by Julia James
And another question, as well. Far more troubling.
Why did he feel a stab of pity at her being so tired—and why did the exhaustion in her face merely emphasise the extraordinary beauty of her bone structure?
He wanted to go on looking at her—just looking.
Then his sales director was telling him the next set of figures. With a mixture of reluctance and relief Xavier resumed his conversation. Deliberately he looked away from the girl.
Inside him, the same confused flux of emotions continued to recycle.
Emotions that were completely, absolutely, out of place when all that was required was the cool, analytical application of reason.
Yet they continued to circle all the same—to his irritation and displeasure.
‘I believe we have arrived.’
The words, murmured without expression, stirred Lissa to wakefulness. She felt dopey, her mind blurred and unable to focus. Then, with a little shake, she roused herself fully from the torpid slumber the warmth and motion of the car had induced in her.
She sat upright with an effort. The car had paused by the kerb just outside a rundown Victorian apartment block, built in the nineteenth century as social housing for the labouring poor. Unlike many parts of South London, this area had not gentrified, but the virtue of that was that it made the rent of the one-bedroom flat affordable to her. The last thing she needed was to squander money on accommodation.
She blinked. ‘Thank you. It was really very kind of you.’
Her voice was slightly husky with sleep, but she made herself look at the man who’d insisted on driving her home. As her eyes lifted to his face, she felt the same catch in her breath she’d had when she’d first set eyes on him. Weakness flushed through her, and a sense of disbelief that she was really here, sitting in the same car as him. For a self-indulgent moment she just went on looking at him. His face was slightly averted from her, glancing out of his window at the locality. Did his expression tighten? She didn’t know—only knew that the shadows of the car’s interior only served to accentuate the incredible contours of his face.
Then his head turned fully towards her, and his eyes came to meet hers.
Her stomach hollowed. In her still-dopey state she could not tear her own gaze away. She felt her eyes cling to his, in a moment of exchange that was like a bolt through her.
Then, ‘Mademoiselle?’
The cold draught of air at her side and the polite voice of the driver made her realise that the passenger door had been opened. They were waiting for her to get out, the chauffeur and the flash Frenchman.
She broke eye contact and got out.
‘Thank you for the lift. It was very kind of you,’ she repeated, her voice stilted. As she got out her key, she allowed herself one more glance back at the car. It hovered by the side of the road, sleek and dark and expensive. Like the man inside.
She could not see him now—he was just a darker shadow in the dark interior. Something pierced inside her. That was it, then. The last time she’d see him. That moment before she’d got out of the car. Already the driver was climbing back into his seat, closing his own door. Jerkily, she turned away, and opened the door and went inside.
Behind her, she heard the car glide away into the night.
Xavier stared unseeingly ahead of him. The street was scruffy and rundown, with litter blowing around and the dank, bleak dreariness of poverty. Not a good place to live. No wonder Lissa Stephens was eager for a way out of here.
His eyes darkened. But not at the expense of his brother.
He waited for the stab of anger to come—but instead all that came was a repeat of that sense of jarring disconcertion he’d felt when he’d set eyes on her by the bus stop and almost failed to recognise her as the same woman he’d deliberately singled out for his attention in the casino.
How could she look so different? The question sliced through him again, and once more he could give no rational explanation for the difference it made to him. It shouldn’t make a difference.
Yet it did.
And another thought was intruding—where it had no business to be.
If she looked that good without even trying, what would she look like if she were properly dressed and presented?
Immediately, without volition, his mind was there. That long blonde hair, loose but sleek, flicked back off her face, make-up subtle but enhancing the natural beauty she possessed, and her slender body gowned as a beautiful woman should always be gowned.
The image hovered in his mind. Vivid. Powerful. Alluring.
No. He would not sit here fantasising about what Lissa Stephens might look like if she were done up the way she would be if he were inviting her to spend the evening with him.
More than the evening.
No. Again he slammed the harsh, forbidding negative down across his wayward thoughts. The only reason he had anything at all to do with Lissa Stephens was to assess whether she was suitable to marry his brother. It had seemed in the casino an open and shut case. Picking her up in the street as he’d done should only have confirmed it. She should have been eager to be picked up—eager for the interest and intention of someone so obviously rich. She should have batted her thickened eyelashes at him and come on to him.
Instead, she’d shown every reluctance at getting into his car, and when she had she’d fallen asleep.
He frowned. It didn’t make sense. It was irrational. Lissa Stephens in the casino and Lissa Stephens asleep in his car seemed two quite different people, both in appearance and in behaviour.
As the car drove on, back into the brightly lit affluent West End, a world away from the dreary bleakness of south London’s poorer districts, Xavier knew he could be sure only of one thing. That he could not yet be sure about Lissa Stephens.
His investigation, he had to accept, was very far from over.
But what, precisely, should be his next step?
Well … He shifted his shoulders as if to release a sudden tension. He had the rest of the night to decide.
The rest of the night to think about Lissa Stephens.
As she stood outside the door to her ground-floor flat, Lissa paused a moment. Her emotions were strange. She was still feeling blurred from interrupted sleep. But that was not the reason.
The reason was even now driving away down the street.
Why did he do it? Why did he offer me a lift and go out of his way to drive me back here, miles away?
Any wariness that he might have had less than honourable intentions had been completely unfounded. He hadn’t made the slightest attempt to make a move on her, and certainly her own attitude had scarcely been inviting.
Deliberately so. Because what, dear God, would have been the point? Even without any of the complications in her life, the guy was still a punter, and therefore completely out of bounds. He might be like something out of Continental movie in terms of looks, but if he’d actually thought he might pick her up sexually, knowing her to be a casino hostess, it would only have been because he himself was a sleazeball.
But he wasn’t that.
Apart from that moment when he’d shown surprise that a woman working as a hostess could possibly be capable of learning a foreign language, he hadn’t actually dissed her at all. In fact, if she’d had to describe his attitude towards her she would have had to say it was one of civility and nothing more.
She frowned again. So why had he offered her a lift? Some kind of Gallic gallantry after making her miss her bus? If so, it had been an over-the-top gesture, and she’d responded appropriately by asking to be let out at Trafalgar Square. He could have done that and gone on his way.
But he hadn’t. He’d insisted on driving her all the way back here. But why?
Impatiently she brushed the question from her head. It was pointless asking it—she wasn’t going to get an answer. And the answer didn’t matter anyway.
Xavier Lauran was not someone she was going to encounter a second time after all.
F
or the briefest moment, as she inserted her key into the lock and turned it quietly, she felt a pang go through her. He had walked into her life—and out again. The most incredible-looking male she’d ever seen. A man to take her breath away, stop the blood in her pulse, hollow out her stomach.
Gone.
The pang bit again. Her eyes clouded. Then, with a tightening of her chin, she let herself inside her flat. Xavier Lauran had been and gone in her life, and that was that. And it was just as well.
There was no room in her life for him. None at all.
No room for anyone except—
‘Lissy, you’re home.’ The voice that spoke out of the darkness was soft, and very slightly slurred.
Lissa walked into the bedroom. Her life closed around her. Familiar, loving, but cruel and bleak.
Xavier stood by the uncurtained windows of his hotel suite and moodily nursed a cognac glass between his fingers. He looked down at the silent street below.
He should go to bed. Go to sleep. But he didn’t feel tired. There was a restlessness pacing in his veins. A question circulating in his head.
What was he going to do about Lissa Stephens?
He’d thought it would be cut and dried. That the trashy casino hostess gushing over him was all the evidence he needed that she was the last person he should allow his brother to marry. The carefully orchestrated offer of a lift was merely supposed to have given the girl the opportunity to do what any of her co-workers would surely have done.
But she hadn’t.
Why not?
The cynical answer was that a woman with sufficient—if unexpected—intelligence to have learnt a foreign language was also one that was too smart to jeopardise what she had going with another wealthy man—his brother—to risk a fleeting interlude with anyone else. And maybe that was the reason she hadn’t given him the come on.
But maybe it was for a quite different reason. Logic demanded that he consider that possibility. One that was at odds with the woman he had thought she obviously was. Maybe Lissa Stephens simply wasn’t the kind of girl the evidence said she was.
The slow, unconscious swirling of the cognac in his glass halted abruptly.
He had to know for sure.
And there was, Xavier knew, with a sudden clenching of his stomach, an obvious way to find out.
Spend more time with her.
Conflicting emotions flashed through him as he articulated the thought—and neither was welcome. Emotion seldom was. But he had to recognise it, all the same. One was extreme reluctance—reluctance for a reason that was troublingly evident in the second emotion flaring in him. An emotion that was completely and absolutely inappropriate to the situation. But it was there, all the same—and he could do nothing about it.
Anticipation.
With a sudden lift of his hand, he raised the cognac glass to his lips and took a mouthful of the fine, fiery liquid. He might as well face it—he wanted to see the girl again. Wanted to spend more time with her.
And it was not just to check her out for his brother.
The kick of the cognac to his system seemed to release something in him. A hot pulse through his veins.
He wanted to see her again all right.
Danger prickled on his skin.
He shouldn’t do this.
The cool, analytical voice of reason spoke inside his head. It was the voice he always listened to. The voice he ran XeL with, ran his life with—the voice he listened to which had advised him to disentangle his brother from his previous mésalliance. It was the voice with which he selected the women for his bed. Suitable women, appropriate women, who moved in his world, who were part of it, and knew the rules by which he conducted his affairs. Women quite unlike the likes of Lissa Stephens, with her confusing double image—one moment a cheap casino hostess and the next.
He shouldn’t have thought of Lissa Stephens. Shouldn’t have remembered that second image of hers, the one that had come like a blow out of nowhere in a rain-wet London street in the bleak fag end of the night.
But it was too late. It was in his head, etched like a diamond against murky smoke. The pure, bare, unadorned beauty of her profile turned away from him. The long fall of pale hair from its high plume. The upturned collar of her cheap jacket that nevertheless framed the crystal contours of her face.
Of its own volition his hand lifted the glass to his mouth again, and he took another mouthful. He wanted to see that image again. Wanted to look at it. At her.
He needed to know.
The words formed in his mind.
He needed to know. Was she, against all evidence, a fit woman to marry his brother? That was what he needed to find out.
Nothing else. That was, after all, the only question on the table. The only question that could be on the table.
Sharply, he turned away. There was nothing else he needed to know about Lissa Stephens.
As he deposited, with a jerkier movement than was necessary, the cognac glass on a table as he passed it, by heading to his bedroom, he screened out the word that had formed in his consciousness.
Menteur.
Liar.
Lissa lay, staring at the ceiling unseen above her. From time to time, through the muffling of the bedroom door, she could hear a train rattling along the tracks that ran past the rear of the poky flat. From beside her, on the next pillow in the double bed, came the rhythmic rise and fall of slightly stertorous, drug-induced breathing.
She gazed upward into the dark.
For all her extreme weariness she could not sleep. Even though she knew she had to be up again in a few hours, her mind was wide awake.
Thinking. Remembering.
And—worse still—imagining.
About one single face. One single man.
Angrily, she tried to force the image from her mind.
What was the point in thinking about him? None—none at all. So why was she doing it?
Because her mind would not go anywhere else.
Would not even think about the one thing that, above all else in her life, she always thought about. The one person she always had to think about.
Guilt drenched through her. Oh, God—how low could she stoop? Even thinking it with a note of resentment, however faint. Automatically, as if to assuage her own guilt, she reached out a hand to let it rest lightly on the sleeping form beside her. A wave of love and pity welled in her.
If only she could wave a magic wand. If only she could make it somehow instantly better. If only she could …
But she couldn’t. Bleakness chilled in her throat. There was no magic wand. Nothing like that. Only a tiny sliver of hope. And even to seize that meant that all her waking hours had to be dedicated to one thing and one thing only—earning money. Saving money. Little by little. Slowly, oh, so slowly.
Unless Armand …
The chill intensified.
He hadn’t phoned. She had hoped against hope that tonight he would, but there had been nothing. That made it three nights in a row, not hearing from him.
He’s gone.
The grim words tolled in her brain. She might try to dispel them, but they would not disappear.
Gone.
A single word, extinguishing hope—hope she should not have allowed herself.
Against her will the image formed in her mind of sable hair and dark eyes and a sculpted mouth.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘LISSA, the manager wants you. In his office. Sharpish!’
Lissa swivelled her head from her cramped place at the vanity unit in the crowded dressing room that she and the other hostesses changed in. She had only just arrived, and was about to start on her make-up.
She frowned at the command, issued by one of the staff from the door.
‘What for?’
A shrug was her only answer, and with a sigh Lissa got to her feet again and made her way out of the dressing room. A couple of the other girls looked at her curiously.
The manager’s office overlooked the
casino floor, which was currently thinly populated.
‘You wanted to see me?’ said Lissa. She was wary and tense. It was seldom good news when the manager wanted to see a hostess. It was usually to reprimand her for not having brought enough custom to the bar. Maybe, thought Lissa tightly, the manager thought she hadn’t got the rich Frenchman to buy enough last night.
Damn, she didn’t want to be reminded of him. She’d done her best all day, all through the long slog into the City, and the long, tedious hours working in the office her temping agency had currently assigned her to. All through the crowded rush-hour journey home, sardined in the Tube train with all the other commuters until they’d been disgorged at the South London underground station closest to her flat. And certainly all through the brief time she’d had at home before setting out for her evening’s work here at the casino.
The manager, short and rotund and far from pleasant, eyed her up. Lissa stood impassively.
‘Private hire,’ he told her. ‘You’re to go straight there. There’s a car waiting outside.’
Lissa stood very still.
‘I’m afraid I don’t do private hires,’ she said quietly. ‘I did make that clear when I started.’
The manager narrowed his small eyes.
‘You’re lucky I’m in a good mood. And you’re lucky you made a hit last night. The guy who’s booked you is that fancy Frog who dropped a ton at the tables. He’s paying premium price for you, so make sure you give value for money, all right?’
Lissa swallowed. So Xavier Lauran had not been the type to stoop to coming on to her last night after offering her a lift home? No, he was just the type who liked the euphemism of a ‘private hire.’
‘Maybe Tanya would—’ she ventured.
‘He’s booked you, all right? And you deliver—understand? Or you walk—permanently.’
Lissa understood. Schooling her face into immobility, she nodded and got out. She felt sickened, more than sickened. It just wasn’t something she’d thought of the man last night.
