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A dewy-eyed innocent? With instinctive male appreciation he watched the sway of her seductively rounded bottom as she neared the top of the stairs, and thought not.
Definitely not.
A girl that lovely would have had males swarming round her since she reached puberty.
He drank his wine and did his best to relax back on the sofa.
Lying, or not, what did it matter? He’d be back in Spain in a couple of weeks and Rosie would be out of his life. Not that she was actually in it, he reminded himself forcibly. She was simply a temporary member of staff. Different from the women he normally mixed with and therefore intriguing in an odd sort of way. And sexy with it.
Shooting to his feet, he gave himself a refill and shrugged out of his suit jacket, removed his tie and opened the top two buttons of his shirt. He felt strangely overheated.
He had to concentrate on what was really important, put Rosie Lambert right out of his mind. Opening Marcus’s eyes to the type of woman Terrina really was before he brought her back to England as his future wife was his immediate priority. Once the greedy little gold-digger was here at Troone Manor, with her feet under the table, so to speak, and an engagement ring on her finger, there would be no getting rid of her. It was up to him to see that things didn’t get that far.
Turning back to the sofa, wine glass in hand, he glimpsed a corner of the book Rosie must have stuffed underneath the cushion and swore softly. Just as he was getting her out of his head she had jumped right back in there again!
In her rush to pull him down a peg she had forgotten her bedtime reading matter. His brows peaking again at her strange choice, he came to a snap decision. He would take it up to her. She’d only been gone a few minutes, not long enough to already be in bed. It would give him the opportunity to hand it over with some polite pleasantry, letting her know there were no feelings—hard or otherwise—over the happenings of this evening and thereby close the chapter completely.
Rosie had had the quickest shower on record. She felt all churned up as she pattered barefooted back to her bedroom, tying the sash of her old cotton robe around her overheated body. Her clothes were still in an untidy heap on the floor, just as she’d left them. She and Sharon had been expressly instructed to take their daily washing down to the laundry room every evening, where Mrs Partridge would deal with them first thing in the morning and avoid a backlog.
Rosie kicked them under the bed. She was venturing nowhere.
She couldn’t run the risk of bumping into Sebastian again. Not this evening. Not ever, if she could somehow avoid it.
Her hands trembling, she lifted the pendant from where she’d left it on the old-fashioned
washstand that served as a dressing table. She had worn it, for safe-keeping, ever since her mother had given it to her. Now the idea of fastening it back on again after her shower and having it next to her skin was repellent to her.
It glittered at her, an uncomfortable reminder of how close she’d come to copying her mother’s mistake, of making love with an unattainable man, going down a road that led to misery.
Grabbing a handful of tissues, she wrapped it and thrust it to the back of a drawer, then leant against the top of the chest, her heart pounding.
It would have been so easy. If Sebastian had wanted to make love to her she wouldn’t have been able to stop him. She wouldn’t have wanted to. And, despite knowing she was being utterly stupid, her body still clamoured for him, her breasts swollen and sensitised, an insistent sweet and burning ache between her thighs.
Just reliving those fleeting minutes when his tongue had plundered her eagerly parted lips, his mouth as hot as sin, the long hands that had caressed, shaped and moulded her aching breasts, made her knees go weak and the blood in her veins turn to liquid fire.
Clamping her soft lips together, Rosie pushed herself upright.
She had to stop fantasising, pull herself together. It had only been a kiss, for heaven’s sake! It had meant absolutely nothing to him. In fact, she was at pains to point out to herself, when she’d responded the way she had, far from turning him on, he’d backed off in double quick time!
So why had a simple kiss made her lose the sense she’d been born with?
Because she was twenty years old and had never had a boyfriend and her hormones were telling her it was time for her to find a mate?
But that didn’t gel with what had happened when she’d had her first real kiss, did it? Dwayne Evans had been the acknowledged school stud. All the girls had drooled over him.
Blonde, clean cut and hunky, he had fallen in beside her as she’d walked home on a dark December afternoon in what had turned out to be her final year at school.
She hadn’t minded chatting, but when he’d grabbed her and kissed her hard and furiously she’d felt nothing but outrage, when she’d known darn well that all the girls in her class would have been swooning.
He had towered over her, but even so the ferocity of her fists flailing into his stomach had knocked him off balance, and the way she’d disgustedly wiped the back of her hand over her mouth as she’d tried to get rid of the taste of him had been more than enough for him to tell his mates that Rosie Lambert was a frigid bitch and put her on the receiving end of horrible lewd comments.
So what was the difference? She’d had hormones back then, hadn’t she? The way Sebastian Garcia made her feel was an enigma.
She had come to find out what she could about her father, but had discovered something else instead. The unwelcome knowledge that, like her poor mother, she could fall victim to lust.
Disgusted with herself, she turned to the mirror, grabbed the hairbrush and dragged it with vicious swipes through her hair.
She was blinking back tears when she heard a brisk tapping on her bedroom door.
