AllFreeNovel
Share Us
So he hadn’t been distancing himself from her. He had actually been working on her behalf, or rather on behalf of their shared project, Lily was forced to admit reluctantly. She didn’t want to have to feel guilty about misjudging him, but it seemed that she was going to have to admit that she had. Just as he had misjudged her—although she suspected she would never be able to convince him of that. Not after everything that had happened between them. Not that she was going to even attempt to change his mind about her. Why should she want to?
Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what had caused such a deep-rooted loathing of what he believed she represented. Whatever it was, she couldn’t imagine him ever telling her about it. Everything about him said that he simply wasn’t the kind of man who confided in other people. He was too remote for that, too proud, Lily thought tiredly as she forced herself to respond with professional politeness.
‘It’s very generous of her to make such a kind offer. I’d love to have the opportunity to spend more time studying both the villa and her art collection.’
‘Very well, then. I’ll e-mail an acceptance of her invitation to her personal assistant.’
The chauffeur swung the car out of the static traffic and into a space he had spotted in the adjacent lane. Automatically Lily put her hand down to stop herself from sliding along the leather seat, but to her embarrassment felt only the hard, unyielding surface of Marco’s thigh.
Scarlet-faced with mortification, she snatched her hand away. Was it her imagination or were her fingertips tingling with awareness of the flesh they had accidentally touched? It was certainly her imagination that was providing her with unwanted and dangerous images of charcoal sketches of a taut male thigh. Marco’s thigh.
‘We’ll be at the airport in a few minutes.’
The calmly delivered information should have been enough to block out such images but somehow it wasn’t. Lily kept her face turned towards the car window as they approached the airport. She didn’t dare risk looking directly at Marco. Not that he could see what had been going on inside her head, of course. Thank goodness.
From his own corner of the comfortable limousine Marco cursed under his breath at the effect Lily’s brief touch on his thigh had had on him. Because he hadn’t been expecting it, that was all. There was nothing special about her touch that could have caused that almost violent surge of unstoppable desire from stabbing up his thigh and into his groin. He had been so involved in his business affairs that he hadn’t realised until now just how long he had been celibate. Too long. That was what had made him vulnerable to her. Nothing else. His intellect and his emotions were appalled by the very idea that he could find her physically desirable, given what he knew about her. She was a woman whose way of life he had very good reason to abhor—a woman he had already discovered to be involved in the same kind of world that had destroyed Olivia.
Olivia.
Lured away by promises of the fame her beauty could bring her as a top model, Olivia had been seduced by the thought of excitement and adventure far from the safety and security of her sheltered life with her parents.
It had taken him several weeks to discover that she had moved to London. He had pleaded with her to come home but she’d refused. She had told him that she had been taken on by a modelling agency and had been sharing a flat with other young models.
He had gone to see the owner of the model agency and appealed to her for help. She had seemed so sympathetic and understanding, so concerned for Olivia, that he had made the mistake of believing her when she had assured him that he had her personal guarantee that Olivia would be safe in her care, and that she would quickly tire of her new life and decide to return home.
At eighteen, he had been a gullible fool. How that knowledge still burned like acid within him. He’d had no idea that the woman was little more than a procuress, and that far from protecting the girls in her charge she was selling them into a life of drugs and prostitution. That life had led ultimately to Olivia dying from an overdose, alone in a New York hotel room.
He had buried his shame, his gullibility, his guilt deep within himself, making a vow to himself that his days of trusting others were over and that in future he would rely on logic and not emotion to direct the course of his life.
