AllFreeNovel
Share Us
CHAPTER NINE
CRETEFOUNDITsomewhat lowering that Timoney had actually fallen asleep beside him. He rather felt she should have been wide awake and on tenterhooks for the whole of the drive back into town, if only becausehefelt shot through with adrenaline.
As if he might never sleep again.
Still, when they arrived at his flat in London, he waved off the attendants in his garage and carried her into his private elevator himself.
And though her eyes fluttered open, he did not set her down until the lift delivered them into the stone foyer of his penthouse.
He opted not to examine the way he seemed to settle only when he carried her over his threshold, such as it was.
Then he found himself watching her as she blinked the sleep out of her eyes. Without looking back at him, she crossed the foyer and walked deeper into the flat. She didn’t stop to turn on any lights and for some reason, Crete did not do it as he followed her. He was too busy watching her as she went. She dragged the bright red cloak behind her as she moved to the great wall of windows that looked out over giddy London, laid out bright and gleaming before them.
He was growing tired of the way it hurt him to gaze upon her when she was not even looking at him in return. She stopped at the windows and raised the hand that wasn’t clutching the cloak to her. He watched as she pressed her fingertips to the glass, let out a sigh, and only then turned to look at him over her shoulder.
“This must be the most beautiful view in all of London,” she said quietly.
Though it felt far more portentous than a simple comment on the view.
And Crete felt that it was some kind of surrender on his part to walk to her, still shrouded in the darkness—or revealed by it—but it was as if his feet did as they liked.
Or as if he could not stay away, a voice in him suggested.
Then, either way, he stood with her at the glass.
“Of course it is the best view of London,” he said. “Do you imagine I would tolerate anything less?”
He was looking at her as he said that, not at the view. And not because he was stunned by her beauty, though he was. But because she smiled then, and it was a sad, small curve of her lips that he could not say he liked at all.
“I’m sure it cost you a lot of money,” Timoney said softly. She turned to look at him then, and there was a starkness in that sea blue gaze of hers that brought that same ache on again, harder this time. “But you don’t ever look at it, do you?”
They were no longer in the car, so he did not have to pretend that the road held his attention. He reached over and hooked one hand around her neck, tugging her closer.
“Is this another metaphor, Timoney?” Crete kept his voice far softer than that ache in him, or the drumming noise of his own pulse. His own need. “I’m growing tired of all these games you wish to play with words. Both you and I know what is between us. It is a mystery to me why you would pretend otherwise, but I have solved it for you. It is already Christmas. You are here. And if I have to tie you to the bed to keep you from racing back to your wedding in a few hours, I will. Happily.”
He was fairly certain that the reason she glanced away was to disguise the flash of heat he’d seen in her gaze. But he thought it proved how magnanimous he was that he did not tip her chin up. He did not force her to show what he knew was there.
Crete only waited.
As he waited for nothing and no one else.
“You don’t have to tie me up, Crete.”
He couldn’t read the tone she used then. He couldn’t parse it, and that was unusual. Crete had long prided himself on being able to see beneath the words people used. To see to the heart of things, where most people were usually hiding their true motivations.
But this woman confounded him. If he was honest, she always had.
“Are you sure?” he asked, silkily. Because he could think of any number of reasons that tying her up seemed like a fantastic idea, and not a single one of them had to do with the vile Julian.
Or that abomination of a wedding that he would not allow her to go through with.
The lights of the city outside seemed to play in her hair the way the moon had out in the countryside. And he found himself toying with the thick silk of it, without even meaning to. Without knowing what he was doing until he was curling it around his fingers and letting it spill through. While the hand that cradled the nape of her neck seemed to absorb nothing from her but heat.
Crete told himself that she was a provocation, that was all. And he was a man who had never allowed a provocation to go unanswered.
Why stop now?
“You have me here now,” she said after a moment, with a certain directness that pricked at him. Perhaps because it did not whisper to him of tying her up in a bed and making them both wild. “You’ve made it clear that I’m not to leave. At least, not until you’ve made certain that my wedding is called off. I could try to run but, chances are, you would catch me. Or have your security team do it.” She lifted her chin. “What now?”
