Читать книгу Passionate Playboys: The Demetrios Bridal Bargain / The Magnate's Indecent Proposal / Hot Nights with a Playboy - Элли Блейк, Ким Лоренс - Страница 15

ROSE backed away so fast she almost tripped over a low table. Hastily righting it and the porcelain figurine that she had just saved, she straightened up and hitched up the neckline of her dress a protective inch before smoothing it down.

A distracted expression filtered into her wide wary eyes as her hand remained flat on the gentle curve of her stomach. She could feel the heat of her skin through the thin fabric. Mathieu’s body had felt hot when she had been crushed up against him—scorchingly hot. Hot enough to melt her.

Closing her eyes, she counted to ten—slowly. When she opened them he was staring at her.

‘Was that really necessary?’ she asked.

As he carried on studying her flushed face with an unsettling intensity she began to panic. What was he seeing? If he knew how and what she was feeling it would give him an unfair advantage because she as sure as hell didn’t. She had never felt so confused in her life.

There was a noise outside the windows on the patio and his attention shifted briefly. Rose, who had been unconsciously holding her breath, released it on a shuddering sigh of relief.

‘They are forecasting a storm tonight. It looks as if for once they are right,’ he observed, walking across to close the window.

He turned as Rose was sinking into a chair. ‘It felt like it at the time.’ He was genuinely shocked to recognise how necessary it had felt. He was no stranger to lust, but not since his teens had he allowed it to rule him. A man could take pleasure from his appetites without becoming a slave to them.

‘What?’

She looked so prim perched on the edge of the seat with her hands folded neatly in her lap. Her lips did not look prim— they looked swollen from his kisses. ‘Kissing you felt necessary.’ It still did.

Her eyes slid from the hunger in his; a man had never looked at her that way before.

‘I’m wearing your ring.’ She held out the hand in question where the square-cut emerald in its bed of diamonds caught the light. ‘I think she’s already got the message. That was just plain cruel,’ she observed, thinking of Sacha. ‘Or I suppose you’d call it being cruel to be kind … tough love …?’ she ended on a sneer.

‘You’re shaking.’

The soft interruption cut short her heated diatribe. His voice made her shiver but not as much as his touch. As she stared at his long fingers, very dark against her pale skin, encircling her wrist, a febrile shudder worked its way along her spine, followed by a second and third as her throat dried. She closed her eyes, bit her lip and dragged herself from the fog of sexual inertia that wrapped itself around her.

‘Of course I’m shaking,’ she snapped, lifting her chin in an attitude of angry defiance. ‘I don’t appreciate being mauled for the benefit of your girlfriend.’

‘You seemed to appreciate it pretty well at the time.’

Her fingers itched to slap the smugly complacent smirk off his face, they itched to do other things, but she wouldn’t let herself think about those shameful impulses.

She was unable to deny the observation without looking like a total idiot—his normally sleek dark hair was still mussed from where her fingers had pushed into the rich, lush thatch. After a painful pause she played safe and ignored his comment.

‘What is it about me?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Do I have a sign across my forehead?’ she wondered, drawing a vicious imaginary line with her finger. ‘Use me because I’m so stupid I’ll probably just say thank you.’

The guy with the troubled sexual identity who had dumped her at the altar, Mathieu thought, a flash of contempt appearing in his narrowed eyes as he contemplated the faceless loser who was responsible for the defensive hard-faced pose, which frankly was pretty shaky.

Rose could talk the talk but he had met hard-faced, and she was not even close to it.

Whatever his faults, he had never made any promises he couldn’t keep. What sort of weak idiot, he asked himself, backed away at the last minute after making someone believe you wanted to share the rest of your life with them?

Did she still love him, he wondered, this ex who had bolted? There was no trace of any emotion so tender in her face as she jabbed a finger in the direction of his chest and snarled.

‘Well, newsflash, I’m not that stupid. Do you think I didn’t know you were kissing me because Sacha was standing there? God, I hardly think it was necessary to go that far to get your message across.’

‘You know what they say about anger, don’t you, Rose? It’s only fear turned inwards.’

Fear as in fear of the consequences was not a bad thing—not if it stopped you doing something really stupid. ‘Very profound,’ she snapped, giving him a slow handclap. ‘Where did you get that one from, Mathieu, a Christmas cracker?’

‘You’re mad because you think I kissed you for Sacha’s benefit?’

There were two tell-tale patches of colour on her cheeks as she rolled her eyes and said in a voice laced with sarcasm, ‘No, I think you kissed me because I’m totally irresistible to the opposite sex.’ At that moment she would have settled for being irresistible to one man, just to have the pleasure of rejecting him.

Sure, that’s really likely.

Ignoring the snide voice in her head, she gave a contemptuous sniff and folded her arms tight across her chest, the action unintentionally pushing her breasts together and drawing his eyes to the modest neckline of her dress.

‘I can’t speak for the rest of the male sex, but you do have a seriously destructive influence on my self-control.’

Rose loosed a scornful laugh. ‘What’s the punchline?’

There was a pause as their eyes locked. Mathieu’s voice was flat apart from a slight ironic inflection as he said, ‘It isn’t a joke.’

Or maybe it was, he mused. A joke on a man who had always prided himself on never being a slave to his basic instincts being so fascinated by a woman who, given the perversity of female psychology, was probably still hung up on a man who had broken her heart.

His jaw clenched as he struggled to contain the irrational explosion of anger that surged through his body at the thought of her still craving another man, he covered the space between them in one stride.

He pinned her with a molten stare and as he cupped one side of her face with his hand some of the anger seeped from him. Her skin was soft and warm … she was soft and warm. His thumb moved across the curve of her satiny cheek and with a tiny cry she pulled away.

‘And you feel the same way,’ he said as she swung away from him.

Rose froze, then slowly, sparks of anger flying from her eyes, she turned slowly back and planted her hands on her hips as she lifted her chin. ‘Don’t you dare tell me how I feel,’ she snapped. ‘You haven’t the faintest—’

‘Please,’ he begged, cutting her off mid-rant. ‘Don’t give me that garbage about knowing Sacha was there; there could have been a twenty-person choir in full voice and you wouldn’t have noticed.’

She bit her lip, knowing that no matter what she said the mortified heat was going to rush to her cheeks. Who still blushed at her age, and why wasn’t there a pill to deal with this affliction?