She is part of this place. She goes with it.
And after all, he mused, since he had come here to take possession of this remote and unexpectedly hismas, why should he not take possession, too, of Arielle?
So very, very lovely…
He let his gaze continue to rest on her, taking pleasure in it. Confirmed in his resolve.
Chapter Six
The powerful noteof the engine dropped to a smooth purr as Lycos steadied his speed along the highway. Arielle felt herself sink back into the deep, low-set passenger seat.
They were making for the old, walled, medieval town of Saint-Clément, popular with tourists in this part of Provence. Lycos said he wanted to get a feel for the area. He’d given her a cynical smile.
‘Show me the sights, Arielle. It will mean you don’t have to pack your bags and leave just yet,’ he’d told her.
She had no more idea of why he wanted to play tourist than she had about why, for the past week, he’d continued to stay at themas, making himself at home. She couldn’t stop him, themaswas his. And even if she had to share the days with him, it meant she could have that much more time there too. And that was precious to her.
Yet it was so weird to have him there, day after day, apparently content to simply go along with her uneventful daily routine. His presence was getting easier to bear. Maybe she was just getting used to it. Getting used to having to accept that themaswas now his. That soon, all too soon, she would have to leave her home. Getting used to the anguish she felt over it.
Getting used to treating him civilly, without baleful hostility. As if he weren’t the man taking her home from her.
But there was something happening to her that was distracting her from that. She felt it again, now, as her eyes slipped from watching the road ahead, to covertly glancing atLycos’s profile as he drove. She felt a little frisson go through her. It was becoming increasingly familiar and increasingly impossible to suppress.
She should suppress it, she knew. What did it matter that Lycos’s dark looks could make her pulse quicken, her breath catch? And why should she care that sometimes she saw him watching her with something in his eyes that made the colour flush in her cheeks?
Yet something was happening. She knew she could not deny it, or suppress it. It was something that had nothing to do with the malign reason for his presence in her life.
She felt a little ache inside her. It had been so long since there had been anything like that for her. Her only big romance had been at music college, a fellow music student, a cellist, Ben, who had been taken on after graduating by a prestigious youth orchestra. She had not been so fortunate and that had been the year her mother’s fatal illness had first made itself felt. So, they had gone their separate ways and she had come back to themasto stay with her mother. To look after her, organise her treatment, then nurse her through her final months. It had not been a time for socialising, let alone romance. Then had come the turmoil of her father’s remarriage, his early death, his disastrous will and her futile contesting of it…
To retreat, defeated. To make the most, the very most, of her last chance to live at themas. The home she was to lose, however isolated she was there. Where none but her nearest neighbours ever occasionally came. No one else.
Until Lycos Dimistrios.
The frisson went through her again and she dragged her gaze away. Her thoughts disturbed. Disturbing…
Surely of all men it should not be the one taking her home from her that could make her react in that way? Be so susceptible to? But then she would remind herself that, just asLycos himself had said to her, it wasn’t him taking her home from her. It had never been hers at all.
It isn’t Lycos’s fault he owns it now.
So just as she could argue that she did not need to feel bitter and hostile towards him, maybe she didn’t have to deny or suppress the effect he was having on her? Why not just acknowledge it, accept it?
The question hovered in her head. The temptation…
Her eyes slipped back to his profile again, where they wanted to go. A sense of release went through her, as if she’d finally given herself permission to do what she wanted to do. To let her gaze rest on the sinewed strength of his bare, tanned forearms, the curve of his fingers around the steering wheel effortlessly guiding the powerful car with the lightest of touches, his face in profile, eyes shaded by sunglasses. She felt that frisson come again, and this time made no attempt to resist it…
Facing the truth about herself. That there was something about Lycos Dimistrios that was more than just the man taking possession of her beloved home.
He was taking possession of her senses.
Lycos eased the car into a convenient parking space in a side road off the main square in Saint-Clément and cut the engine.
‘Well, here we are,’ he said conversationally. ‘What is there to see first?’
‘Probably the castle,’ Arielle said.
They set off in that direction, Arielle leading the way. Half a step ahead of him, Lycos could rest his eyes on her at his leisure.
And his pleasure.
