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Whatever that meant. She didn’t think it would be wise to ask. He really was much too close. Sarah felt her entire body go quite rigid. Yet to move away would tell him that he affected her, and then the swirling danger would become something else again, something intolerable… She must project complete indifference. Somehow.
‘Then perhaps you will respect what I have to say,’ she uttered stiffly, blocking out the impulse to leap on to one of the other sofas. ‘It could be weeks before Piers even gets your message. And then there’s no guarantee he’ll respond.’
‘A man not respond to his daughter’s plight? How could that be so?’
He was not taking her seriously. She could hear the laid-back amusement in his voice; it curled around her, stroked her, caressed her, crept into the very privacy of her soul. His hand moved slowly, taking a shining tendril of her hair between his long fingers, holding it gently, rubbing a little as if enjoying its silkiness.
He was a supremely physical man…
‘He doesn’t even like me,’ she muttered gruffly. ‘We don’t like each other. We’re chalk and cheese. After my mother died he packed me off to boarding-school, but I did my best, when I saw him, to get him to moderate his behaviour. It didn’t work out. Wine, women and work, never a thought to how embarrassing his behaviour—Well,’ she bit off, ‘that’s another story.’ She wished he’d stop playing with her hair! It was…it was… ‘The point being,’ she spluttered nervily, ‘he lives through all his five senses and he has spectacularly vivid senses, I might tell you. I prefer to use my mind and lead a tidy, professionally rewarding life. He won’t renounce the pleasure of the moment for my sake. That’s what I’m trying to get over to you.’
‘No, that is not what you are trying to convey at all,’ he said smokily, his fingers still intent on the enjoyment of what he was doing with her hair. ‘You are trying to tell me that you have no emotions, no sensuality. That you are a properly programmed robot, without a sex. Is that not so?’
He edged a little closer, his fingers sliding up to her scalp, turning her head, making her face him, making her recognise the unholy silver gleam deep in those lustrous black eyes. ‘Well, protest away, Salome, but I know better. I know all about passion, therefore I can recognise it easily. It sang out to me; I saw it throbbing inside you, fighting to get out of that enforced sexless exterior on only our second encounter.’
His fingers were warm on her scalp, stroking, gently kneading, and she twisted her head away, her face going scarlet as she snapped out, ‘Don’t call me that! It’s not my name; my name is—’
‘Salome,’ he interrupted with lazy amusement, capturing her bristling body with his hands, sliding them up to fasten round the naked skin of her midriff. ‘It’s more appropriate than you like to think. Shall I demonstrate?’
No! Her brain said no, but her mouth wouldn’t function. How, for pity’s sake, could she expect it to when his fingers were edging beneath the oyster silk, finding the full undercurve of her breasts, lingering there, her lacy bra no barrier at all?
He moved closer and she stopped breathing as tiny flickers of sexual tension quivered all over her body and exploded in a million shattering shards of wild sensation as the pads of his fingers found the taut nipples and began to tease them.
There was fever in her blood, wicked and wild and wanton. It was burning her up and she felt sweat break out from every pore, slicking her body, and with a groan of utter helplessness she slithered towards him, writhing, winding her arms around his neck; his head came up, his mouth so close to hers that she could feel the heat of it, the passionate heat, taste and savour the kiss that surely had to come, and someone knocked on the door and she went into shock, her eyes wide with the wildness of knowing how deplorably she’d behaved.
He straightened up slowly, his smile conspiratorial and lazy as he removed one hand to rest it gently against her knee, replacing the other along the back of the sofa as he instructed, ‘Entre.’
She had never, ever been so pleased to see anyone in the whole of her life as she was to see Rosalia and, presumably, her son Marcos. She could actually breathe again, albeit shakily, as the two of them set the covered dishes they were carrying, on trays that looked as large as barn doors, neatly and efficiently on a table in front of one of the windows.
Shifting along the sofa, as far away as she could get from that long, lean, scorchingly sexy body, she slapped his hand away from her knee and hoped she didn’t look as hectic as she felt. But very much feared that she did when, as Francisco got fluidly to his feet and strolled over to the table to open the wine, saying something in a dusky undertone to Rosalia, Marcos gave her a long and strangely complicated look.
He wasn’t much above eighteen, slightly built, very dark, with almost girlish features, but that look was nothing but pure male speculation. A mystifying mixture of approval and disapproval. And only when he turned back to what he’d been doing did the penny drop.
Rosalia would have gossiped about their employer’s new mistress, closeted up in that princely suite of rooms. That quick, revealing assessment had said quite plainly that her status wasn’t approved of, but her fluttery feminine appearance was. Oh! It was all too much!
And that was why the louse had touched her up! To get her all in a dither to reinforce the reason he’d given his staff for her presence here. If she’d been sniping and snapping at him, sitting on the opposite side of the room, his cover would have been blown!
Next time he tried that on again she’d be good and ready for him. Ready to slap his head until it flew off his shoulders!
‘Come. Eat. Drink.’ The dark drawl was like a punch in the solar plexus, making her poor head spin. But when he added, investing his voice with sinful meaning, ‘We shall not be disturbed again tonight,’ she was able to hang on to herself and remind herself tartly of what happened to little girls who met up with the big bad wolf.
And it most certainly wasn’t going to happen to her. She knew exactly what to say to cool his spurious ardour, make him forget his idle desire to have a little fun at the expense of silly Sarah Scott.
Gratifyingly cool now, she set her face and joined him at the table, letting him help her to the various dishes, even though she had completely lost her appetite. Then, when he was seated, and before he could start saying things, things that would get her all hot and bothered again, she calmly began her defensive attack.
‘As you seemed unable to believe that Piers won’t come running to my rescue with your tearful, repentant sister on his arm, may I put it to you that she would probably refuse to set foot inside this place again?’
Keeping her face stony, her eyes on the stem of her wine glass as she twisted it round and round in her fingers, she refused to let the sudden dark silence from the opposite side of the table affect her in the slightest. He had asked for it.
‘After all,’ she went on, ‘there can be little doubt now that she and Piers are an item. She is probably revelling in the freedom to be a woman instead of a cardboard princess, the owner of more frilly clothes than she could ever wear, shut away from the wicked, contaminated world in lovely, lonely isolation. Why should she come back when there is nothing here for her? When someone is actually teaching her how to live?’
‘You condone what that old man has done to her?’ He slammed his cutlery down on his plate with a violence that had her jumping out of her skin. She glanced up at him quickly. His anger was so cold, it froze her bones. But at least it had stopped his sexual overtures, and that, for her peace of mind and self-respect, was the only thing that mattered.
‘No,’ she returned levelly. ‘I can’t. His affairs— as you said once yourself—are legendary. But up until now, and as far as I know, always with older, mature women. Widows, mostly.’
‘Widows?’ he scorned bitingly. ‘Are you forgetting Liberty Torrence? Her third husband—or was it her fourth?—threw her out when her affair with your father hit the headlines.’
Forget? How could she ever forget that public humiliation?
