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He glanced across, saw her, and gave a grim kind of smile.
Fran walked over to his car just as he climbed out of the driver’s seat, managing to turn a few heads as he did so, even though he was wearing nothing more sensational than faded denims and a beaten-up flying jacket. But he did look remarkable and the casual clothes did nothing to conceal his raw sex appeal.
His hair was windswept and his eyes sapphire-dark, and Fran remembered the feel of his arms around her waist as they had danced, his lazy suggestion that they should find somewhere private, and wondered what it would be like to go to bed with a man like Sam Lockhart.
She felt like an explorer entering uncharted territory. ‘Hello, Sam,’ she said quietly.
‘Hi.’ He kept his voice noncommittal, but he wished she wouldn’t look at him with that solemn expression of expectation. He stared at her. In the cold, bright light of an early spring day he was discovering that it was going to be difficult to sustain the great rage he had felt while talking to Cormack. After all, she was here, wasn’t she? Now it was all up to him….
‘Good flight?’
Fran shook her head. ‘A bit bumpy.’
‘Pick up your connection okay?’
She nodded.
He wasn’t sure that he liked her quiet and compliant like this. Looking like she was about to have her teeth pulled. He jerked his head in the direction of the station café. ‘Do you want to get a coffee in there? Can’t guarantee the quality, but it’ll warm you up.’
She was more than a little surprised. After several sleepless nights dreading this confrontation, she had been expecting growled commands, not consideration. ‘No, I’ll be fine. We might as well get going.’
‘Okay,’ he nodded, silently observing her through the lush, dark curtain of his lashes, as he put her one small bag in the back.
Again, he was slightly perplexed at what she was wearing. Apart from that night at the ball—when she had been dressed to kill, and more—she was obviously a woman who believed that less was more.
She wore camel-coloured trousers which were casual, but definitely not jeans. He suspected that she would consider jeans unprofessional when she was working. And a big, creamy roll-neck sweater underneath a workaday brown jacket. He wondered who had advised her to wear those neutral colours so that she merged into the background. Big mistake. She had looked utterly sensational in that scarlet ball gown. Maybe it was deliberate. Maybe she liked resembling the wallpaper. Blending in safely.
He looked at her white face and felt another irritating stab of concern. ‘We’ll drive with the window open. You look like you could do with some fresh air.’
‘Why are you being so nice to me?’ she demanded suspiciously.
‘Because it makes sense.’ He clipped the words out, allowing the mantle of hostility to settle around his shoulders with relief. ‘You’re here to work, aren’t you? I need to keep you relatively happy, since I don’t want you simmering away with resentment and glaring at everyone, just as we start singing “Happy Birthday” to my mother!’
She felt oddly disappointed, but didn’t show it as she slithered into the vehicle. ‘I would never be so unprofessional!’
He shot her a look as he climbed in beside her. ‘But you think that arranging an ambush of embittered women falls into the category of professional behaviour?’
She didn’t answer, but began edging away from him a little instead, thinking that if his legs weren’t quite so long and so lean, then she might be able to tear her eyes away from them!
He knew exactly what was going on in her mind. She was as aware of him as he was of her! It was written on every delicious pore in her body which those boring and staid clothes couldn’t quite disguise.
‘Do you often have to go and stay in people’s homes like this?’ he questioned, unprepared for the slicing sensation of jealousy at the thought of her alone in a house with some of the men of his acquaintance.
‘I do if it’s a proper house party involving several meals, and it’s out in the middle of nowhere like this.’
He frowned. ‘Isn’t it strangely…intimate, staying with people you hardly know?’
She wondered if he had used the word just to embarrass her. ‘No more intimate than groups of work colleagues who go away on conferences and stay in the same hotel and eat breakfast together, surely? It’s just a job,’ she told him, though that was not strictly true in this particular instance. This time it did feel strange. Not like work at all. And it was in grave danger of becoming—to use his word—intimate.
He drove out of the station and shot her a sideways glance. ‘So. Pleased to be back in England?’
Fran almost smiled. Almost. ‘I’ll leave that to your imagination.’
‘You’d rather be somewhere else?’
Anywhere! ‘A beach in Tobago would do,’ she said drily. ‘But—’
‘Beggars can’t be choosers, right?’
