Turning back to the speaker, she smothered a smile and sank down a bit lower in her chair. Unfortunately, she was too aware of the man sitting next to her, of his long legs and strong thighs. His elbow rested on the armrest beside her, causing his body to lean towards hers slightly. His shoulders were already so broad, but the angle of his body caused those shoulders to invade her personal space.
Not that she minded. Not in the least, she thought. In fact, Talia leaned slightly closer still, silently inhaling the clean, masculine scent of him, the citrus aftershave and…just the maleness of him. He smelled amazing!
“This is important,” he whispered. “You should be writing this down.”
Startled, Talia looked down at her notebook. Sure enough, she’d trailed off mid-sentence when she’d seen him enter the auditorium. Talia had no idea how much information from the speaker she’d missed. Her fingers were slack around her pen and she couldn’t write down the point the speaker had just made even if her life depended on it. She simply couldn’t concentrate. Not with him sitting there next to her, looking strong and powerful and dangerous…tapping into her long-desperate hope that she might be daring too.
He nodded again. “That’s important too. Write that down.”
She blinked when he glanced down at her. “What are you…?”
He shook his head, silently shushing her again. “I’ll do it,” he took the notebook and pen from her. He wrote down several salient points and, after several minutes, Talia slowly remembered to listen to the speaker. It wasn’t easy, and the speaker never received her full attention, not while this man sat next to her, distracting her brain, but she could hear.
He filled several pages of her notebook with notes in the form of bullet points. When he wasn’t writing, and she thought something was important, she took the pen and notebook back, startled when their fingers touched. The fission of awareness surprised both of them, but she pulled back, blinking as she scribbled down the point.
A dozen pages had been filled by the end of the speech, mostly in his bold handwriting.
He took the notebook from her again during the applause, and wrote something else down, then handed it back to her.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said, then abruptly stood up and left the auditorium.
Talia blinked after him as the door closed softly behind him. The next speaker was already introduced by the time she broke through her stupor and glanced down at her notebook.
That’s when her heart began to race again. Written with his bold scrawl, were the words, “Dinner tonight at the Accelleron Hotel. Seven PM.”
It wasn’t a request and Talia smiled at his arrogance. If any other man had written that, she would have simply ignored it and gone on with her day. But because it was that man, the one who had done delicious, naughty things to her body last night in her dreams, she would definitely be at that hotel at seven o’clock tonight.
Suddenly, that daring, adventurous spark roared to life inside of her. She wasn’t going to be the shy, studious woman who feared dangerous situations. Tonight, she was going to rendezvous with a daring, handsome man with dark, intense eyes and shoulders that a woman could lean on, a hard, powerful body that she’d love to…well, that was for another time, she warned herself, shifting in her chair.
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Entangled with the Prince Page 14
