AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘With you, apparently.’
The muscles in his forearm bunched beneath his jacket. ‘Yes, Miss Marple, with me. But it’s not a big deal.’
‘It sounds like it’s a big deal to him.’
Abruptly he shifted away from her. She sat up, smoothing her hair away from her face. He watched her in silence, his blue gaze cool and assessing. His mouth—that beautiful, sensual curve—flattened into a line, and then he shrugged.
‘He makes a lot of noise, but I’ve dealt with far worse. It comes with the territory.’ His lips curved again, but he wasn’t smiling. ‘Home invasion. Kidnapping. Carjacking. I’ve had people threaten to burn down my house. While I’m in it. Not that I’d expect you to know what that feels like.’
Which, roughly translated, meant that he was rich and important; and she was not.
She stared at him for a long moment. ‘I don’t have to know,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t make a habit of upsetting people.’
He leaned back against the leather upholstery and stared at her steadily, a muscle pulsing in his cheek. ‘It was nothing,’ he said finally. ‘Just a misunderstanding.’
There was a gritty silence. Effie thought back to the beautiful blonde-haired woman in the lift.
She might be inexperienced when it came to men but being a virgin didn’t mean she was stupid. And you couldn’t work as a chambermaid in a hotel like the Stanmore and not have your eyes opened. Or recognise a mess when you saw one.
Achileas’s mess just happened to be a tall, leggy blonde instead of a pile of discarded towels.
At a guess, the woman was most likely the angry Russian’s girlfriend. Or wife. Hence his bellowing fury. Not that it was any of her business.
She lifted her chin. ‘Did he not look where he was going either?’
For a moment he didn’t reply, and she held her breath as the silence in the car swallowed up her words. He did this, she thought. He was like a black hole, so intense and powerful that everything around him just buckled to his will.
‘When you said you weren’t frightened, I didn’t believe you...’
His voice was soft with a huskiness that made her shiver.
‘But you’re not, are you?’
As his eyes arrowed into hers Effie felt her toes curl up in her shoes. Their intensity made her skin sting. Nobody had ever looked at her like that before—properly, intently, as if he was peeling off not just her uniform but her skin. As if he was seeing her.
Her heart thudded beneath her uniform. Her stomach was trembling with panic—far more panic than she’d felt when he jostled her into the car. Not because of his question, but because for the first time in her entire life she wasn’t just a daughter or a maid or even a wannabe entrepreneur.
She was a woman.
An unfamiliar heat tiptoed across her skin, and she stared up at him, giddy with the utter newness of the sensations she was feeling. She had lied to him. He did scare her a little. But only like a deer caught in the dazzling beam of headlights. He was just too perfect. Too real. Too solid. Too close.
Too much.
Mostly, though, she was scared of herself.
This morning she had woken up and got dressed and come to work and she had known exactly who she was. Now she was struggling to remember. It was as if she was losing shape, growing soft, melting...
Moments earlier she had thought it was panic. But she knew panic, and it wasn’t that pounding through her like a dizzying roll of thunder. This was something else. Something she had never felt or expected to feel. A kind of life-changing fire in her blood that consumed everything in its flames.
Her heart froze mid-beat.
Including the most important meeting of her life.
She gazed past him blindly, a flood tide of shock and dismay sweeping through her. The appointment at the bank had been centre stage and at the front of her mind for so long, and yet in just a few unsettling minutes this man—this stranger—had erased it.
And she had helped him. Like a child seeing something shiny and out of reach, in thrall to the wildfire of yearning he had provoked, she’d let herself be distracted, jeopardising her hopes, her plans, her future.
Abruptly she shook her head. ‘Why would I be frightened, Mr Kane? You don’t strike me as dangerous or depraved.’ She took a breath. ‘Just arrogant and thoughtless.’
