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His words cut her with their razor-sharp insight. What the hell would he know? ‘You don’t know me,’ she murmured.
‘Maybe I know you better than you think.’
She shook her head mutinously. ‘If you did you’d know that any changes I made, I made because I wanted to. I was sick of being Izzy. Sick of the superficial lifestyle. The attack just ensured I completely ditched all the Izzy trappings. There are way more important things in life than what shoes and bag go best with a Chanel jacket, you know? I’m happy with my life. I’m happy with the lab and my job and, yes, with my awful glasses and baggy clothes. I don’t need anything else in my life.’
Alex dropped his head close to her ear. ‘You’re a liar,’ he murmured.
Isobella sucked in a breath at the erotic slither of his husky accusation. ‘No. Iam happy,’ she insisted.
‘I saw your underwear strewn all over the bed at Piccolo. Your very…sexy underwear.’
His tone dropped another notch, and she shivered as she thought about him looking at her personal things. Touching her silk and lace as he had her bra and knickers the night of the cyclone. She should have been affronted, but his scratchy voice and the heat of her memories were weaving their way through her pelvic floor muscles, tightening each one as it fluttered by.
‘You may think you want to forget about being a woman, a sexy woman with a woman’s needs, but your lingerie says different. Your lingerie saysI am woman. Hear. Me. Purr. ’
Isobella swallowed. Her underwear was the only concession to femininity, to her past life, she had allowed herself. He wasn’t supposed to see it. No one was supposed to know. It was her guilty little secret.
‘You want to know how else I know how desperately you want to be that woman you’re suppressing? When I was inside you, deep inside you, there was no façade, Isobella. You let go of all that stuff. All those inhibitions. You wereall woman.’
Isobella blushed, remembering her complete abandon. ‘It was dark,’ she muttered. And she had wanted him. It had been a heady combination.
Alex frowned down at her. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’
Isobella snorted. ‘You think you would have been so eager the other night if you could have seen me? Seen my sc—my body? What I really looked like?’
Ah.He looked at her. She was tearing her napkin to pieces in her lap and she looked deadly serious. ‘If you think for a minute your scarring turns me off then you’re crazy.’
She heard the absolute certainty in his voice, and then remembered how clinically he had looked at her abdomen—as if she’d been under a microscope. ‘Oh, no,’ she said, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice. ‘I’m sure they’re highlyfascinating for you.’
Alex realised he’d made a critical error when he’d examined her so thoroughly on the boat. He thought for a moment, then pursed his lips and pushed them right up close to her ear.
‘You are sexy. Your body in those awful clothes and horrible glasses is sexy. Your naked body is a whole other level sexy. In fact I want nothing more than to take you into the nearest bathroom, rip those dreadful clothes off you and show you just how very much I don’t give a damn about how fascinating those scars are.’
Isobella froze, the fingers plucking at her napkin stilling at his sinful proposition. The brush of his lips rendered her incapable of movement. ‘You can’t mean that,’ she whispered.
‘I do. I absolutely do,’ he whispered back.
Red came along just then and reached across Isobella, collecting Alex’s tray. ‘I hope everything was satisfactory, Dr Zaphirides?’ she purred.
Isobella didn’t hear Alex’s reply. Her brain was sluggish, stupefied by desire. She felt as if her skull had been flipped open and an electric mixer had been applied to her brain, scrambling it into a million pieces. He thought she was sexy? Dared she believe him?
Like Paolo? He had told her how sexy she was about a hundred times a day. And a bunch of other fashion industry people had used the word as casually as if it were a preposition. Anthony had kissed and touched her at every opportunity in their briefly intense month, had told her he was the luckiest man alive.
Why should she believe it from Alex? Even though his cerulean gaze was hypnotically honest and his frank words free from artifice? She wanted to believe him. But wanting didn’t make it so. Why should she put her faith in a catch-kiss-and-throw-back man? Even if his words were sincere, he was never going to commit to her. She knew where he stood on that. But, after years of being alone and pretending it didn’t matter, she wanted more than a casual affair.
