AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His mind played a speeded-up version of what could happen next, if he pulled her into his arms and began to kiss her. It would be so easy. He gave a grim smile. It always was. The atmosphere between them was so electric that he imagined little would be required in the way of foreplay. Sometimes hot and urgent was best for the first time, he mused.
Buthewasn’t going to have sex with herand not just because of his determination to remain celibate. Because this was Rosie he was thinking about.Rosie.The tomboy he’d once rescued from a tree. Who he’d taught how to tie knots. Who had been kind to him at a time when nobody else had known how to behave around him. What right did he have to contemplate intimacy with her and then inevitably break her heart?
So focus on something else, he told himself fiercely. Focus on the only reason she’s here today—as the star turn for Monterossian PR and nothing more. Leaning back, he spoke from lips which were suddenly bone-dry. ‘You did very well in there just now.’
‘How do you know that, if you were waiting in the car?’
‘My aides usually relay initial feedback from the interview, but in this instance...’ He leaned forward to tap the blank screen of a TV fixed to the screen separating them from the driver. ‘I watched you live.’
‘You watched me live,’ she repeated, before turning those grey eyes on him, and Corso felt as if he could have fallen straight into them, like diving into a silvery lake. ‘Honestly?’
‘Honestly,’ he echoed gravely.
‘And?’
‘You were excellent. Much better than I had anticipated. As seasoned as a pro, in fact. Lionel would have been very proud.’
She bit her lip. ‘That means a lot. I can’t tell you how much.’
He wanted to tell her not to look at him like that—so wide-eyed and grateful that it was threatening to burrow beneath his defences. Nor to draw his attention to the succulence of her lips, which made him badly want to kiss them. He felt his fingers uncurl so that the pen he was holding slid to the floor of the car and only the clattering noise it made broke the fraught silence, alerting him to the fact that he had dropped it. Pleased by the distraction, Corso bent to pick it up himself but so, too, did Rosie. As they bent down to retrieve it, they reached towards the gleaming object at exactly the same time, their fingertips touching and briefly lingering. It was the faintest and most innocent of contacts and yet it was like...
Corso felt the pounding of his heart.
It was like a bolt of lightning forking through his body. It was making him grow hard. Making him want to pull her into his arms and pull the clips from her silky hair and then lay her down on that wide seat, and kiss her.
Her face was so close but he made no attempt to move his head away, even as his fingers closed around the pen before she could reach it. He could feel her warm breath on his skin and smell her scent—something subtle yet earthy, like sandalwood. The crackle of attraction between them was so strong he could almost hear it. And something stabbed at his heart as well as his gut as she looked at him with those wide grey eyes. As if he were the only man she had ever looked at like that.
Her lips were crying out for the press of his. The hard peaking of her nipples demanding he touch them. Temptation rippled over his skin and the urge to kiss her was overwhelming. But he would not give into temptation. He would not become a victim of desire. If this was a test of his own inner strength, he would pass it.
And wasn’t denial good for the soul—if such a thing existed?
Abruptly, he sat up, distancing himself physically as well as emotionally—and emotional withdrawal was something he excelled at. Putting the pen away, he opened his notebook to study it—as if he were able to make sense of the indecipherable blur of his own handwriting—before glancing up to offer her a bland smile. His official smile. The one which reminded people never to get too close. ‘Haven’t you got a cell phone or something to play with, Rosie?’ he murmured. ‘Now that I’ve massaged your ego by complimenting you on your performance, I have some things which really need my attention.’
Even the most dense of people would have recognised his words as a dismissal, and Rosie Forrester was not dense. He saw the flicker of consternation which crossed her features and the way she chewed on her lip, as if distressed. Why was she looking so damned kittenish all of a sudden? he wondered angrily. Was she hoping for all the things he’d just been fantasising about?
But her thoughts were irrelevant.
All she needed to be aware of was that nothing was going to happen between them.
Nothing.
