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‘Why aren’t you out there dancing with her?’ she asked as she saw Dylan rise swiftly to whatever challenge Carly had issued, jerking her closer and plunging himself into the mood of the music.
‘Because Dylan asked her first,’ Ethan replied lazily.
‘She was waiting for you to ask.’
‘She knows I have two left feet on the dance floor.’
‘Still, you’d make the effort for her,’ Emily couldn’t help the faintly cutting emphasis, and hurried to disguise her slip, ‘otherwise why bring us to a restaurant which features opera music and dancing as an essential part of its atmosphere?’
‘The food?’ murmured Ethan wryly. The restaurant’s exclusivity and award-winning status had been the reason that the dinner-date had been postponed, even Ethan’s considerable influence and greasing of palms not enough to gain them admittance in under a fortnight if it hadn’t been for an unexpected cancellation.
‘Well, yes, the food was rather fabulous,’ admitted Emily. The Northern Italian cuisine had been impeccable, as had the silver service and the progression of expensive wines, although she noticed that Ethan, as their driver, had been very abstemious.
As if on cue, he signalled the hovering wine waiter to pour the last of a bottle of rich, ruby-red wine into her cut-crystal goblet.
‘Oh, I don’t think I should,’ she murmured weakly as the wine began to flow, but the waiter only hesitated briefly before receiving a discreet nod from Ethan and continuing to pour her a generous half-glass.
Ethan leaned towards her, his chin on his hand, the low-burning candles in the centre of the table turning one side of his face into a saturnine mask, the other an intriguing dance of angles.
‘Why not indulge yourself? You spend all day cooped up in that little studio with only a packed lunch, and in the evening you share Peter’s restricted diet so he won’t be tempted to sneak a helping of forbidden foods. You’ve earned a night of decadence.’
A whole night? Emily firmly quashed the errant thought. She was finding it difficult to cope with Ethan in this mood. In the last few days he had suddenly jettisoned his rock-crushing approach and opted for a more refined form of torture, each day succeeding in getting a little further under her frazzled skin with his silky-smooth courtesies. Emily knew she had Peter to thank for this apparent back-down. He was stonewalling his nephew and had sternly instructed him not to badger Emily with his questions.
‘I think I’ve indulged myself a little too much already,’ she said, giving him a slightly fuzzy smile, ‘food and wine.’
‘I noticed you mopping up your plate with your bread,’ he teased, and saw the blush sweep up from the softly draped neckline of her floaty blue dress.
‘I couldn’t help it—that sauce was divine,’ she said guiltily.
‘I suppose I did come across as rather greedy.’ She had noticed Carly had consumed only a small portion of each of her courses.
‘I liked seeing you eat with such wonderful abandon,’ he told her. ‘You were in ecstasy with every bite. Dinner was a very sensual experience.’
She laughed, her hazy blue eyes not quite certain whether to be embarrassed or flattered. ‘And then I went and ordered that chocolate dessert…I know I should have been like Carly, and had the fresh fruit and shaved ice—’
Ethan stroked the back of his fingers lightly over her rounded shoulder, bared by the self-tied straps of the halter-neck dress and down to the warm crease in the crook of her elbow.
‘You could never be like Carly,’ he murmured. ‘She has angles, you have curves…soft, pretty, round curves that flow into one another with intriguing dips and hollows that make a man curious to explore each and every one…’ His finger rubbed along the sensitive crease, finding the quick throb of her pulse on the inside of her elbow.
She took gulp of her wine, inadvertently trapping his finger instead of dislodging it as she had planned. ‘Ethan—’
‘You know, that dress is almost the exact shade of your eyes,’ he decided, looking deeply into her flustered gaze.
‘I—that’s why I bought it,’ she stammered, sitting back in her chair and dropping her hands in her lap to give her the excuse to shake off his intrusive touch. ‘It’s one of my favourites…I hope you can’t still smell the smoke on it,’ she blurted.
As a distraction it was a disaster. His smile warned her of her error as he dipped his head, inhaling the scent from her cleavage with a long, slow pull of his lungs, his chin brushing the slope of her breast, his hair lightly tickling the underside of her jaw.
Emily saw a middle-aged couple at another table watching them with raised eyebrows.
‘Ethan, for goodness’ sake!’
He raised his head, his eyes burning ice. ‘Nothing but warm, lush woman with sexy undertones of sugar and spice and all things particularly nice.’
‘And you’re certainly slugs-and-snails at the moment,’ she said shakily. ‘You’re supposed to be here with Carly. How would she feel if she saw you—saw you—?’
‘Sniffing around you?’ he mocked throatily. ‘She won’t. She’s too preoccupied with snubbing my brother.’
Emily glanced over to the dance floor, where sure enough Carly was looking haughtily up at Dylan as he recklessly dipped her over his arm.
