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‘Marcus!’ Polly gasped in disbelief. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ Marcus asked her laconically.
‘This is my room,’ Polly informed him angrily. ‘How did you get in, and why are you having a shower?’
‘Correction, this is our room,’ Marcus informed her grimly. ‘It seems that the hotel has made a mistake and booked us both into the same room—perhaps because we share the same surname and the same address. I don’t know, and right now I don’t particularly care just how the error occurred. But what I can tell you, before you say anything else, is that the hotel is fully booked and there are no spare rooms.’
‘What?’ Polly rubbed her eyes sleepily. She felt as though she had strayed into some weird surreal dream. It seemed an impossibly bizarre coincidence that she and Marcus should have been given the same room, but one look at his face warned her that he was in no mood for her to tell him that she didn’t believe him. And besides, what possible motive could he have for lying?
And then a horrible suspicion struck her.
‘You haven’t brought…anyone back with you, have you?’ she asked him huskily.
There was a small, sharp silence before Marcus replied curtly, ‘No, I haven’t.’
‘Oh…’
She stifled a huge yawn. Even though the sound of the shower had woken her up she was still feeling the effect of the herbal sleeping tablet she had taken. Her eyes felt heavy and she longed to go back to bed, curl up and go back to sleep. To stifle another yawn she raised her hand to her mouth, and as she did so her overlarge robe fell open revealing the soft satin-skinned curve of her breast.
Marcus felt as though someone had kicked him in the stomach, and the urge to take hold of her and bury his face in the creamy scented warmth of her neck, to slide his hands inside her robe and touch her, feel her naked body against his own, was so acute and overwhelming that he had to remind himself of just what Polly was doing in London to stop himself from giving in to it. And because of that, and his unwanted jealousy, he heard himself demanding angrily, ‘Just why are you here anyway? I should have thought the least Bernstein could have done was to offer you a room for the night, even if he didn’t want you sharing the one he had.’
Polly could hardly believe her ears.
What Marcus was implying about her wasn’t just ugly, it was also offensive, and she knew that if her senses, her emotional responses hadn’t been softened and dulled a little by the sleeping tablet they would probably have reduced her to shocked, shamed tears.
Holding her head up high, she told Marcus quietly, ‘You shouldn’t judge others by your own standards, Marcus. Phil did offer me a room. In fact—’ she gave him a small sad smile, ‘—he offered me a suite…’
Now her eyes were clouding with tears, and as he read the underlying message in her words Marcus cursed himself under his breath. What on earth had possessed him to be so stupid?
‘You might consider me to be some silly middle-aged woman so desperate for sex that I’ll grab at any chance to…to have a man,’ she told him, scarlet-cheeked, ‘but that doesn’t mean that I am one.
‘I just can’t get it right with you, can I, Marcus? You’re either condemning me for being dull and boringly faithful to my husband’s memory or you’re accusing me of having some kind of mid-life sexual problem.’
‘Polly,’ Marcus protested, reaching out to stop her as she started to turn away from him, but she had moved too quickly and as she pulled away he was left holding the empty fabric of her robe.
As she felt the towelling fabric slide free of her shoulder and then her body Polly gave an outraged gasp of shock, turning back to try to hold onto it; but it was too late.
For a second neither of them moved, and even though Polly was burningly conscious of the way Marcus was looking at her body, of the tension she could feel emanating from him, the hot male desire she could almost feel filling the distance between them, it was as though somehow she was experiencing these things at a distance. It was as though it could not possibly be happening, not possibly be her standing here, her body naked to Marcus’s black-eyed burning scrutiny, her nipples taut and full, aching with a sensuality that shocked as well as tormented her, her belly soft, quivering with that same feeling.
And then Marcus moved and she was jerked sharply into reality, crying fiercely, ‘No,’ as she backed away from not just the physical presence of him but the dangerous heat and scent of him as well.
He might be nearly as naked as she was herself but his was a different kind of nudity—a man’s nudity—which somehow, instead of robbing him of control and power, only seemed to reinforce it, just as it reinforced his maleness.
