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CHAPTER TWO
EFFIEFELTHERHEART leap into her throat as the car door slammed shut. Seconds later the huge black SUV began to move.
She couldn’t believe what was happening.
One moment she’d been standing on the pavement...the next Achileas Kane had been propelling her into the car and she had obeyed, driven not by the hand guiding her but by the sheer force of his personality.
And now she was lying across the back seat of his car, his body wedged alongside hers, muscular legs a hair’s breadth away from her thighs, his right arm resting lightly across her waist.
Just as if they were in bed together.
Thinking about her neatly made bed with its faded quilt, she felt her cheeks burn hot against the cool leather seat. As if a man like him would share her bed. Only Jasper had ever done that. And he was a cat.
Her breath caught.
This couldn’t be real. Things like this happened to other people—not her. Her life had always been so small and contained. But none of that changed the fact that this was happening. To her. Now.
She swallowed against the mix of emotions rising in her throat and finally, when she got her breathing under control again, she said quietly, ‘What exactly do you think you’re doing?’
‘I believe it’s called an extraction.’
His voice was close, and deep, and she felt it move through her. Maybe if it had just been the nearness of his body she could have stayed remote—after all, she couldn’t actually see him. But this close she couldn’t block out the scent of him, and she had been right. There was lavender and caramel. But there was also the scent of his skin—clean, warm...
Closing her eyes, she breathed in shakily.
Male.
‘Keep your head down.’
Her eyes snapped open. No please, she noted. Then again, it wasn’t a request but an order, given by a man who had never had to ask for anything. Probably he’d never thanked anyone either. Why would he? No doubt he had been raised from birth believing he was entitled to the life he led. Who would he feel the need to thank?
She couldn’t see much through the tinted glass window, but she heard the hotel doors burst open and then a man’s voice, bellowing like a maddened bull.
‘Where the hell is he?’ he roared. ‘Achileas! Achileas!’
There was a quivering silence like the hush before the start of a play, and then he bellowed again—a furious, tumbling tirade of words in a foreign language... Russian maybe. It sounded like either a curse or a challenge. Amplified by his anger and frustration, the man’s howls reverberated down the street, and even though the car was moving, Effie couldn’t stop herself from shivering.
‘You don’t need to be frightened. Trust me, his bark is worse than his bite.’
Achileas’s deep voice cut through the pounding of her heartbeat, and she felt the scratch of his stubble against the shoulder of her dress as he adjusted his position.
‘I’m not frightened,’ she said quietly, and she was surprised to find that she was telling the truth.
Only that didn’t make much sense, because surely, she should be frightened. After all, she had just been bundled into a car by a complete stranger. But—and this made no sense at all—he was the reason she wasn’t scared.
Stunned, surprised, but not scared.
She cleared her throat and edged away from him—away from the hypnotic, destabilising pull of his scent. ‘But nor am I particularly inclined to trust anything you say, Mr Kane. Given that you just dragged me off the street in broad daylight.’
‘A necessary precaution,’ he said, batting away her accusation with the expert dexterity of a lion flicking away flies with his tail. ‘My head of security had information that a situation was developing. I didn’t want you to get caught in the crossfire.’
His arm shifted against her and every nerve in her body went haywire, her skin pulling so tightly around her bones it felt like she had been shrink wrapped.
‘I thought you said his bark was worse than his bite?’
She felt him hesitate. His irritation buffeted the car’s interior. ‘I did say that, and I was telling the truth. Roman Ivanov isn’t violent, but he is volatile, and right now he’s a little upset.’
As if to prove the point, another barrage of invective rippled down the street.
