned. It was not a feeling he was comfortable with.
‘I don’t mind being your sex object.’ For the first time in her life she felt womanly and sexy and not ashamed of her curves—that was down to Marco, who had let her see herself through his eyes, and it was an incredibly empowering experience.
Accustomed all her life to thinking of herself as an ugly duckling who would always fall short of swan-like status, it had come as nothing short of a mind-altering revelation that a man as tall and lean and utterly drop-dead gorgeous as Marco could find her sexually attractive, and his uninhibited appreciation and the pleasure he took in her body had made her feel like a woman for the first time in her life.
‘Actually,’ she admitted huskily, ‘I quite like it.’ And you too, though liking hardly covered the swelling of her heart when she looked at him.
Marco’s half-smile vanished as his burning eyes connected with the shy invitation shining in her china-blue eyes.
It was only the distant—but not distant enough—yell from one workman to another that prevented him from picking her up and carrying her to his bed. Well, that and the paper in his pocket.
‘Dio mio, cara, if you don’t stop looking at me like that I will not be responsible,’ he growled thickly. ‘Perhaps,’ he added, taking a deep breath, ‘we should change the subject.’ He definitely could not walk straight until his level of arousal had lowered several painful notches.
Despite the fact that she had a million things to do and several hundred of the most important people in Europe were about to descend on them, Sophie found she was painfully disappointed when he did just that.
‘So what,’ he asked, indicating her head gear, ‘is that thing on your head?’ His eyes slid to the pouting outline of her mouth. Bad move, he thought, as he was forced to ruthlessly check the surge of passion that sent a fresh pulse of pain through his groin. He was clearly going insane.
Her hand went to the scarf that covered the giant pink hair rollers. She found it some comfort that his husky voice was not quite steady and it was clear from the way he was staring hungrily at her mouth that his thoughts were not on hairstyle.
‘They’re hair curlers—Julia put them in to straighten my hair.’
Marco could see the obvious contradiction in this sentence but decided not to go there; instead he asked, ‘Who is Julia?’
He was playing for time. Decision-making was not a struggle for him; he did not overcomplicate matters as he had a goal and he went straight for it, taking the shortest route possible to reach that desired goal.
He had a great deal of success but the occasional failure was inevitable—despite what the financial gurus suggested about his infallibility—and he chalked those up to the experience part of the learning curve of life.
He did not waver or vacillate. He made decisions and lived with the consequences. He did not anticipate failure but neither did he fear it.
So why, when he never lost sleep over the acquisition of an airline or media company, was he unable to decide whether to make his pitch to Sophie now or later?
It wasn’t as if the outcome was in doubt.
It was just the timing and she did appear pretty distracted, he thought, studying her glowing face.
The word radiant came into his head and at the same moment so did the image of the workmen’s faces as they had watched her run across the grass and he thought, why wait?
‘She is Natalia’s granddaughter.’
‘Who is Natalia?’
‘The woman who cooked your breakfast for the past thirty years…’ She stopped, intercepting the gleam in his eyes. ‘You’re pulling my leg.’
‘It is sometimes irresistible.’ Much like her lips, he mused, feeling the kick of lust again as his gaze lingered on the soft pink curve.
Sophie snorted.
‘Why are you having your hair done by the cook’s daughter? I said you should fly in a stylist from…’ He saw the mulish belligerent expression spread across her face and extended a hand, palm up, in a gesture of mock submission. ‘Fine, have it your way.’ Behind her smiles and quiet manner Sophie was as stubborn as anyone he had ever met, and quietly ruthless when it came to getting her own way, which was why the project had not only been brought in under budget but ahead of time.
Observing the moment that someone realised they had been gently manoeuvred into doing it the Sophie Balfour way was amusing, except when he was on the receiving end of her tactics, and even then he did not have any strong objections. It occurred to him that a few weeks earlier he would not have viewed being wrapped around the little finger of a woman with any degree of equanimity, let alone affectionate amusement.
Sophie tugged fretfully at the hem of her T-shirt. ‘Marco? You were joking about me…not wearing certain items, weren’t you? You can’t really tell, can you…?’ she asked in a mortified whisper as she glanced downwards, trying to assess the level of exposure.
Marco’s eyes swept downwards and made the return journey as far as her breasts. He could make out the faint shadow of her nipples.
His pupils dilated and in the space of a heartbeat he was in the grip of an insatiable, ravening hunger.
It was literally agonising not to be in a position to quench it, and the pain was not helped by a masochistic portion of his brain that provided a graphic image of her sinking her fingers into his hair as he ran his tongue across one ruched pink centre and then the other, watching them harden and hearing her catch her breath and making that throaty little groan that drove him crazy.
A woman’s body had never pleased him more, or tempted him more, and the thought of another man being on the receiving end of her warmth and generosity filled him with an utter repugnance.
‘You can tell.’
She shot him a killer glare and crossed her hands over her chest. ‘Thanks for making me feel better.’
Marco’s grin was strained. ‘There is a school of thought that says, if you have it flaunt it.’
He found that he had very mixed feelings about Sophie flaunting it for people who were not him, though once their relationship was on a more formal basis he could afford to be less vigilant. Then men would think twice before trespassing and she would stop talking
about leaving.
His brow puckered into a thoughtful frown. He recognised that part of the problem was that Sophie didn’t have a clue what effect she had on men and she appeared genuinely oblivious to the fact that she had a body that inspired lust.
The combination made her incredibly vulnerable to prowling wolves.
That one of those wolves might be able to give her the love that she deserved was a thought that Marco suppressed before it was fully formed.
He could count the number of love matches he knew of, that lasted, on one hand. And who knows if they were as happy as they appeared? he mused cynically. Marco knew only too well how deceptive appearances could be. Until Allegra’s drinking had got out of control, they had presented the picture of a devoted couple.
Marriage stood a far better chance if you went into it with your eyes open. If Sophie married him, he would make her happy, not offer her false promises and break her heart.
Sure, you’re saving her from heartbreak—you’re a regular hero, Marco, mocked the voice of his troubled conscience.
Sophie’s voice broke through his introspective chain of thought. ‘Flaunting is a great policy if you have a body like your wife!’
The drop in temperature was instantaneous and dramatic.
‘I have no wife.’
Marco had always known that one day that situation would change. Continuity was important and his was an ancient name and he needed to pass on that heritage, but this did not mean that he had ever anticipated the event with any degree of pleasure.
Though naturally he would approach marriage the second time around from a very different perspective; his approach would be practical, not emotional.
His lips curled into a contemptuous smile for the romantic boy he had been.
Obviously he was not going to marry anyone he was not compatible with; common interests would be high on his list of qualities necessary in a future bride. She would need to have a certain level of sophistication to feel comfortable in his world, and of course he would not marry anyone he found physically repulsive, but he did not realistically expect mind-blowing sex.
