A Tycoon to Be Reckoned With (Harlequin Presents)

by Julia James

  And yet today at the villa she had seemed happy to while away the afternoon swimming and sunbathing, openly enjoying the easy-going, lazy relaxation of it all. She had been admiring of the gardens and the sea views, appreciative of the peace and quiet, content to do nothing but let the time pass.

  Confounding his expectations of her.

  His expression changed. Until, of course, the very end of the afternoon. When she’d made her move on him...changing her allegiance from Philip to himself.

  Bastiaan’s mouth twisted. That request of hers to speak to him privately had been transparent in its objective. As transparent as her suggestion, made in an intimate husky voice, that their path would be smoother without young Philip to get in their way. Well, in that he would oblige her—and be glad to do so. For she was, of course, playing right into his hands with her suggestion.

  The twist at his mouth turned into a smile. A smile of satisfaction.

  Of anticipation.

  Soon—very soon now—his cousin would be safe from her charms, and he would be enjoying them to the hilt.

  * * *

  Sarah’s voice was low, throaty, as she finished the last number of her final set of the evening. It had been days since she’d spent the afternoon at Bastiaan Karavalas’s villa, and Philip had been noticeable by his absence. He hadn’t shown up at the next morning’s rehearsal, and she’d picked up an apologetic text from him mid-morning, saying that he was working on his essays, then heading off with Bastiaan in the Ferrari. Nor had he turned up at the club in the evening—another apologetic text had said he was staying at Bastiaan’s Monte Carlo apartment. Since then there’d been silence.

  Sarah knew why—Bastiaan was doing his best to keep Philip preoccupied and away from her. She could only be grateful: it was, after all, what she’d asked him to do, and what she knew was best for Philip. For herself too.

  And not just because it was keeping the disturbing impact of Bastiaan himself away from her—essential though that was for her fractured peace of mind. More than ever she needed to focus on her work. She could afford no distraction at all—not now. Least of all now.

  Anxiety bit at her. She was hitting a wall—a wall that was holding her back, holding them all back, and making Max tear into her mercilessly.

  They had reached the scene where the War Bride received news of her husband’s death. Her aria in it was central to the drama—the fulcrum on which it turned. Although technically it was hard to sing, it was not that that was confounding her.

  Max had been brutal in his criticism.

  ‘Sarah—your husband is dead! A brief while ago you were rapturously in love—now all that has been ripped from you—destroyed! We have to hear that! We have to hear your despair, your disbelief. But I don’t hear it! I don’t hear it at all!’

  However hard she’d tried, she hadn’t been able to please him. Had not been able to get through that wall.

  He’d made her sing an earlier aria, declaring her love, dazzled by the discovery of her headlong tumbling into its lightning-swift ecstasy, so that she could use it to contrast with her plunge into the depths of grief at its loss. But she still hadn’t been able to please him.

  ‘You’ve gone from love to grief in days—from bride to widow. We need to hear that unbearable journey in your voice. We need to hear it and believe it!’

  She’d thrown up her hands in frustration. ‘But that’s what I can’t do! I can’t believe in it! People don’t fall in love just like that only for it to end a few days later. It doesn’t happen.’

  In her head she remembered how she had wondered, on first hearing the tragic tale, what it must be like to love so swiftly, to hurt so badly. Unreal...quite unreal...

  Her mind skittered onto pathways she should not go down.

  Desire—yes. Desire at first sight—that was real. That she could not deny. Across her vision strolled Bastiaan Karavalas, with his night-dark eyes and his hooded, sensual regard that quickened her blood, heated her body. Desire had flamed in her the moment she had seen him, acknowledged his power over her...

  But desire isn’t love! It’s not the same thing at all. Of course it isn’t.

  She recalled Max’s exasperated rasp. ‘Sarah, it’s a fable! These characters are archetypes—timeless. They’re not people you see in the street. Anton—talk to her—make her understand!’ He’d called across to where the composer had been sitting at the piano.

  But it didn’t matter how much Anton went through the text with her, elucidated the way his music informed and reinforced the words she sang, she was still stuck. Still could not break through.

  Max’s tension cast a shadow over them all as he stepped up the intensity of their rehearsals, becoming ever more exacting. Time, as he constantly reminded them all, was running increasingly short, and their performance was not yet up to the standard it had to be. Time and again he halted them in mid-song, demanding they repeat, improve, perfect their performance. Nerves were jittery, tempers fraying, and emotions were running high amongst them all.

  Now, standing on the stage, finally lowering the microphone as she took a smattering of applause for Sabine’s tedious repertoire, Sarah felt resentment fill her. Max was working them all hard, but he was working her harder than everyone else. She knew it was for her own good, for the good of her performance, the good of them all, but she was giving everything she had and it was still not enough. From somewhere, somehow, she had to find more.

  Tiredness lapped at her now, and the lazy, sunlit afternoon she’d spent at the villa seemed a long time ago—far longer than a handful of days.

  Memory played back the verdant flower-filled gardens, the graceful loggia and the vine-shaded terrace, the sparkling water of the pristine pool and the deep azure of the glorious Mediterranean beyond. The complete change of scene—to such a beautiful scene—had been a tonic in itself, a respite both from the rigours of rehearsal and the banal tiresomeness of performing her nightly cabaret. It had been relaxingly enjoyable despite the disturbing presence of Bastiaan Karavalas.

  Because of it...

  The realisation was disquieting—and yet it sent a little thrill through her at the same time. She tried to quell it. She felt it, she told herself sternly, only because she was standing here with the hot spotlight on her, in her skin-tight gown, just as she had been that first night when she’d felt his unknown eyes upon her.

  More memories stirred. Her eyes moved briefly to the dance floor between the tables and the stage, and warmth flushed through her, as if she could still feel the firm, warm clasp of Bastiaan Karavalas’s hands on her as they’d danced. Still feel the shimmering awareness of his physical closeness, the burning consciousness of her overpowering attraction to him.

  An attraction she could not explain, could not cope with and certainly could not indulge.

  She must not think about him—there was no point. He and Philip were both gone, and her only focus must be the festival performance ahead of her. So what was the point of the strange little pang that seemed to dart into her, twisting as it found its mark somewhere deep within? None. Bastiaan Karavalas was gone from her life and she must be glad of it.

  I must!

  She straightened from her slight bow, glancing out over the dining tables beyond before making ready to leave the stage.

  And looked straight at Bastiaan Karavalas.

  As her eyes lighted on the dark, familiar form, she felt a kick inside her that came from the same place as had that pang, only moments earlier. She hurried off the stage, aware that her heart was beating faster. Why was he here? Just to tell her how he’d removed Philip? Or was there another reason—a reason she would not give name to?

  But Max did. ‘You’ve lost your young, rich admirer, I see, cherie, and replaced him with a new one. Cultivate him—I’ve looked him up and he’s worth a fortune!’

  Sarah’s jaw tightened, and she would have said something harsh, but there were tight lines of ingrained stress around Max’s mouth and she could see t
iredness in his face. He was working as hard as any of them—harder. And if she was working late nights, then so was he.

  ‘I don’t know what he’s doing here,’ she replied with a shrug.

  Max gave his familiar waspish smile. ‘Oh, come now—do you need it spelled out?’

  She gave another shrug, not bothering to respond. Bastiaan thought she was Sabine—not Sarah. For a moment a thought struck her. Should she introduce Max to Bastiaan—see if he couldn’t persuade him to sponsor their production? But that would mean explaining that she was Sarah, not Sabine—and all her objections to that disclosure still held. She just could not afford to let her role as Sabine contaminate her identity as an opera singer, compromise her future reputation.

  ‘Well?’ Max prompted. ‘Off you go to him—it’s you he’s here to see, that’s obvious. Like I say, be nice to him.’ His eyes were veiled for a moment. ‘Just don’t be late for rehearsal tomorrow, OK?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she snapped at his implication.

  Whether he was joking or not, she didn’t care. She was too tired to care. But if Bastiaan had taken the trouble to turn up here, she had better return the courtesy.

  Max was now on his phone to Anton and she left him to it, making her way through to the front of house. Her emotions were mixed. She felt strange—both a sense of reluctance and a stirring of her blood. They warred within her.

  As she approached Bastiaan’s table he got to his feet. He seemed taller than ever—and suddenly more forbidding, it seemed to her, his lean body sheathed in a custom-made tuxedo. Was it because of the momentary tightening of his features? The veiling of his dark eyes? Whatever it was, she felt a shimmer go through her. Not just of an awareness that was quickening her pulse, but of its opposite as well—a kind of instinctual reserve.

  She would keep this as brief as possible—it was the only sensible thing to do.

  ‘M’sieu Karavalas,’ she greeted him, with only the slightest smile at her mouth, a nod of her head.

  An eyebrow lifted as he held a chair for her. ‘Bastiaan, surely?’ he murmured. ‘Have we not advanced that far, mademoiselle?’

  There was light mockery in his invitation to use his given name while reserving more formality for his own addressing of her. A mockery that played upon what he knew—must know—about her receptiveness to his masculine potency, his own appreciation of her charms...

  She made no reply, merely gave a flickering social smile as she sat down while he resumed his seat.

  ‘So, what have you done with Philip?’ she asked. She kept her tone light, but this was, after all, the only reason that his cousin was here.

  She saw a dark flickering cross his eyes. ‘I’ve just returned from driving him to Paris,’ he answered.

  Sarah’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Paris?’

  Bastiaan lifted his cognac glass. ‘Yes,’ he said smoothly. ‘He’s meeting his mother there, and visiting family friends.’

  ‘So, how long will he be away?’ she asked. She sought to keep her tone light, still, but it was hard—every nerve-ending was quivering with the overpowering impact this man had on her.

  ‘Long enough.’

  There was a hint of a drawl in his voice and it made her stare at him. She tried to quash the sudden flare in her veins as his veiled, unreadable gaze rested on her. A gaze that suddenly seared its message into her.

  ‘And now, having disposed of the problem of my young cousin,’ Bastiaan was saying, his voice dragging across her nerve-endings and making them flare with a kind of internal shiver that she felt in every cell of her body, ‘we can move on to a far more interesting subject.’

  Something in his face changed and he shifted slightly, relaxing back, it seemed to her, and lifting his cognac glass, his long, strong fingers curved around the bowl. His eyes rested on her with an open expression in them that was pinioning her where she sat.

  She could not answer him. Could only sit, lips slightly parted, feeling her heart start to race. The rest of the room had disappeared. The rest of the world had disappeared. There was only her, sitting there, her body shimmering with a sensual awareness of what this man could do to her...

  And then a smile flashed suddenly across his features. ‘Which is, Mademoiselle Sabine, the subject of where we should dine tonight.’ He paused, a light in his eyes. ‘Last time you disdained my suggestion of Le Tombleur. But, tell me, does it meet with your approval tonight?’

  ‘Tonight?’ Her echo of his question was hollow, hiding the shock beneath. Hiding the sudden, overwhelming spike of adrenaline that had shot into her veins as she’d realised what he intended.

  Amusement played about his well-shaped mouth. ‘Do we need to wait any longer, Sabine?’

  All pretence at formality was gone now. All pretence at denial of what had flared between them from the very first. There was only one reality now—coursing through her veins, pounding in her heart, sheering across her skin, quickening in her core.

  This man—this man alone—who had walked into her life when she’d least expected it, least wanted it, could least afford to acknowledge it. This man who could set her pulse racing...in whose dark, disturbing presence her body seemed to come alive.

  Temptation overwhelmed her. The temptation to say Yes! Yes! to everything he was offering. Simply to let his hand reach across the table to hers, to let him raise her to her feet, lead her from here and take her where he wanted...

  To a physical intimacy, a sensual intensity, an embarkation into realms of sensuous possibility that she had never encountered before.

  And why not? Why not? She was free, an adult and independent woman. Her emotional ties to Andrew, such as they’d been, were long gone. She was no ingénue—she knew what was being offered to her...knew it was something that would never come again in her life. For there could never be another man who would affect her the way this man could.

  She could go with him as Sabine—the woman he took her to be—as assured as he in the world that this dark, powerful man moved in. A world of physical affairs that sated the body but left the heart untouched. As Sabine she could indulge in such an affair, could drink it to the full, like a glass of heady champagne that would intoxicate the blood but leave her clear-headed the following day.

  The temptation was like an overpowering lure, dominating her senses, her consciousness. Then, like cold water douching down upon her, she surfaced from it.

  She was not Sabine.

  She was Sarah. Sarah Fareham. Who had striven all her life towards the moment that was so close now—the moment when she would walk out on stage and give the performance upon which her future life would depend.

  I can’t go with him—I can’t.

  She felt her head give a slow, heavy shake.

  ‘C’est impossible.’

  The words fell from her lips and her eyes were veiled beneath the ludicrously over-long false eyelashes.

  His face stilled. ‘Why?’

  A single word. But she did not answer. Could not. Dared not. She was on a knife’s edge—if she did not go now, right now, she would sever her resolve. Give in to the temptation that was lapping at her like water on a rising tide.

  She shook her head again, drained her coffee cup with a hand that was almost shaking. She got to her feet. Cast one more look at him. One last look.

  The man is right—the time is wrong.

  ‘Goodnight, m’sieu,’ she said, and dipped her head and walked away. Heading to the door beside the low stage, moving back towards her dressing room.

  Behind her, Bastiaan watched her go. Then, slowly, he reached for his cognac. Emotion swelled within him but he did not know what it was. Anger? Was that it? Anger that she had defied his will for her?

  Or anger that she had denied what burned between them like a hot, fierce flame?

  I want her—and she denies me my desire...

  Or was it incomprehension?

  He did not know, could not tell—knew only that as his fingers clenched around
the bowl of his cognac glass he needed the shot of brandy more than he needed air to breathe. In one mouthful he had drained it, and then, his expression changing, he pushed to his feet and left the club. Purpose was in every stride.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SARAH’S FINGERS FUMBLED with the false eyelashes as she peeled them off her eyelids, then with shaky hands wiped the caking foundation off her face, not bothering to tackle her dark eye make-up. She felt as if she was shaking on the inside, her mind shot to pieces. She’d made herself walk away from him, but it hadn’t seemed to help.

  All she could see in her vision was Bastiaan Karavalas, saying in his low, deep voice, ‘Do we need to wait any longer?’

  Emotion speared in her—a mix of panic and longing, confusion and torment. An overwhelming urge to get away as swiftly as possible, to reach the safe haven of her room in the pension, surged through her. She wouldn’t wait to change. She simply grabbed her day clothes, stuffing them into a plastic bag and seizing up her purse, then headed for the rear exit of the club. Max was long gone and she was glad.

  She stepped out into the cool night air of the little road that ran behind the club—and stopped dead.

  Bastiaan’s Ferrari blocked the roadway and he was propped against it, arms folded. Wordlessly he opened the passenger door.

  ‘Give me one reason,’ he said to her, ‘why you will not dine with me.’

  His voice was low, intense. His eyes held hers in the dim light and would not release them. She felt her mouth open to speak—but no words came out. In her head was a tumult, a jumble of thoughts and emotions and confusion.

  He spoke for her. ‘You can’t, can you? Because this has been waiting to happen since I first set eyes on you.’

  The intensity was still in his voice, in his gaze that would not let her go.

  She was still trying to find the words she had to find, marshal the thoughts she had to think, but it was impossible. Impossible to do anything but succumb. Succumb to the emotions that were coursing through her. Impelling her forward. She felt one last frail, hopeless thought fleeting through her tumbling mind.