By a little after one, James was safely tucked up for the night, tired but still on high from the success of his impromptu gathering; the house was as good as empty. Only a handful of cleaning staff remained in the kitchen tidying away dishes or else scouring the house for stray glasses and crockery.
Andreas could have relayed back Elizabeth’s movements down to the last second, due to a watchfulness that was extraordinary for him. He knew who she had spoken to and for how long. Had noted her body language when she had been with the Gilbert creep, and had been pleased that all those miniscule signals that indicated interest were stupendously absent, at least on her part. He also knew what time Gilbert had departed, and had observed with satisfaction that the goodbyes had been a general affair, not a cosy one-to-one business. He also knew that she was making herself useful, bringing in glasses that had been left outside; she would never be the kind of person who took it for granted that other people were there to wait on her hand and foot. That was one of those little things that he liked about her.
He was waiting for her as she returned from her final trip to the kitchen with a trayful of champagne flutes, and as he blocked her path she could feel every nerve ending in her body ratchet up into screaming awareness.
He looked as fresh as a daisy, despite the missing tie, the shirt sleeves carelessly cuffed, the tousled hair. She, on the other hand, felt like Cinderella several hours after the witching hour.
‘Join me for a drink?’ Andreas noted her discomfort and was amused by it.
‘You must be joking. It’s nearly one-thirty in the morning!’
‘I know. Shocking, isn’t it?’
‘It’s been a long day,’ she mumbled inadequately.
‘And you’re glad it’s over.’
‘Very glad.’ Elaboration on this seemed to be required. ‘I’m not used to all of this.’ She gestured to the now-empty hall, and then self-consciously to her worse-for-wear dress.
‘Have you considered that this might just be the start of James’s quest to make sure that you’re happy and entertained? You’ll have to become accustomed to the Tobys and the Ruperts and the Alexanders…’ The bundling of random names neatly downplayed the significance of any one in particular.
Elizabeth’s eyes glazed over. ‘I think they only came here out of curiosity,’ she blurted out, alarmed at the prospect of having more well-connected, eligible men wheeled out in front of her. James was well intentioned but misguided.
‘You have become something of a catch,’ Andreas remarked wryly. ‘Surely you’re not so naive that you don’t see that? The recession has barely skimmed the surface of James’s fortune. Like it or not, if you want to have freedom of choice, you’re going to have to spell it out in words of one syllable.’
‘I don’t need you to look out for me, thank you very much.’ She was desperate to be away from his suffocating presence, but the mesmeric pull of his eyes glued her to the spot until her pink tongue darted out lightly to moisten her dry lips.
‘Maybe I need to look out for my godfather’s fortune,’ Andreas answered distractedly. ‘No one can move faster at demolishing an inheritance than an out-of-work banker who suddenly finds himself down on his luck. I want to make sure that you don’t become a sucker for someone who knows how to spin a good tale.’
‘Oh—either I need to lock a man up to keep him interested, or else I’m too stupid to differentiate between the minnows and the sharks! Thanks very much!’ Insults, insults, insults—yet instead of fleeing her disobedient feet refused to budge.
‘You’re welcome.’ In actual fact, he knew that she was nobody’s pushover underneath that softly yielding exterior. But he was enjoying watching her face. He hadn’t thought it was possible for a woman to get under his skin to the extent that this one had, which just went to show that life could still hold surprises.
‘Anyway, there’s no need for you to be concerned. I’ve already told James that I don’t want anything from him. Not a penny. In fact, I’m going into town on Monday to have a look for a job. I’ve been chatting to a local guy, and he said that there are lots of vacant positions, especially if I’m not fussy about what I do. Even if I don’t move out immediately, I intend to do my fair share towards helping with the groceries and stuff like that.’
‘That’s incredibly noble, but I have a suspicion that James would hate that. Don’t forget, you’re the daughter he never knew he had. More than that, he loved you before he knew who you were. Course he’s going to want to spoil you.’
Elizabeth hesitated, taken in by the seductive logic of what he was saying.
‘He’s also going to want to think that you’re happy here. He wasn’t born yesterday. He knows that for a young girl things can sometimes get a little…challenging around here. He will also be aware of the fact that you came here to suss him out, to get to know him; it was the reason you stayed. But, now that everything is out in the open, there just might be the fear that you’ll start wanting to return to the big city.’
‘And a parade of guys would keep me grounded?’
‘These are country folk, even if they might bide their time in the big city,’ Andreas pointed out. ‘Their lives are inextricably tied up with their parents’ estates, and their hearts and souls are never too far away from the country pile. Anyway.’ He glanced away in a thoughtful fashion. ‘It’s entirely up to you what you do. You did mention that guys like Toby might be fun, especially after us…’
‘I never said that I didn’t have fun with you.’ Elizabeth jumped in feverishly, then reddened at what she had blurted out.
‘I’m glad to hear it.’ Andreas allowed a heartbeat of silence to elapse. This strange little game of one step forward, two steps back was new to him, but he wasn’t going to help her along the path of realising just how much she still yearned for him. He would wait for her to come to him and then he would have her, and he didn’t think that she would be complaining.
‘Because that wasn’t the impression I got at the end.’ He dangled the memory of the great sex they had had and left her to contemplate what she had thrown away. When she stared down at the ground, he had to resist the tremendous urge to sweep her bright hair away from her face and assuage his hunger on her full, half-parted mouth. It was frustrating that every time he thought he was in control of the situation, guiding it to the place where he wanted it to be—the place where it was destined to be—he seemed to lose his foothold. Tonight had heralded an onslaught of destabilising emotions and at the forefront of them was the certainty that he wanted her back. For good? No, surely not! He wasn’t a ‘for good’ kind of guy…
‘I just didn’t want to move back to London.’
‘Understood.’ Andreas frowned. In the great scheme of things, dwelling on this particular sore point was not to his liking.
‘Really?’
‘Really.’ His voice was dry and rueful. ‘Which isn’t to say that you didn’t do lasting damage to my ego…’ He gave a low, sexy laugh and leaned against the banister. He folded his arms and slanted that slow smile of his that could make any rational woman go weak at the knees. She had a blinding memory of how incredible it had been working alongside him, and then when they had become lovers enjoying a passion of which she had never considered herself capable. Like an ice sculpture subjected to the scorching intensity of white-heat, every pore in her being had melted at his touch.
Assailed by the power of memory and the reality of the man standing in front of her, Elizabeth was momentarily disabled, and she gripped the doorframe so fiercely that her knuckles turned white.
‘I wouldn’t overestimate my worth,’ she said, making light of his remark, wondering whether there was a woman alive who could do any sort of damage, lasting or otherwise, to his ego.
‘Why not? You might be surprised.’
Elizabeth felt her breath catch in her throat. This was heady stuff. She didn’t need it. She just didn’t have the right artillery to deal with the lazy caress of his words and the intimate
huskiness of his voice. She could feel the pulse in her neck throbbing like a visible, uninvited sign of her excitement, and she wondered if he could see it too. There wasn’t much he ever missed. She looked down, seeking divine inspiration from the ground, but her breathing was laboured as she looked back up and her eyes tangled with his.
She had no idea what malicious finger of fate made her lean towards him. She didn’t mean to. In fact, she had fought very hard not to. But lean towards him she did, reaching out to curl her fingers around the collar of his shirt so that she could pull him towards her; like a drowning man tasting his first drop of life-giving water, she parted her mouth and kissed him with a desperate, greedy urgency that thrilled and sickened her at the same time.
She curved her treacherous body into his, pressing hard against him, and angling her legs so that his arousal could stimulate her aching wetness through the flimsy fabric of her dress.
Lord knew, but anyone could come upon them at any given moment. Much as Andreas was up for adventure when it came to sex, being caught in full flagrante in his godfather’s house, like a randy teenager who couldn’t make it up the stairs in time, was not his thing. Even so, with her body doing wickedly arousing things against him, he couldn’t resist hitching up her dress so that he could plunge an exploratory finger into her moist wetness. He moved it, found that tender, swollen bud, pressed delicately until she gasped and shuddered and then very reluctantly withdrew his hand and straightened down her dress.
‘Not here,’ he said roughly, and just like that, in the space of two words, the moment was lost. Horrified, Elizabeth pulled away sharply as the consequences of her behaviour congealed in her head like a poisonous tumour. What was she doing? She had already succumbed to Andreas’s persuasive charm and jettisoned all her principles in the process. She knew that he was a one-hundred percent, red-blooded alpha male who took what he wanted, enjoyed it for a while and then moved on. Okay, so maybe he was telling the truth and he had already dumped Amanda before he’d begun sleeping with her, but that didn’t change the guy’s basic moral guidelines. He didn’t do love. He did sex. He didn’t do commitment. He did fast-escape just as soon as his boredom levels were breached.
Furthermore, he had made a point of warning her off the guys at the party, and Toby in particular, and she could only think that he had done that because he hadn’t been ready for her to walk away. As he had once told her, there was nothing he relished more than a challenge. To quarantine the competition and move in for the kill. And she had aided and abetted and opened the door to more hurt and pain by giving him the green light.
What did she need to get her house in order? She had ditched her pride for a couple of seconds of passion. The trade-off made her feel weakly sick, and she abruptly turned away from him.
‘I can’t do this,’ she muttered, snatching her arm away when he tried to hold her. God, pathetic fool that she was, she was trembling like a leaf in a high wind.
‘Stop pretending that you don’t feel what I feel.’
‘And stop asking me to pretend that it’s all that I want.’
‘I thought you wanted fun.’
‘I just said that. I…’ She looked at him steadily and drew in a deep breath. ‘I want the whole nine yards. You know that. So hopping into bed with you isn’t an option.’
‘You mean it’s not an option unless I offer you marriage. Because not even cohabitation would work for you, would it? Well, let me tell you straight away, that’s not on the cards and never will be.’ Blackmailed into marriage? No way! Was any addiction worth that? Addictions, like everything else, could be overcome; he just wasn’t used to having one. But no addiction would get the better of him. He was invulnerable, and if any little voice in his head dared to disagree then he would squash it.
But he couldn’t look at her. He would walk away. Because no one took control away from him, even a witch with eyes the colour of sunlit sea, hair that shimmered like burnished gold and a smile that could screw with his head like nothing he had ever experienced before…
CHAPTER TEN
ELIZABETH pulled the comb through her long hair, leant towards the mirror on her dressing table and glared. She had done quite a bit of that over the past ten days. In response to James’s relentless curiosity, she had finally confessed that she had had a bit of a minor contretemps with his godson—more a heated debate than a full-fledged argument, she had felt compelled to elaborate, with her fingers tightly crossed behind her back, and that Andreas was a louse. Beyond that she had not expanded, and in fact had managed to eventually steer the subject away by producing a replacement.
She had managed to find herself a job. It was only a temporary one, working at the local village school in the admin department, but she was hoping for an extension. That change of subject had had the desired effect of diverting James’s needling questions and speculations, some of which had landed with disturbing accuracy. He had moved on to the less-fraught topic of what she intended to do long-term, and then to his familiar lament that she would find life dull and boring in Somerset. That she would leave just when they were getting to know one another, and would return to London to lead a wildly glamorous life from which he would be excluded. Now if she met a nice, young local chap…Then he had inserted slyly, ‘Or there’s always my godson. No woman calls a man a louse without good reason, but I’m certain you two could patch up your differences—and how comforting for me if you and Andreas…’
At that point, Elizabeth had made a radical decision. It was no good harbouring silly fantasies that Andreas would ever be anything more than he was capable of being. What they had had was conclusively over because their long-term wants and needs were a million miles apart. She didn’t know if Andreas would ever settle down but she knew that when he did it certainly wouldn’t be with her. With a brutality which he had probably found necessary, just in case she was driven to harbour any unrealistic expectations, he had spelled that out for her in words of one syllable.
It had been the most humiliating moment in her life. It had also provoked some soul-searching truths which she had forced herself to acknowledge. Truth one was that an extraordinary circus of events had thrown them together, but that without those extenuating circumstances nothing would ever have happened between them. Even if their paths had crossed, and even if she had stared at him the way every single woman on the face of the planet seemed to stare at him, he would never have returned the look; in normal conditions, she just wouldn’t have been the type of woman to interest him. He wouldn’t have bothered getting to know her, because men like Andreas didn’t bother getting to know anyone who didn’t immediately grab their attention with flamboyant good looks that matched their own. In every area of his life, he was the most complicated man she had ever met, but when it came to the opposite sex he was as shallow as a puddle.
He had ended up in bed with her because he had been isolated from his usual routine and because, in that isolation, he had come to see her as a novelty. Like a fool, she had not similarly seen him as a novelty. Like a complete idiot, she had embraced him as the real thing, and compromised her common sense which had been vocal in telling her that she was being stupid. And, just in case she started getting the wrong ideas, he had felt the need to state the obvious. It had been the final, stinging reminder of why she needed to move on.
Never mind moving on with any of the guys she had met at the party; Toby had telephoned her the day after and she had been polite but evasive, and he had taken the hint. The truth was that she was still the same girl she had always been, and high fliers from a different walk of life were never going to be the sort of men she would find lifetime happiness with.
Hence her conflicted emotions as she stared at her disgruntled face in the mirror. She would braid her hair. It wasn’t the sexiest look on the face of the earth, but then she wasn’t sexy; forget how Andreas had once made her once feel. Nor was she looking for someone who wanted to get her into bed to pass the time of day—or night, for that mat
ter. She was looking for kindness, consideration, a man who didn’t resent a few months of chaste kisses while they got to know one another.
Whether Tom Lloyd, one of the visiting teachers with whom she had been persuaded to have a cup of coffee, fitted the bill she had no idea. But he was young, affable and didn’t threaten. He had been forward enough to approach her as he had spotted her leaving after her interview, but not so forward that he had jumped in with a dinner invitation. That said something. He had asked her about herself, and had been interested but not over-impressed at her recent family connections. Another tick for him. In fact, they had chatted for over an hour, and now they were meeting for lunch.
It would be nice, Elizabeth thought despairingly. And what choice did she have? Retreating from the world so that she could nurse her wounds would make her even more vulnerable than she already was. After Andreas, Tom might prove just the calming tonic she needed, even if James had seen fit to disagree volubly.
‘Sounds a namby-pamby to me!’ he had barked, before she had even finished talking. The fact that Tom was reasonably local was a trump card that had been waved aside like an irritating wasp. However local he was, nothing had saved him from being ‘wishy washy’, ‘dull as dishwater’, ‘boring, and probably with a sackful of hang-ups and issues’ and what the hell damn woman would want to get involved with someone who needed sorting out, especially his daughter?
Worse than all that, he had asked her, eyes narrowing, ‘Fancy the man, do you, my girl?’ To which there had been no conceivable answer, and she had blushed wildly, much to her father’s glee. By the time she had got round to babbling something nonsensical about spiritual bonding being the most important thing in a relationship, he had been beside himself with laughter.
With one swift, angry movement, she ran her fingers through her braid, untangling it back into its normal, copper tumble. Then she did one final check in the mirror, grabbed her bag and popped in to see her father, who seemed inclined to carry on his in-depth analysis of a man he had never met in his life.
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