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Memory flooded over him. The last time his eyes had held her she had been lying naked in his arms, sated from passion, her skin like silk against his body, her hair a glorious swathe across his shoulders, her mouth pressed against the wall of his bare chest, her exhausted limbs tangled with his...
And yet when he’d awoken from the overpowering sleep that had claimed him she had been gone, vanished into thin air.
Only to reappear now, suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere.
I can’t let her walk out on me again...
The words were inside his head and he knew he should wipe them away. He knew he should send her packing. He knew exactly what he should say to Gerald Grantham’s daughter.
He knew it. But he could not say it. Not for all the will in his body and in mind.
Instead, as if he were possessed by a force he could not resist, he felt his muscles start to loosen, his shoulders ease back, and then he heard the words that came from his mouth. Words he knew with every rational part of his mind he should not be saying, but which were coming from a place inside him where reason held no sway. There was only an instinct as old as time itself and just as powerful.
Not to let her walk out on him again...
‘Then perhaps,’ he heard himself saying, ‘we can come to an alternative arrangement...’
* * *
Talia stared at him. Her senses were reeling. She was floored...in shock...mesmerised.
She had thrust her way into this inner sanctum to which that snooty PA had been determined to bar her entry, and then, as she’d stared at the man jolting to his feet at her entry, she had realised just who it was who stood before her. It was impossible to recover from this truly unexpected outcome.
She could barely countenance the brutal demand he’d made of her to pay rent in order to stay on in their own home, though she did understand on a rational level that the villa was part of the spoils of his acquisition of what was left of her father’s once mighty business empire.
She had tried to ignore the leap in her senses as her eyes had clung to him in the custom-tailored suit that sheathed his lean body, the dark tie with the discreet gold tie pin, the gold links at his cuffs, the leather strap of that exorbitantly expensive watch she’d noticed the night they’d met. Still, his long-limbed pose was lithe and it radiated power—the kind of power that came from wealth, the way her father’s had.
Yet Luke—Luke Xenakis, she reminded herself forcibly, of XL Holdings—had pursued her father’s ailing company with a power that had nothing to do with his wealth. A power that he could exert over her with a mere flick of those dark lidded eyes, a twist of that sensual mouth...
She felt herself almost swaying as memories assaulted her: his arms tightening around her, his mouth opening hers to his, his hands gliding over her body that had trembled at his silken touch...
With a silent groan she tore her mind away. What use were those memories here, in this austere office, with its views out over the glacial alpine lake and the jagged, snow-capped mountains soaring all around, as icy as the coldness in the eyes that had once burned with heat for her?
She felt something wither inside her under the cold indifference of his gaze, and knew she must banish from her memory the night she had spent with him, with this man she had given herself to so gloriously and so freely—the man who had thrown open the gate of her prison, offering her a beguiling glimpse of the freedom and bliss that could be hers.
As always, her prison doors had closed on her and were still shut. For now, as then, her first responsibility must be to her mother, to protect her from the catastrophe that had engulfed them with her father’s ruin. She must protect her from blows she could not cope with yet, and soften the final blow of losing her last refuge from the bleak poverty she was going to have to face.
She knew she must not run from Luke in an effort to try to end the torment of seeing him again and feeling his coldness towards her, and nor should she throw herself at him to beg him to listen to why she’d had to leave him as she had, though she desperately wanted to do both. She must accept whatever he offered her if it helped protect her mother just a little longer.
She forced herself to focus on what he was saying, to try to make sense of it. ‘What...what do you mean?’
She saw a veil come down over his eyes—another layer of inscrutable protection. He was so close to her and yet so infinitely far away. Something ached inside her at the distance between them now. With every instinct in her being she knew that he had not forgiven her for walking out on him that morning, leaving him after such a night as they had shared.
For a moment she wanted to cry out, to tell him why she had left like that, to try and make him understand that her life had never been hers to live as she wanted.
That it still wasn’t.
Whatever ‘alternative arrangement’ Luke had in mind, she’d have to go along with it—if it was the only way to let her mother go on living at the villa she had no choice. She had to buy the time that she so desperately needed to get her mother to face the brutal truth of how they had to live now—time to find a cheap place to move to, to get herself a job and earn money for the food they were going to eat from now on...
Her tired mind fogged as she made herself listen to what he was saying.
‘I may have a job for you.’
She frowned.
‘You told me you were an interior designer,’ he went on. ‘Are you only residential or do you have commercial experience?’
She blinked, remembering instantly the conversation they’d had, brief though it had been, as they’d introduced themselves to each other.
