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‘Beth,’ he began, reaching out to catch hold of her arm. Unable to move in time to prevent him, Beth went rigid as she felt his fingers circle her wrist.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he asked her huskily. His thumb was resting on the pulse in her wrist and she could feel it starting to hammer frantically against his touch. He could obviously feel it as well, because his thumb started to move against her skin in a rhythmic, circular stroking movement that should have been soothing but for some reason had quite the opposite effect on her hypersensitive nervous system.
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she lied jerkily, willing herself not to allow the deep tremor she could feel beginning deep within her body like some subterranean force to manifest itself in open shivers and shudders of reaction.
And then, to her own self-contempt, she heard herself asking him sharply, ‘Did you enjoy yourself last night—with your family?’
The appraising look he gave her made her wish she had kept silent.
‘Yes, I did,’ he agreed calmly, ‘but nowhere near so much as I would have had you been with us, and certainly nowhere near so much as I would had we been alone...’
Beth’s gasp was, she assured herself, one of furious female outrage. How dared he have the barefaced cheek to stand there and say such a thing to her when she knew, when she had seen with her own eyes, just how he had spent his evening and with whom?
‘Tonight, I want you to have dinner with me,’ he was continuing. ‘Tonight, I want you,’ he added, underlining the sensuality of his message and his desire.
But that desire was faked, flawed, a lie, and Beth knew it.
‘I can’t. I’ve already made arrangements for this evening,’ she told him coolly.
Ridiculous to feel that she was at fault just because of the way he managed to fake those dark shadows in his eyes and that male look of hurt withdrawal in the tightness of his mouth. She was the one who was being badly treated, not him.
* * *
‘You’re not going to find what you’re looking for at any of the factories on your list,’ Alex informed Beth as they left the third factory.
‘No. I’m coming to realise that,’ Beth said testily. She felt both tired and disappointed, but that was not the real cause of her defensive anger and she knew it. Five hours of being cooped up in a small car with Alex was beginning to have its effect on her equilibrium—and her emotions.
She had done everything she could to hold him at a distance, but to her chagrin, instead of recognising that she had guessed what he was up to, he’d seemed to think that she wasn’t very well, anxiously asking her in some concern several times if she was suffering from a headache or feeling unwell. Only her own cautious nature had prevented her from telling him that if she was suffering from any kind of malaise then he was its cause. But there was more to what she was experiencing than that, she was forced to acknowledge honestly.
Had she simply been able to feel for him the contempt and disdain she knew he deserved then there would have been no need for her defensive and protective anger. But against all logic, and certainly against any cerebral desire on her part, she was unable to deny her body’s physical reaction, her body’s physical response to him; that was why she was getting so uptight and angry.
Every time he made some comment about wanting her, every time he alluded to how much he desired her, she could feel herself starting to react to him. And she had even, at one morale-lowering point, found herself wishing that he would put his softly suggestive comment about longing to silence her sharp tongue with his mouth into action.
‘You’re so prickly that a man can’t help but feel tempted to wonder what it would take to make you purr,’ he’d informed her outrageously when she had refused his suggestion that they find somewhere to have lunch.
‘You’re right,’ he had agreed, when she had told him shortly that she didn’t want to eat, his eyes suddenly dark and hot. ‘My appetite isn’t for food either. What I really want to taste is the sweet softness of your flesh. Its juices will be like nectar, honey to my lips, whilst—’
‘Stop it,’ Beth had demanded frantically, unable to screen out the mental images his erotic words had provoked for her. How could she dislike him so much, distrust him so much, and yet, at the same time, want him so much?
It was just sex, she told herself fiercely. That was all. For some reason he had aroused within her a hitherto unexperienced need, a desire she had never suspected herself capable of feeling. The hesitant and awkward experiments of her teenage years had simply not prepared her for what she was feeling now—and that was all it was, a quirky build-up of the sexual desire she should perhaps have felt at a younger age but which, for some reason, she had not, and which was now manifesting itself in this totally unacceptable reaction to Alex Andrews.
Yes, that was what it was, she decided in relief. It was just sex...just an itch that needed scratching... Shocked by the unfamiliar directness of her own thoughts, Beth tried to concentrate on the countryside they were driving through. Just because she now knew the cause of her disturbing reaction to Alex, that didn’t mean she had to give in to it, she warned herself. And at least it meant she no longer had to worry about it, she told herself in relief.
‘Look...I’m sorry if I seem to be crowding you or rushing you,’ Alex was saying gruffly at her side. ‘All this is new territory for me, you know. I’ve never actually felt like this before, experienced anything like this before. I always knew that one day I would fall in love just as passionately and permanently as my grandfather fell in love with my grandmother, but I have to confess I didn’t expect it to be so...’
Heavens, but he was quick, clever... Beth acknowledged as she forced herself to be detached and step outside her own feelings to admire the adroit way he was handling not just the situation but her as well.
First the advance, now the back-off. No doubt he expected her to feel chagrin and to start pursuing him. And as for that schmaltzy comment about his grandparents...!
CHAPTER FIVE
‘I’M SORRY THAT none of the factories we visited today came up to your expectations.’ Alex joined her in the hotel’s gift shop and looked at his watch. ‘It’s too late for me to organise anything now, but why don’t I give my cousins a ring and arrange for you to visit their factory? We could...’
They moved back into the hotel foyer, which was very busy with business-suited people who Beth assumed must be attending one of the conferences in the hotel the manager had told her about. She felt tired and disappointed, but those feelings weren’t the real cause of the desire she felt to snap sharply at Alex.
>
Why, when she knew exactly what kind of man he was and exactly what he was after, was she experiencing this sense of new panic and fear that her self-control might not prove strong enough for her to hold him at bay? What was the matter with her? Surely she had enough intelligence to know that once one had been struck by lightning a first time one did not return to the same tree in a thunderstorm and stand there waiting for it to happen again. Not unless one was a very peculiar sort of person who thrived on suffering pain.
