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‘I see.’ He gave her a steady and rather unnerving stare. ‘And what makes you think I’m pretending?’
‘Your s-smile doesn’t quite reach your eyes.’ Glory fiddled with her napkin. ‘It seems kind of...fake. Especially when most of the time with me you don’t smile at all.’
He said nothing, his gaze unblinking.
‘Like you’re doing right now, in fact,’ she pointed out.
He stayed quiet.
‘Anyway,’ she went on quickly, trying to fill up the tense silence. ‘All I wanted to say was that you don’t have to smile or be charming or...or...anything else with me.’
The tension in the air gathered tighter.
Abruptly Castor reached for the open bottle of wine that stood on the table and with a certain amount of deliberation poured it into two wine glasses.
Glory looked down at the napkin in her lap, smoothing it while her heartbeat raced, anxiety twisting in her stomach.
She shouldn’t have said anything. Why had she? She was better at observing people than talking with them and now she’d clearly offended him.
Does it matter if you offend him? He certainly doesn’t seem to care if he offends you.
That was true. He had a couple of times and without apology, while she seemed to be apologising to him all the time.
‘I’m not the only one who pretends.’
His voice came suddenly from across the table, low and deep, with that edge to it that she thought now was anger.
She looked up from her napkin to find him watching her, making her breath catch.
‘Wh-what?’
‘You pretend, Glory Albright.’ His stare became intent. A predator’s stare. ‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed. You seem so shy and so afraid. Stammering like a child whenever you talk to me. Yet I see the way you look at me.’ The gold in his eyes glittered as he pushed the wine glass in her direction. ‘And I certainly felt it the night you kissed me. There’s nothing really shy about you, is there?’ He leaned forward slowly, the candlelight leaping and flickering over his fallen-angel beauty. ‘You’re hungry,mikri alepou. You’re hungry, just like me.’
Glory was sitting there frozen, her dark eyes fixed on his. Her lush mouth had opened slightly, the pretty freckles dusting her nose standing out under the blush that had risen in her cheeks.
He shouldn’t be angry with her. He had no right to be. Yet fury wound through him, hot and raw, coming from a place so deep inside him he hadn’t known it was there.
A fury that had begun to climb as he’d spent fifteen minutes searching the villa for her. A fury in direct proportion to the cold thread of worry that had also began to build. Because she didn’t seem to be anywhere around and yet no one had seen her leave. He’d ordered Nico to search the grounds while he did another search of the villa, the chill inside him gathering along with his anger.
How dare she make him worry about where she was? And how dare he worry about her at all? Because since when did he care?
The last decade of his life he’d had to cut his emotions off completely or else go mad, and he’d done so successfully. So successfully that sometimes he wondered if he still felt anything at all.
Yet in the space of a week, one ordinary young woman from LA had set alight something inside him and now here he was, frantically searching his villa as if she mattered in any way, and yes, he was furious about it.
And then when he’d gone into one of the smaller rooms he kept as a library, he’d found her lying on the couch fast asleep as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
An intense relief had overcome him then, only to be overtaken by an equally intense fury, because why he should bequiteso relieved he had no idea. She hadn’t disappeared inexplicably or been taken by any of the people he was trying to bring down. She’d simply wandered off and fallen asleep on the couch as if he hadn’t mobilised the entirety of the villa’s staff to look for her.
As if she wasn’t lying curled up on the couch with her hands beneath her chin like a child, pretty russet hair spread over the white linen, the denim miniskirt she wore pulled up to expose rounded thighs and smooth, pale silken skin.
Over the years he’d become so jaded that it took a lot to get him hard. But looking down at her lush feminine curves and her innocence, he felt his fury and relief transform into something burning, that ached, that made him hollow with hunger.
Every part of him had tightened with desire and he’d had to take a step out of the room to control himself. To not simply scoop her up in his arms, carry her straight to his bedroom and punish her for making him angry, for making him worry. For making him feel anything at all, because he didn’t like it.
But of course he wasn’t going to do that. He’d made his decision not to touch her and he couldn’t. Yet the time it took to get himself in hand didn’t help his temper, and by the time he’d gone back in to wake her up, he felt as if everything was strangely precarious. As if he was an explorer in unfamiliar territory constantly on the lookout for threats.
Maybe that was why he’d pulled her hair off her cheek and touched her cheekbone. Because he wanted to understand the nature of the threat she presented. Solve the mystery of why she should render his control as brittle as glass.
