Читать книгу Modern Romance March 2015 Collection 2 - Кэтти Уильямс, Jane Porter, Cathy Williams - Страница 16
ОглавлениеMILLY GAZED AT her reflection in the mirror but she wasn’t really focusing on the face staring back at her. She was thinking of the past week and a half.
Behind her, the king-size bed that had filled her with horror was just...a king-sized bed. Her fears had been unjustified. At least, unjustified except in the deepest, darkest corners of her mind where fantasies of Lucas still swirled around with dangerous strength, powerful riptides lying in wait for the appropriate moment to suck her under, or so it felt.
They barely shared this private space. Antonia always retired before ten, at which point Milly would head upstairs, leaving Lucas downstairs, where he would work until the early hours of the morning. She neither heard nor saw him when he finally made it to the bedroom because she was always sound asleep. The only evidence he left that he occupied the room at all was the barely discernible imprint on the sofa where he had slept, because he was always up and moving by eight in the morning.
The man hardly needed any sleep at all. She, on the other hand, had always been able to sleep for England.
The linen he used for the sofa was always shoved neatly in the wardrobe.
Twice she had woken needing the bathroom and her heart had been pounding as she had tiptoed her way past where he had lain sprawled and asleep, half-naked, the thin duvet barely covering him.
That fleeting glimpse of him sadly had been yet more fodder for her very active imagination.
If only this stupid charade had done what it should have done and exposed his failings. At this point in time, shouldn’t he have morphed into an arrogant bore with too much money for his own good? Shouldn’t the impact of his good looks have done her a favour by diminishing?
She sighed and peered a little more closely at her reflection. The hair looked wilder than usual but she had given up trying to tame it. Was this the look she really wanted to go for? Wild hair and a strappy dress, and high-heeled sandals that were so not her thing?
She and Lucas, at his mother’s urging, were going to have a supposedly romantic dinner out tonight. She had given Milly a stern talk on buying something pretty for the occasion, because she had not been shopping, and had managed to use what she had brought with her: jeans; T-shirts; more jeans; jogging bottoms.
So, despite lots of protests, she and Antonia had spent much of the day out. There had been no need to venture further afield into Madrid because Salamanca boasted designer shops for every taste. These were just the sort of things that were undermining the ‘cracks in the relationship’ that should have been happening by now.
Every crack Milly tried to break was papered over by Antonia, who seemed to think that her outspokenness was a charming and refreshing change from all the limpets who had cluttered her son’s life before.
And in the meantime, while all this was going on, she was seeing sides to Lucas that chipped away at her defences.
He was ferociously intelligent and, whilst he was good at listening to other sides of an argument, he liked to win. Over dinner—which was usually when she saw most of him, because his days were spent working to make up for the fact that he wasn’t actually in his office or on a plane going to meetings somewhere or other across the globe—they talked about everything under the sun. Antonia might generate the topic, but they would all contribute. And the topics flowed from one to another, from what was happening in the news to what had happened in the news, sometimes years previously.
He was a loving son without being patronising. He was very good at teasing his mother, and Milly’s heart always constricted when she witnessed this interplay between them.
Of course, she and her grandmother were very close, as she had insisted on telling them a couple of nights ago, but it was still something to have grown up without a mother figure. Or a father figure, for that matter. She might have had a sip or two too many at this point, Milly recalled uncomfortably. She had held the floor for far too long and she might even have become a little tearful towards the end. She shuddered thinking about it.
He was also funny, witty and downright interesting. He had travelled the world. It helped when it came to recounting fascinating anecdotes about faraway places.
Her heart picked up speed as another treacherous thought crept into her head like a thief in the night: she looked forward to his company. She spent her days in the grounds, sometimes by the swimming pool reading her book, often in the company of his mother. But, when five o’clock came, she always felt a stirring in her veins, as though her body was beginning to wake up and come alive.
And that wasn’t good.
In fact, it frightened her because, face it, Lucas was as distant as he had promised. Yes, when they were in each other’s company he was warmth and charm itself but, the second his mother wasn’t around, a shutter dropped and he became someone else. Someone cool, controlled and somehow absent.
Now, she noticed, he had stopped sitting quite so close to her on the sofa and the physical shows of affection...the little touches on her shoulder, her cheek, her arms...had dropped off.
She guessed that this was his subtle way of informing his mother that all was not quite right in the land of wonderful love and happy-ever-afters.
Had Antonia noticed? Milly didn’t know. She had thought of trying to open a discussion on the subject, maybe starting with a few vague generalities before working her way up to her and Lucas and what they had, and then ending by finding out what Antonia’s thoughts were. But she always chickened out because she wasn’t sure she would be able to hang on to her composure if the questions became too targeted.
Right now Lucas was downstairs. He usually stopped working around six so that he could spend some time with Antonia while Milly was upstairs having a bath, changing...analysing her thoughts and coming up empty handed.
And, while Milly relaxed downstairs, usually with a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade, he took the opportunity to get cleaned up. It was a clever game of avoidance that Antonia didn’t seem to notice, but Milly noticed it more and more because she was noticing everything more and more.
Tonight, Milly entered the sitting room to find Antonia there sipping a glass of juice, her book resting on her lap.
Like all the other rooms in the splendid house, this one was airy and light with pale walls and furnishings and adjustable wooden shutters to guard against the blistering sun during the hot summer months. And, as with all the rooms, the air was fragrant with the smell of flowers, which were cut from the garden several times a week and arranged by Antonia herself in an assortment of brightly coloured vases to be dispersed throughout the house.
‘I wanted to see how the dress looked.’ She beamed and beckoned Milly across and then ordered her to do a couple of turns so that she could appreciate it from every angle. ‘Beautiful.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Milly said awkwardly. ‘I’m not accustomed to wearing dresses.’
‘You should. You have the perfect figure to carry them off. Not like those scrawny women my son has dated in the past. Like boys! Simpering and preening themselves and looking in every mirror they pass! Pah! I tell him, “Lucas, those are not real women, they are plastic dolls and you can do better than that”...’ She smiled smugly and waved Milly into a chair.
‘We have our differences,’ Milly said weakly, determined to head off an awkward situation at the pass. ‘You might think that those model types are no good for Lucas but in fact...in fact...they suit him far more than you might imagine. I mean...’ She leaned forward and stared earnestly at the handsome woman in front of her whose head was tilted to one side, all the better to grasp what was being said because, impeccable though her English was, she still became lost in certain expressions. ‘It’s okay to be outspoken but, in the end, it can get on a guy’s nerves.’
‘Is that what happened to your last boyfriend?’ Antonia asked gently. ‘Was that why it all fell apart, my dear?’
Milly blushed. She had breezily and vaguely skimmed over the details of the broken engagement that had supposedly encouraged her into the arms of her one true love, Lucas. Antonia had conveniently not dwelled on the subject. Now, she was waiting for some girlish confidence.
‘It fell apart,’ Milly said slowly, ‘Because he didn’t love me and, as it turns out, I didn’t love him either.’ This was the first time she was actually saying aloud what she had been privately thinking. ‘I was just an idiot,’ she confessed. ‘I’d had a crush on Robbie when I was a teenager...’ She smiled, remembering the gawky, sporty kid she had been, more at home with a hockey stick than a glass of vodka, which had been the in drink at the time with all the under-age drinkers: the alcohol could be camouflaged by whatever you happened to dilute it with and parents could never tell you were actually getting a little tipsy at parties.
‘Robbie was the cutest boy in the class. Floppy blond hair, gift of the gab. Plus, he would actually take time out to chat to me. It felt like love, so when he showed up in London and asked to meet up I guess I remembered what I used to feel and somehow transported it to the present day and decided that those feelings were still there, intact. He was still cute, after all. He brought back memories.’
And he had known how to manipulate her weaknesses to his own benefit but, in the end, it took two to tango. He had made inroads into her common sense because she had allowed him to.
‘But what was I saying...?’ She gulped back the temptation to cry just a little.
‘You were saying...’ Lucas’s voice from behind her made her temporarily freeze ‘...that you got suckered in to a dud relationship with some guy who was never suited to you in the first place.’
He had been standing by the door, unnoticed by both his mother and Milly, and he couldn’t quite understand just why it gave him such a kick to hear her finally admit what he had suspected all along.
She had not been occupying Heartbreak Hotel, as she had fondly and misguidedly imagined. Of course she had known that, he had seen it on her face when he had chosen to point it out to her, but it was still gratifying to hear her admit it.
Not, he hurriedly told himself, that it mattered in any way that was significant. It didn’t. She might be amusing, feisty, way too open for her own good...in short, all the things he never encountered in his relationships with women...but that didn’t make her available. She had been available to a simple ski instructor but to the man he was? No.
But, hell, it was getting more and more difficult by the second. He always made sure that temptation was safely out of the way by burning the midnight oil in front of his computer, although he knew that his mind was only partly on work. Too much of it, as far as he was concerned, was preoccupied with visions of her in that bed—and those visions were all the more graphic because he knew how she slept, sprawled in sexy abandon with the duvet tangled about her body.
He’d bet all his worldly possessions that that was not the way she started out. No. He imagined that she tucked herself tightly underneath those covers, swaddled herself in them, but somewhere along the line, when she was happily gambolling about in deep REM, her body had other ideas on how it was most comfortable. And that was not wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy.
Twice she had gone to the bathroom in the early hours of the morning, tiptoeing past the sofa in such slow motion that it had taken all he had not to burst out laughing.
Her sleepwear would be a passion-killer for most men, but the baggy T-shirt with the faded logo, reaching mid-thigh, did crazy things to his system, sent it soaring into the stratosphere. She might wear the least flattering outfits known to womankind, but her body was luscious and sexy, the jut of her full breasts promising more than a handful, the shapeliness of her legs tempting him to find out what lay between them.
He flushed darkly now as he recalled the rigid erection those thoughts had induced as he had showered.
He wondered, with some irony, whether this was what happened when the guy who could have it all was denied the one thing he found he wanted.
The sooner this charade came to an end, the better. Not least because his mother appeared to have fallen in love with the woman and that had not been on the agenda. But they were going out tonight, just the two of them, and he wouldn’t mince his words.
The time for pulling the plug had come.
He was sick of waging war with his libido. He had to return to the land of the living, his offices in London. His mother was getting far too involved in their pretend love affair for his liking. And, anyway, who knew whether Milly was getting a little too accustomed to the good life? That was a consideration that had to be taken into account. Surely. Wasn’t it?
‘How long have you been lurking by the door?’ Milly said accusingly and Lucas strolled into the room to take up position by the window, perching against the broad window sill with his arms folded.
Here comes Adonis again, Milly thought absently, and shouldn’t I have become accustomed to this by now? She could see him a million times and still be startled by his dark, stunning beauty.
‘I don’t lurk...’ His features were perfectly controlled, as was the tenor of his voice, but he had to steer firmly away from the soft swell of her breasts jutting against the soft fabric of a flimsy, strappy dress. Hell, she wasn’t even wearing a bra! It bordered on indecent, even though the style was modest enough.
There was something about the shimmering colours, though...blues and creams that made the fall of her curly red hair even more vibrant...and she was wearing make-up. Just a bit. Just sufficient gloss on her full lips to tease any red-blooded man to distraction.
He felt himself harden and he looked away from her momentarily, gathering himself, before indulging in his usual light-hearted banter with his mother. The fiercer his desire grew, the more distance he had to try and put between them. Those brief touches were like matches flung onto dry tinder.
‘Now, make sure you use Carlos...’ his mother was telling him as he walked towards Milly, who was rising to her feet, as graceful as a ballet dancer in some strappy little sandals that showed off newly painted toenails.
‘Is this the drink-driving lecture?’ Lucas slipped his arm around Milly’s waist and felt her soft body against his, which was a predictable challenge to his self-control. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be using Carlos. If I remember correctly, he has a fondness for that little wine bar not a million miles away from the restaurant. He can enjoy himself with a plate of pasta and a big bottle of mineral water.’ Her breasts were just above where his hand curved on her ribcage.
As soon as they were through the front door, he dropped his hand and moved away from her.
Talk about being obvious, Milly thought, stung because he was so clearly turned off by her. She slid into the back seat through the door that Carlos held open for her and didn’t glance in Lucas’s direction as he levered himself in and sat next to her.
He hadn’t even commented on her dress. Her normally bubbly nature was flattened by that and she was cool as they drove towards the town, choosing to stare through the window at the scenery and replying to his attempts at conversation in stiff monosyllables.
‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’ Lucas drawled once they were out of the car and in the restaurant, which was a cosy Italian that obviously appealed to the beautiful and the wealthy.
‘Nothing’s wrong.’ Milly reluctantly looked at him and her heart picked up pace. He was staring at her, his dark eyes lazy and unfathomable. Was he comparing her to the sort of women his mother disliked but he didn’t?
‘Spit it out.’
‘Okay—what’s wrong is that you’re not making any attempt to sort this business out. We’ve been here nearly two weeks.’
‘I didn’t think you were in any rush to get back,’ Lucas said mildly.
‘That’s not the point. The point is that I don’t like lying to your mother. I feel we’re getting close to one another...’
‘Then make sure you pull back, Milly. She’s not a substitute mother because you lost yours.’
‘That’s a rotten thing to say!’
Lucas sighed and raked his fingers through his hair in frustration. ‘It is and for that I apologise. In actual fact, I have been thinking the same as you. It’s time to start letting my mother know that this situation between us isn’t going to work. For one thing, I’m sick to death of sleeping on that sofa. I’m a big man. Far too big for a sofa. I never even did that in my teenage years.’
‘You never slept rough?’
‘Never. But we’re getting off topic here. We will have to be a bit more proactive. I admit, I’ve been at fault here...’ Yes, he had. He had preferred to enjoy the atmosphere in the house, his mother’s delight with his latest conquest, so different from her reactions to the few women she had met over the years. Lazy. He had been lazy. ‘Tomorrow, we stage an argument. It shouldn’t be too difficult. We have precious little in common.’ He shrugged with the usual graceful nonchalance that Milly found so seductive.
Milly drank some of the white wine that had found itself into the oversized glass in front of her. She had hardly been aware of a waiter pouring from a bottle.
‘If we have so little in common,’ she mocked, ‘then how is it that we haven’t been at each other’s throats by now?’
Lucas flushed. It was a good question. ‘It’s called the route of least resistance. When my mother has been around, it has been all too easy to let her see what she has wanted to see, but I have a life to get on with. I can’t afford to spend much more time here. Naturally, I will commute on weekends, but I need to be back in the saddle. I need to return to London. As do you. So that you can make good on the bargain you struck with me. Have you told your landlord that you will no longer be needing his flat? Or house? Or wherever it is you live?’
‘House. I’ve already told you that.’
‘My short-term memory can be occasionally short.’ The house she had shared with her so-called good friend. Of course he remembered! He remembered everything, every little detail. Too much.
‘And, no, I haven’t told my landlord yet. I can email him in the morning but you have to give me your word that you won’t renege on our agreement. I don’t want to find myself without a roof over my head.’
‘You did as you were asked. Naturally I will keep my end of the bargain.’
He was barely aware of ordering another bottle and, by the time they had finished eating, they were two bottles down and were making inroads into a third.
‘And what do you think our staged argument should be about?’ After a brief lull in hostilities, Milly picked up the thread of what they had been discussing earlier. The meal was finished, the bill paid; when she stood up, she had to focus, really focus, to stop herself from teetering on her unfamiliar heels.
He reached out to steady her and his hand remained there at her waist.
‘You’ve had too much to drink,’ Lucas murmured.
‘Maybe we could weave that in. Maybe you could turn me into an alcoholic.’
‘My mother would never buy it.’
‘Because I’m such a boring girl-next-door type?’
‘Where did that come from?’ He stopped dead in his tracks and spun her to face him. Of their own volition, his fingers sifted through her hair and brushed her cheek.
Milly was transfixed by that gesture. He was staring down at her and she experienced a weird, drowning feeling. He was right. She’d drunk too much. She couldn’t peel her eyes away from his handsome face.
‘You should stop looking at me like that,’ Lucas said huskily and Milly half-closed her eyes.
‘Like what?’ she breathed.
‘Boring girl-next-door types don’t look at men the way you’re looking at me...’
Milly reached out and tentatively touched his cheek, and was blown away when she realised that that was what she had been longing to do since...for ever. She let her hand linger there, feeling the roughened stubble on his chin, while her heart carried on beating like a sledgehammer inside her.
‘No,’ Lucas said shakily. ‘Come on. Carlos is waiting.’
And he meant it. However tempting she might be, he wasn’t going to make love to her. No way. The prospect enticed and, yes, frightened him in equal measure. It was an unfamiliar feeling. It disturbed and unsteadied him. It smacked of a loss of control.
‘I’m going to put you to bed as soon as we’re back.’ He was dismayed when she nodded and nestled against his arm. She smelled floral, clean, young.
‘So, tell me what vices you’re going to give me,’ Milly encouraged, at once sleepy and yet never so wide awake. She felt alive to everything: to the scent of him; to the rough feel of the linen jacket he had flung on before leaving the house; to the way his chest rose and fell as he breathed. ‘I’ve always thought it must be nice to have a few vices.’
Lucas wasn’t doing much thinking at all. He cleared his throat, shifted, failed to budge her...knew that he didn’t want to anyway, not really. The key thing was that he wasn’t going to make a move on her.
‘Not a cry I’ve often heard,’ he remarked drily.
‘I guess you heard what I was telling your mother about Robbie...having a crush on him. He was so cool when he was young.’
‘And now less so,’ Lucas reminded her shortly. ‘A loser, in fact.’
‘I bet you think that everyone’s a loser compared to you,’ Milly murmured, wriggling so that she could tilt her head and look him directly in the eye.
Her breath caught in her throat and her racing heart slowed, along with time, which seemed to stand still altogether.
Her kiss took him by surprise, reaching up on tiptoe as she did, and it was so sweetly, disarmingly innocent; the gentle, tentative probing of her cool tongue a breathless, feathery flutter against his lips..
He shuddered and stifled a groan. ‘This isn’t part of the deal,’ he muttered unsteadily.
‘I know. But remember those vices I wished I had? One of them was to just...let go, not take guys so seriously...’ She traced the outline of his jaw, could sense him wanting more against his will and that filled her with a heady sense of power. When he pressed a button so that opaque glass separated them from Carlos, she smiled.
So the big break-up was going to start tomorrow. And then, in a heartbeat, she would be back in London, back to reality... But, right now, this was her reality and why shouldn’t she grab it with both hands? If he pushed her away and stormed off in revulsion, then so be it, but deep inside she sensed that he wouldn’t do that.
‘You see them and you what...? Want to marry them?’
‘I see them and I start wondering how they would fit in on a long-term basis.’ Which was pretty badly in every case thus far, few though those cases had been. ‘Sort of, “hi, how are you? What are your thoughts on big families...?”’ She felt him shudder and laughed. ‘I know. You’re horrified. I bet you’d run a mile if a woman asked you a question like that. I mean, you gave your heart away and you got burned, right? So you’re not up to giving it away again.’
‘You got that right but, word to the wise, don’t mention that particular bone of contention to my mother. She might not quite see my side of the story.’
‘Oh, I won’t mention anything that might give her the wrong idea about us,’ Milly said with a hitch in her voice. She didn’t want to think about going. Not right at this moment.
What she wanted...
She covered his big hand with her much smaller one and guided it to her breast, and she felt him slip a little lower in the seat.
‘Hell, Milly! No. You...don’t know what you’re doing...’ But he kept his hand there, felt the rounded fullness of her breast, and wanted to do so much more that it was a physical ache. His erection was so hard that he could barely move.
‘I do know what I’m doing. For the first time in my whole life, I know what I’m doing.’ Her voice was insistent as she unbuttoned the top two pearl buttons of the dress, allowing him more access to her and loving, absolutely loving, the way he was making her feel. ‘I’ll be gone in a few days and I won’t be seeing you again... And...you make me feel...’
‘How do I make you feel, Milly?’ More than a handful. She was well endowed; if Carlos hadn’t been in the front seat, driving them slowly with an impeccable lack of interest in the goings on behind him, he would have taken her right here in the car.
‘Curious,’ she confessed with the honesty that was so much a part and parcel of her personality. ‘You make me feel curious.’
