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He looked amused and disbelieving. ‘When will be the time and the place, Rose?’
Rose knew this was her moment to seize the reins. Be the cool, sophisticated woman who held all the cards instead of the hot, hormone-driven girl who was pushing the cards off the table and landing in his lap.
But when she met his eyes she was confronted with hooded sexual dynamite. He was looking at her all moody and brooding, as if weighing up his options with her.
Rose moistened her lips. They felt swollen and incredibly sensitive. All the dating advice she’d ever offered had been predicated on waiting, getting to know one another, shared interests… This was moving awfully fast. If he kissed her now they wouldn’t be stopping, she thought faintly, heart pounding, and had she really come all this way to be tumbled in the back of a car? Then she realised the car had stopped. Had probably been stopped for a while.
‘Ivan will take you to the apartment,’ Plato instructed with a slight smile, as if he knew what she’d been thinking. His eyes did that lazy, satisfied thing all over her body. ‘You can settle in, freshen up.’ His charismatic smile flashed at her. ‘Have your bath.’
Rose suddenly really wanted to drag him into that bath—waiting be damned. Except he was opening the door of the limo.
“One more thing, Rose,” he said seriously. “I don’t want you to answer the door to the apartment, and once you’re inside don’t go out.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Just do as I ask and there won’t be a problem.”
Then he was gone. He didn’t try to kiss her, and he didn’t even say goodbye…after taking away her choices and issuing orders.
Rose pulled herself upright, her knees knocking together as the car pulled away from the kerb.
Her mind blank, her stomach stone-cold.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ROSE gazed medit
atively into her glass of tea as the savoury pastries called piroshki the waiter had recommended went cold on the plate. Her appetite had left her at about the time Plato had issued orders in the limo, placing her under house arrest.
Except she wasn’t in his house. She’d walked into his apartment and taken one look at the stunningly designed rooms, absorbed the fact of the money it had taken to create something like that and felt like the unsophisticated farm girl from a small town the Hilligers had always painted her to be. Worse, all of a sudden all she’d been able to see were the parties the tabloids said Plato was famous for holding there, the blondes she had read about who had been in his bed. She hadn’t even been able to find his bed, and once she’d found herself looking for it Rose had lost patience. She’d stamped her foot, jammed her arms into her coat and marched out of that apartment with her head held high.
Which had brought her here, to a restaurant adjoining the gallery at the end of his street. She’d spent the past hour drinking tea, calming down, and trying to figure out what to do.
This is where your hormones get you, Rose Harkness, she grumbled to herself. Halfway across the world and at the beck and call of another big, bossy man…thinks he can tell you what to do…wants to treat you like his little sex doll…locking you up in his apartment…
Her thoughts skidded to a halt. This wasn’t about being controlled. It was about her own fears. Because Plato wasn’t trying to change her. From the get-go he’d accepted her on her own terms. In fact she got the impression he enjoyed her standing up to him. She did. She liked bumping noses with him. She liked it a little too well.
Oh, heck, she wanted to give this a chance. Except to be with a man—this man in particular—she was going to have to open herself up to being hurt, maybe to being loved. To the whole drama. To the possibility of loss.
Three seconds on the bull, Rose? a tougher little voice intervened. Is that going to be your lifetime record?
But she was scared. None of this was about what had happened to her in Houston. This was all about her deepest fear—the one that had left her wide open to a guy like Bill Hilliger. The death of her mother and her father’s retreat into grief. No room in his heart for anyone—even a small girl who had no one else. She had seen what happened when love was taken away. It had been taken away from her too. She was so afraid of falling in love and having love taken away she had chosen a man she would never love, and in the process she had idealised the notion of finding that one special person. She’d built a business around it! And because of her fear she needed that special man to be perfect before she took a chance.
Plato sure as heck wasn’t perfect.
Mr You-Stay-Indoors-and-Stay-Put certainly wasn’t perfect…
But he was just about everything she’d ever wanted. A man who swept her off her feet and looked at her as if she’d been invented just for him, who seemed to relish the fire in her. And sometimes in life you had to take a chance.
She was willing to take that chance with Plato, but right now, thinking about the apartment and the parties and the blondes, the orders and the fact she was sitting here alone, she was getting the real impression that the only risk he was taking was an alteration to his busy schedule.
* * *
Plato entered the down-lit environment of the private bar off Ulitsa Svobody, scanning the tables, the look of the place, satisfied by its lack of pretension. From outside you wouldn’t know it was here, and yet it did the best business of any of his bars in the city—had done since its opening six months ago. It was closed right now.
He’d spent the better part of the morning talking to his board and fielding questions and now he was about done. He needed to touch base with Nik Stolypin, old friend and second-in-command, and then he was going home for some recreational activity with his little import from Texas. So far, so normal.
Yeah, keeping telling yourself that and maybe you’ll believe it.
