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‘Well, you could be waiting a long time for that,’ Amy admitted ruefully. ‘Right now, I feel as though I’ve walked onto a movie set. I’m not used to this level of extravagant living.’
‘I’m still the same man,’ Sev murmured.
‘But what on earth are you doing with me?’ Amy countered. ‘I don’t fit in your world.’
‘Never try to define me by my income. We live in thesameworld.’
‘Doesn’t feel like it, right now,’ she admitted tautly as he passed her a moisture-beaded glass brimming with bubbling palest pink liquid.
She sipped, grateful to have something to occupy her restless hands, and by the time they arrived at the world-renowned hotel where they were to dine she was on her second glass, taking even tinier sips to carefully control her alcohol intake while encouraging Sev to talk. And my goodness, getting Sev to talk at all, she discovered, was an uphill task.
Asked about his day, he muttered, ‘Work...meetings,’ and that was that. Asked to tell her about something that had annoyed him, he looked at her with a frown and claimed that it took a great deal to annoy him. Asked to describe one positive development, he looked downright blank, and he said drily as he walked her into the hotel where he was greeted by name by the uniformed doorman, ‘Where are you trying to go with these strange questions?’
‘My foster mum, Cordy, used to tell me to think of something positive to say about every day, especially if it was abadday,’ she stressed wryly, struggling not to react to that revealing word, ‘strange’.
Sev gritted his teeth because he thought that was a terrible idea. ‘Be careful or I will christen you Little Miss Sunshine. There was nothing positive about my day. It was stressful.’
But as she gave him a forgiving smile for that honesty, he knew he had lied. She was probably the most positive development in his day because she made negativity and pessimism a challenge, he acknowledged ruefully. They were polar opposites in character. Sev knew himself to be dark right down to his innermost soul and a case-hardened cynic. He expected the worst from people. He let nobody get close to him. He might be attached to Annabel and his birth father, Hallas, and his happy family, but he confided in none of them. What he thought and felt, he kept strictly to himself because it was safer not to let anyone get too close and learn too much about him. His childhood had taught him the art of self-protection. Even Annabel, in her innocence, had betrayed him once or twice with her loose chattering tongue.
He could still recall sitting at the Aiken dinner table when he was ten, the evening his half-sister had chosen to announce thathewas unhappy at boarding school. Even better did he recall her sobbing incomprehension as the parental storm of rage had broken over his head while he was shouted at and humiliated for his ingratitude as though he were some charity case taken in off the street. He could never have dreamt then that, in point of fact, his birth father was a wealthy man, who would have given him a home in a heartbeat or that, as his heiress mother’s firstborn, he would come into a substantial trust fund of his own at twenty-one. No, his mother and stepfather had instead combined to make him feel frightened, defenceless and unwanted in the only home he had ever known.
Amy’s gaze was wide as she scanned the opulent hotel foyer and the member of staff, the manager, no less, who came forward to personally escort them into a magnificent dining room. Conversations faltered, heads turned to look as they were shown to a central table and she was horribly conscious of her inexpensive dress and lack of jewellery, already wishing that Sev had chosen to take her to eat somewhere less public and more private. At the same time, she was scolding herself for such thoughts because it was a huge treat to be taken out somewhere fancy for a meal and the superb surroundings should only add to the thrill of the experience.
That aside, however, one glance at Sev’s taut dark features and the hardness in his dark shadowed eyes warned her that Sev’s thoughts had taken him somewhere he would rather not have gone, and she was wondering if she had said something unfortunate until he asked her about the shelter and how she had first become involved with it. She told him about visiting the animals when she was a kid, getting to know Cordy, and in passing she mentioned her difficult relationship with her mother, for the shelter had often acted as an escape hatch when she had displeased her only parent.
‘Why didn’t you get on with her?’ Sev probed, surprising her, because for a man who didn’t want to talk about himself he seemed very keen for her to do the opposite.
‘It wasn’t just me who struggled to get on with her,’ Amy divulged reluctantly. ‘She had a sharp tongue and she often offended people. My father dumped her when she was pregnant, and she never got over it. She was really bitter. Remember Miss Havisham inGreat Expectations? Mum didn’t sit around in the wedding gown she never got to wear but she still kept it in her wardrobe...’
Sev rolled his eyes. ‘That must’ve been difficult.’
‘I got through it and then Cordy offered me a home,’ Amy told him, glossing over her time in foster care, when she had lived in a council-run home for teenagers deemed troublesome.
‘It seems that you owe your foster mum a great deal,’ Sev conceded.
Amy could not resist telling him about the good work Cordy had done with the charity, animation lighting up her face as she discussed the animals she loved. She talked a lot, Sev conceded, but what she talked about held his interest, unlike the women who chattered to him about fashion designers, social events and their own fascinating selves. A waiter topped up her wine glass with a discreet hand.
Most crucially, Amy was not obsessed by herselforher appearance, Sev acknowledged. She walked past mirrors without looking at them, paid no heed to the men noticing her and fussed with neither her hair nor her make-up. Yet the more Sev studied her, scanning the perfect symmetry of her features and her flawless skin, the violet depths of her sparkling eyes and the pouty sexiness of her pink lips, the more he recognised her beauty. She might be very small, in fact downright tiny in terms of height, but she was undeniably gorgeous.
‘You’re staring,’ she told him breathlessly.
Sev nodded, a sudden grin flashing across his wide, sensual mouth. ‘I enjoy looking at you,caramia.’
Her cheeks flamed at his directness even as a warm feeling mushroomed in her chest and she dropped her head and fiddled with her wine glass. She wished she had the nerve to tell him that she liked looking at him too, indeed could barely take her eyes off the sculpted angles and hollows of his lean, darkly handsome face. The meal was beautifully presented and wonderfully tasty and when she stood up to leave she felt pleasantly full and mellow in mood. A knot of excitement tightened low in her belly when she met his liquid-bronze eyes and marvelled at the lush inky lashes that enhanced them.
A crowd of people were milling outside the upmarket club. She had heard of it because the name appeared frequently in the gossip columns, it being the sort of exclusive venue generally only attended by the rich and famous. The women she glimpsed on the way in seemed very polished and the clothes they wore were elegant, slinky and revealing. In her plain black dress, she felt mousy and funereal, and as a queue stand was removed for them to move upstairs to the VIP area she tensed even more. A cocktail adorned with cherries already awaited her and she ate the cherries slowly, aware that she was already a little merry after the wine over dinner following on the champagne. Her attention was stolen by the semi-nude dancer on a little platform sinuously twisting and moving to the beat of the music. It was a very sexy display and she turned her head away to concentrate on Sev instead, surprised that his attention was still on her and not on the dancer.
‘I wish I could dance like she can,’ she said with a rueful grin.
Sev smiled, megawatt charisma blazing from that slashing smile because he had believed he had heard every possible comment on that performer from other women, every one of whom had viewed the dancer as competition and had found some excuse to denigrate her or her performance. But Amy, he was beginning to appreciate, did not like to speak ill of anyone. Why else did she call her late mother only sharp? According to the file he had, Lorraine Taylor had been, at best, a thoroughly dislikeable woman and an uncaring parent.
Sev rested an arm along the back of the booth and angled his body towards her, his black shirt pulling taut across his muscular torso, his long powerful thighs slightly splayed, accentuating the bulge at his crotch. In spite of herself, her eyes were drawn there, and a curl of heat ignited in her pelvis because the force of attraction was so strong that, for the first time ever, she was seriously wondering...
In haste she lifted her head, her cheeks a heady pink, and she collided involuntarily with Sev’s intent gaze and her heart skipped an entire beat before drumming back to life at greater speed, her tummy turning over as if she had gone down in a lift too fast. His hand eased down onto her shoulder and he urged her closer for his mouth to taste her parted lips. It was a shocking, seriously sexy manoeuvre because it was slow and measured, his lips firm and full and demanding while the rolling, twirling exploration of his tongue twinned with hers. She had never felt anything like the fierce hunger his mouth induced or the crazed surge of response racing up through her like a leaping flame, ripping through every defence yet bringing with it a sense of connection that she couldn’t bear to deny.
The gradually deepening passionate intensity of that kiss sent her hands flying up into his hair, melding to his skull, fingering through the luxuriant strands of his dense blue-black hair to keep him close. Her body came alive with a great swoosh of feeling and she was astonished even more by how much she loved that adrenalin rush of sensation: the sudden urgent, almost painful tightening of her nipples driving the throbbing rise of liquid heat at her feminine core. She pressed her thighs together. It was all new to her and incredibly exciting.
Sev lifted Amy and set her back on the seat beside him because inexplicably she had ended up practically on his lap. Had he hauled her closer in the heat of the moment? Or had she approached him? He was breathing in quick shallow bursts, so aroused he was in pain and, while Amy had welcomed her response, Sev was fighting that overpowering need to the last ditch. He wondered if his overreaction could be laid at the door of his awareness that he could not possibly have sex with her. Did she have the magical allure of forbidden fruit? In the circumstances, touching her would be taking advantage because he was only faking his interest in her. And then, shewasOliver Lawson’s daughter, he reminded himself squarely, so nothing intimate would be appropriate. Even so, those reminders did nothing to curb the aching pulse at his groin or his incredulity that any woman could push him so easily to the very edge of his control.
