Читать книгу The Revenge Collection 2018 - Кейт Хьюит, Эль Кеннеди - Страница 55
ОглавлениеSOPHIE LOOKED AROUND her and realised guiltily that, after two weeks’ living in the apartment Javier had kindly loaned her, refusing to countenance a penny in payment, she was strangely happy.
The apartment was to die for. She still found herself admiring the décor, as she was doing right now, having just returned from the office and kicked off her stupid pumps so that she could walk barefoot on the cool, wooden floor.
She had expected minimalist with lots of off-putting glossy white surfaces, like the inside of a high-tech lab. Images of aggressive black leather and chrome everywhere had sprung to mind when she had been handed the key to the apartment by his personal assistant, who had accompanied her so that the workings of the various gadgets could be explained.
She had assumed that she would be overwhelmed by an ostentatious show of wealth, would be obliged to gasp appropriately at furnishings she didn’t really like and would feel like an intruder in a foreign land.
The Javier of today was not the teasing, warm, sexy, funny guy she had once known. The today Javier was tough, rich beyond most people’s wildest dreams, ruthless and cutting edge in his hand-tailored suits and Italian shoes. And that would be reflected in any apartment he owned.
She’d been surprised—shocked, even—when she was shown the apartment.
‘It’s had a makeover,’ the personal assistant had said in a vaguely puzzled voice, but obviously far too well-trained to comment further. ‘So this is the first time I’m seeing the new version...’
Sophie hadn’t quizzed her on what it had been like previously. Tired and in need of updating, she had assumed. He’d probably bought a bunch of apartments without even seeing them, the way you do when you have tons of money, and then paid someone handsomely to turn them into the sort of triple-A, gold-plated investments that would rent for a small fortune and double in value if he ever decided to sell.
Whoever had done the interior design had done a great job.
She padded towards the kitchen, which was cool, in shades of pale grey with vintage off-white tiles on the floor and granite counters that matched the floor.
Everything was open-plan. She strolled into the living room with a cup of tea and sank into the cosy sofa, idly flicking on the television to watch the early-evening news.
It was Friday and the work clothes had been dumped in the clothes hamper. Javier had told her that it was fine to dress casually but she had ignored him.
Keep it professional; keep it businesslike... she had decided.
Jeans and tee shirts would blur the lines between them...at least for her...
Not, in all events, that it made a scrap of difference how she dressed, because, after the first day, he had done a disappearing act, only occasionally emailing her or phoning her for updates. A couple of times he had visited the branch when she had been out seeing customers, trying to drum up business, and she could only think that he had timed his arrivals cleverly to avoid bumping into her.
He didn’t give a passing thought to her, whilst she, on the other hand, couldn’t stop thinking about him.
She didn’t think that she had ever really stopped thinking about him. He’d been in her head, like the ghost of a refrain from a song that wouldn’t go away.
And now she couldn’t stop thinking about him. Worse than that, she spent every day at the office anticipating his unexpected arrival and was disproportionately disappointed when five-thirty rolled round and he’d failed to make an appearance.
Her heart skipped a beat when she opened up her emails and found a message from him waiting for her.
Her throat went dry when she heard the deep, sexy timbre of his voice on the end of the line.
She was in danger of obsessing over a guy who belonged to her past. At least, emotionally.
He’d suddenly reappeared on the scene, opening all sorts of doors in her head, making her think about choices she had made and bringing back memories of the horror story that had followed those choices.
He made her think about Roger. He was curious about her ex. She sensed that. Perhaps not curious in a personal way, but mildly curious, especially because so many things didn’t quite add up. Why, he had asked her, hadn’t she intervened when she’d known that he was blowing vast sums of money gambling? When she’d discovered the scale of the financial problems with the company? Why hadn’t she acted more decisively?
But, of course, that was the kind of person he was. Someone who was born and bred to act decisively. He could never begin to understand how easy it was just to get lost and find yourself in a fog, with no guiding lights to lead you out.
She had grown up a lot since then. She had had to. And, in the process of taking charge, she had realised just how feeble her brother was when it came to making decisions and taking difficult paths.
When she looked back at herself as she had been seven years ago, it was like staring at a stranger. The carefree girl with a life full of options was gone for ever. She was a woman now with limited options and too many bad memories to deal with.
Was that why she was now obsessing over Javier, someone she had known for such a short space of time? Was it because he reminded her of the girl she used to be? Was it obsession by association, so to speak?
He made her think things she would rather have forgotten but he also made her heart skip a beat the way it once used to when she’d been with him.
And more than that, he made her body feel alive the way it hadn’t for years. Not since him, in fact. He made her feel young again and that had a very seductive appeal.
With an impatient click of her tongue, she raised the volume of the television, determined not to waste the evening thinking about Javier and remembering what life had been like when they had been going out.
She almost didn’t hear the buzz of the doorbell, and when she did, she almost thought that she might have made a mistake because no one could possibly be calling on her.
Since she had moved to London, she had kept herself to herself. She knew a couple of people who had relocated from the northern branch but the London crew, all very able and super-efficient, were new and she had shied away from making friends with any of them.
For starters, although it wasn’t advertised and in all probability none of them knew, she was more or less their boss. And also...did she really want anyone knowing her backstory? It was just easier to maintain a healthy distance, so there was no way whoever had buzzed her from downstairs was a colleague on the hunt for a Friday night companion.
She picked up the intercom which allowed her to see her unexpected visitor and the breath left her in a whoosh.
‘You’re in.’ Javier had come to the apartment on the spur of the moment. Since she’d started at the London office, he had seen her once, had spoken to her six times and had emailed her every other day. He had purposefully kept his distance because the strength of his response to her had come as a shock. Accustomed to having absolute control over every aspect of his life, he had assumed that her sudden appearance in his highly ordered existence would prove interesting—certainly rewarding, bearing in mind he intended to finish what had been started seven years previously—and definitely nothing that he wouldn’t be able to handle.
Except that, from the very minute he had laid eyes on her, all that absolute certainty had flown through the window. The easy route he had planned to take had almost immediately bitten the dust. He’d had every intention of coolly trading his financial help for the body he had been denied, the body he discovered he still longed to touch and explore.
She’d used him and now he’d been given a golden opportunity to get his own back.
Except, he’d seen her, and that approach had seemed worse than simplistic. It had seemed crass.
There was no way he was going to pursue her and showing up at the workplace every day would have smelled a lot like pursuit, even though he had every right to be there, considering the amount of money he was sinking into the failing company.
He wanted her to come to him but staying away had been a lot more difficult than he’d dreamed possible.
Like someone dying of thirst suddenly denied the glass of ice-cold water just within his reach, he had found himself thinking about her to the point of distraction, and that had got on his nerves.
So here he was.
Sophie frantically wondered whether she could say that she was just on her way out. His unexpected appearance had brought her out in a nervous cold sweat. She had been thinking about him, and here he was, conjured up from her imagination.
‘I...I...’
‘Let me in.’
‘I was just about to...have something to eat, actually...’
‘Perfect. I’ll join you.’
That wasn’t what she’d had in mind. What she’d had in mind was a lead-up to a polite excuse and an arrangement to meet when she had some sort of defence system in place. Instead, here she was, hair all over the place, wearing jogging bottoms and an old, tight tee shirt bought at a music festival a dozen years ago and shrunk in the wash over time.
‘Come on, Sophie! I’m growing older by the minute!’
‘Fine!’ She buzzed him in, belatedly remembering that it was actually his apartment, so he had every right to be here. And not only was it his apartment, but she wasn’t paying a penny towards the rent, at his insistence.
She scrambled to the mirror by the front door, accepted that it was too late to start pinning her hair back into something sensible, and even though she was expecting him, she still started when he rapped on the door.
He’d obviously come straight from work, although, en route, he had divested himself of his tie, undone the top couple of buttons of his shirt and rolled his sleeves to his elbows. Her eyes dipped to his sinewy forearms and just as quickly back to his face.
‘You look flustered,’ Javier drawled, leaning against the door frame and somehow managing to crowd her. ‘I haven’t interrupted you in the middle of something pressing, have I?’ This was how he remembered her. Tousled and sexy and so unbelievably, breathtakingly fresh.
And innocent.
Which was a bit of a joke, all things considered.
Dark eyes drifted downwards, taking in the outline of her firm, round breasts pushing against a tee shirt that was a few sizes too small, taking in the slither of flat belly where the tee shirt ended and the shapeless jogging bottoms began. Even in an outfit that should have done her no favours, she still looked hot, and his body responded with suitable vigour.
He straightened, frowning at the sudden discomfort of an erection.
‘I haven’t managed to catch much of you over the past couple of weeks.’ He dragged his mind away from thoughts of her, a bed and a heap of hurriedly discarded clothes on the ground. ‘So I thought I’d try you at home before you disappeared up north for the weekend.’
‘Of course.’
There was a brief pause, during which he tilted his head to one side, before pointedly looking at the door handle.
‘So...’ He looked around him at his apartment with satisfaction. He’d had it redone. ‘How are you finding the apartment?’
Some might say that he’d been a little underhand in the renovating of the apartment, which had been in perfectly good order a month previously. He’d walked round it, looking at the soulless, sterile furnishings, and had been able to picture her reaction to her new surroundings: disdain. He had always been amused at her old-fashioned tastes, despite the fact that she had grown up with money.
‘I imagine your family home to be a wonder of the most up-to-the-minute furnishings money can buy,’ he had once teased, when she’d stood staring in rapt fixation at a four-poster bed strewn with a million cushions in the window of a department store. She’d waxed lyrical then about the romance of four-poster beds and had told him, sheepishly, that the family home was anything but modern.
‘My mum’s like me,’ she had confessed with a grin. ‘She likes antiques and everything that’s old and worn and full of character.’
Javier had personally made sure to insert some pieces of character in the apartment. He, himself, liked modern and minimalist. His impoverished family home had been clean but nearly everything had been bought second-hand. He’d grown up with so many items of furniture that had been just a little too full of character that he was now a fully paid-up member of all things modern and lacking in so-called character.
But he’d enjoyed hand-picking pieces for the apartment, had enjoyed picturing her reaction to the four-poster bed he had bought, the beautifully crafted floral sofa, the thick Persian rug that broke up the expanse of pale flooring.
‘The apartment’s fine.’ Sophie stepped away from him and folded her arms. ‘Better than fine,’ she admitted, eyes darting to him and then staying there because he was just so arresting. ‘I love the way it’s been done. You should congratulate your interior designer.’
‘Who said I used one?’ He looked at her with raised eyebrows and she blushed in sudden confusion, because to picture him hand-picking anything was somehow...intimate. And of course he would never have done any such thing. What über-rich single guy would ever waste time hunting down rugs and curtains? Definitely not a guy like Javier, who was macho to the very last bone in his body.
‘I’m afraid there’s not a great deal of food.’ She turned away because her heart was beating so fast she could barely breathe properly. His presence seemed to infiltrate every part of the apartment, filling it with suffocating, masculine intensity. This was how it had always been with him. In his presence, she’d felt weak and pleasurably helpless. Even as a young guy, struggling to make ends meet, he’d still managed to project an air of absolute assurance. He’d made all the other students around him seem like little boys in comparison.
The big difference was that, back then, she’d had a remit to bask and luxuriate in that powerful masculinity. She could touch, she could run her fingers through his springy, black hair and she’d had permission to melt at the feel of it.
She’d been allowed to want him and to show him how much she wanted him.
Not so now.
Furthermore, she didn’t want to want him. She didn’t want to feel herself dragged back into a past that was gone for good. Of course, foolish love was gone for good, and no longer a threat to the ivory tower she had constructed around herself that had been so vital in withstanding the years spent with her husband, but she didn’t want to feel that pressing, urgent want either...
She didn’t want to feel her heart fluttering like an adolescent’s because he happened to be sharing the same space as her. She’d grown up, gone through some hellish stuff. Her outlook on life had been changed for ever because of what she’d had to deal with. She had no illusions now and no longer believed that happiness was her right. It wasn’t and never would be. Javier Vasquez belonged to a time when unfettered optimism had been her constant companion. Now, not only was the murky past an unbreachable wall between them, but so were all the changes that had happened to her.
‘I wasn’t expecting company.’ She half turned to find him right behind her, having followed her into the kitchen.
The kitchen was big, a clever mix of old and new, and she felt utterly at home in it.
‘Smells good. What is it?’
‘Just some tomato sauce. I was going to have it with pasta.’
‘You never used to enjoy cooking.’ Yet again, he found himself referring to the past, dredging it up and bringing it into the present, where it most certainly did not belong.
‘I know.’ She shot him a fleeting smile as he sat down at the table, angling his chair so that he could extend his long legs to one side. ‘I never had to do it,’ she explained. ‘Mum loved cooking and I was always happy to let her get on with it. When she got ill, she said it used to occupy her and take her mind off her health problems, so I never interfered. I mean, I’d wash the dishes and tidy behind her, but she liked being the main chef. And then...’
She sighed and began finishing the food preparation, but horribly aware of those lazy, speculative eyes on her, following her every movement.
Javier resisted the urge to try to prise answers out of her. ‘So you learned to cook,’ he said, moving the conversation along, past the point of his curiosity.
‘And discovered that I rather enjoyed it.’ She didn’t fail to notice how swiftly he had diverted the conversation from the controversial topic of her past, the years she had spent after they had gone their separate ways. His initial curiosity was gone, and she told herself that she was very thankful that it had, because there was far too much she could never, would never, tell him.
But alongside that relief was a certain amount of disappointment, because his lack of curiosity was all wrapped up with the indifference he felt for her.
She suddenly had the strangest temptation to reach out and touch him, to stroke his wrist, feel the familiar strength of his forearm under her fingers. What would he do? How would he react? Would he recoil with horror or would he touch her back?
Appalled, she thrust a plate of food in front of him and sat down opposite him. She wanted to sit on her treacherous hands just in case they did something wildly inappropriate of their own accord and she had to remind herself shakily that she was a grown woman, fully in control of her wayward emotions. Emotions that had been stirred up, as they naturally would be, by having him invade her life out of the blue.
She heard herself babbling on like the village idiot about her culinary exploits while he ate and listened in silence, with every show of interest in what she was saying.
Which was remarkable, given she had just finished a lengthy anecdote about some slow-cooked beef she had tried to cook weeks previously, which had been disastrous.
‘So you like the apartment,’ Javier drawled, eyes not leaving her face as he sipped some wine. ‘And the job? Now that the work of trying to repair the damage done over the years has begun?’
‘It’s...awkward,’ Sophie told him truthfully.
‘Explain.’
‘You were right,’ she said bluntly, rising to begin clearing the table, her colour high. ‘Some of the people my father trusted have let the company down badly over the years. I can only think that employing friends was a luxury my father had when he started the company, and he either continued to trust that they were doing a good job or he knew that they weren’t but found it difficult to let them go. And then...’
‘And then?’ Javier queried silkily and Sophie shrugged.
‘Getting rid of them never happened. Thankfully the majority have now left, but with generous pension payments or golden handshakes...’ Yet more ways money had drained away from the company until the river had run dry.
‘The company is in far worse shape than even I imagined...’
Sophie blanched. She watched as he began helping to clear the table, bringing plates to the sink.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your father didn’t just take his eye off the ball when he became ill. I doubt his eye had ever really been fully on it in the first place.’
‘You can’t say that!’
‘I’ve gone through all the books with a fine-tooth comb, Sophie.’ He relieved her of the plate she was holding and dried it before placing it on the kitchen counter, then he slung the tea towel he had fetched over his shoulder and propped himself against the counter, arms folded.
Javier had always suspected that her father had been instrumental in her decision to quit university and return to the guy she had always been destined to marry. Even though she had never come right out and said so; even though she had barely had the courage to look him in the face when she had announced that she’d be leaving university because of a family situation that had arisen.
He had never told her that he had subsequently gone to see her parents, that he had confronted her father, who had left him in no doubt that there was no way his precious daughter would contemplate a permanent relationship with someone like him.
He wondered whether the old man’s extreme reaction had been somehow linked to his decline into terminal ill health, and scowled as he remembered the heated argument that had resulted in him walking away, never looking back.
This was the perfect moment to disabuse her of whatever illusions she had harboured about a father who had clearly had little clue about running a business, but the dismay on her face made him hesitate.
He raked his fingers uncomfortably through his hair and continued to stare down at her upturned face.
‘He was a terrific dad,’ she said defensively, thinking back to the many times he had taken the family out on excursions, often leaving the running of the company to the guys working for him. ‘Life was to be enjoyed’ had always been his motto. He had played golf and taken them on fantastic holidays; she recognised now that ineffective, relatively unsupervised management had not helped the company coffers. He had inherited a thriving business but, especially when everything had gone electronic, he had failed to move with the times and so had his pals who had joined the company when he had taken it over.
In retrospect, she saw that so much had been piling up like dark clouds on the horizon, waiting for their moment to converge and create the thunderstorm of events that would land her where she was right now.
Javier opened his mouth to disabuse her of her girlish illusions and then thought of his own father. There was no way he would ever have had a word said against him, and yet, hadn’t Pedro Vasquez once confessed that he had blown an opportunity to advance himself by storming out of his first company, too young and hot-headed to take orders he didn’t agree with? The golden opportunity he had walked away from had never again returned and he had had to devote years of saving and scrimping to get by on the low wages he had earned until his retirement.
But Javier had never held that weak moment against him.
‘Your father wouldn’t be the first man who failed to spot areas for expansion,’ he said gruffly. ‘It happens.’
Sophie knew that he had softened and something deep inside her shifted and changed as she continued to stare up at him, their eyes locked.
She could scarcely breathe.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered and he shook his head, wanting to break a connection that was sucking him in, but finding it impossible to do so.
‘What are you thanking me for?’
‘He was old-fashioned, and unfortunately the people he delegated to were as old-fashioned as he was. Dad should have called a troubleshooter in the minute the profits started taking a nosedive, but he turned a blind eye to what was going on in the company.’
And he turned a blind eye to your ex as well...
That thought made Javier stiffen. Her father had been old-fashioned enough to hold pompous, arrogant views about foreign upstarts, to have assumed that some loser with the right accent was the sort of man his daughter should marry.
But that wasn’t a road he was willing to go down because it would have absolved Sophie of guilt and the bottom line was that no one had pointed a gun to her head and forced her up the aisle.
She had wanted to take that step.
She had chosen to stick with the guy even though she knew that he was blowing up the company with his crazy investments.
She had watched and remained silent as vast sums of vitally needed money had been gambled away.
She had enabled. And the only reason she had done that was because she had loved the man.
He turned away abruptly, breaking eye contact, feeling the sour taste of bile rise to his mouth.
‘The company will have to be streamlined further,’ he told her curtly. ‘Dead wood can no longer be tolerated.’ He remained where he was, hip against the counter, and watched as she tidied, washed dishes, dried them and stayed silent.
‘All the old retainers will end up being sacked. Is that it?’
‘Needs must.’
‘Some of the old guys have families... They’re nearing retirement—and, okay, they may not have been the most efficient on the planet, but they’ve been loyal...’
‘And you place a lot of value on loyalty, do you?’ he murmured.
‘Don’t you?’
‘There are times when common sense has to win the battle.’
‘You’re in charge now. I don’t suppose I have any choice, have I?’
Instead of soothing him, her passive, resentful compliance stoked a surge of anger inside him.
‘If you’d taken a step back,’ he said with ruthless precision, ‘and swapped blind loyalty for some common sense, you might have been able to curb some of your dear husband’s outrageous excesses...’
‘You truly believe that?’ She stepped back, swamped by his powerful, aggressive presence, and glared at him.
The last thing Javier felt he needed was to have her try to make feeble excuses for the man who had contributed to almost destroying her family business. What he really felt he needed right now was something stiff to drink. He couldn’t look at her without his body going into instant and immediate overdrive and he couldn’t talk to her without relinquishing some of his formidable and prized self-control. She affected him in a way no other woman ever had and it annoyed the hell out of him.
‘What else is anyone supposed to believe?’ he asked with rampant sarcasm. ‘Join the dots and you usually get an accurate picture at the end of the exercise.’
‘There was no way I could ever have stopped Roger!’ Sophie heard herself all but shout at him, appalled by her outburst even as she realised that it was too late to take it back. ‘There were always consequences for trying to talk common sense into him!’
The silence that greeted this outburst was electric, sizzling around them, so that the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
‘Consequences? What consequences?’ Javier pressed in a dangerously soft voice.
‘Nothing,’ Sophie muttered, turning away, but he reached out, circling her forearm to tug her back towards him.
‘You don’t get to walk away from this conversation after you’ve opened up a can of worms, Sophie.’
There were so many reasons this was a can of worms that she didn’t want to explore. On a deeply emotional level, she didn’t want to confront, yet again, the mistakes she had made in the past. She’d done enough of that to last a lifetime and she especially didn’t want to confront those mistakes aloud, with Javier as her witness. She didn’t want his pity. She didn’t want him to sense her vulnerability. He might no longer care about her, but she didn’t want to think that he would be quietly satisfied that, having walked out on him, she had got her comeuppance, so to speak.
‘It’s not relevant!’ she snapped, trying and failing to tug her arm out of his grasp.
‘Was he...? I don’t know what to think here, Soph...’
That abbreviation of her name brought back a flood of memories and they went straight to the core of her, burning a hole through her defence mechanisms. Her soft mouth trembled and she knew that her eyes were glazing over, which, in turn, made her blink rapidly, fighting back the urge to burst into tears.
‘He could be unpredictable.’ Her jaw tightened and she looked away but he wouldn’t allow her to avoid his searching gaze, tilting her to face him by placing a finger gently under her chin.
‘That’s a big word. Try breaking it down into smaller components...’
‘He could be verbally abusive,’ she told him jerkily. ‘On one occasion he was physically abusive. So there you have it, Javier. If I’d tried to interfere in his gambling, there’s no accounting for what the outcome might have been for me.’
Javier was horrified. He dropped his hand and his fingers clenched and unclenched. She might have fancied herself in love with the guy but that would have been disillusionment on a grand scale.
‘Why didn’t you divorce him?’
‘It was a brief marriage, Javier. And there is more to this than you know...’
‘Did you know that the man had anger issues?’ Javier sifted his fingers through his hair. Suddenly the kitchen felt the size of a matchbox. He wanted to walk, unfettered; he wanted to punch something.
‘Of course I didn’t, and that certainly wasn’t the case when... You don’t get it,’ she said uneasily. ‘And I’d really rather not talk about this any more.’
Javier had been mildly incredulous at her declaration that her descent into penury had been tougher to handle than his own lifetime of struggle and straitened circumstances. She, at least, had had the head start of the silver spoon in the mouth and a failing company was, after all, still a company with hope of salvation. The crumbling family pile was still a very big roof over her head.
Now there were muddy, swirling currents underlying those glib assumptions, and yet again, he lost sight of the clarity of his intentions.
He reminded himself that fundamentally nothing had changed. She had begun something seven years ago and had failed to finish it because she had chosen to run off with her long-time, socially acceptable boyfriend.
That the boyfriend had failed to live up to expectation, that events in her life had taken a fairly disastrous turn, did not change the basic fact that she had strung him along.
But he couldn’t recapture the simple black-and-white equation that had originally propelled him. He wondered, in passing, whether he should just have stuck to his quid pro quo solution: ‘you give me what I want and I’ll give you what you want’.
But no.
He wanted so much more and he could feel it running hot through his veins as she continued to stare at him, unable to break eye contact.
Subtly, the atmosphere shifted. He sensed the change in her breathing, saw the way her pupils dilated, the way her lips parted as if she might be on the brink of saying something.
He cupped her face with his hand and felt rather than heard the long sigh that made her shudder.
Sophie’s eyelids felt heavy. She wanted to close her eyes because if she closed her eyes she would be able to breathe him in more deeply, and she wanted to do that, wanted to breathe him in, wanted to touch him and scratch the itch that had been bothering her ever since he had been catapulted back into her life.
She wanted to kiss him and taste his mouth.
She only realised that she was reaching up to him when she felt the hardness of muscled chest under the palms of her flattened hands.
She heard a whimper of sheer longing which seemed to come from her and then she was kissing him...tongues entwining...exploring...easing some of the aching pain of her body...
She inched closer, pressed herself against him and wanted to rub against his length, wanted to feel his nakedness against hers.
She couldn’t get enough of him.
It was as if no time had gone by between them, as if they were back where they had been, a time when he had been able to set fire to her body with the merest of touches. Nothing had changed and everything had changed.
‘No!’ She came to her senses with horrified, jerky panic. ‘This is... I am not that girl I once was. I... No!’
She’d flung herself at him! She’d practically assaulted the man like a sex-starved woman desperate to be touched! He didn’t even care about her! She’d opened up and on the back of that had leapt on him and had managed to surface only after damage had been done!
Humiliation tore through her. She went beetroot-red and stumbled backwards.
‘I apologise for that.’ She immediately went on the attack. ‘It should never have happened and I don’t know what came over me!’ She ran her fingers through her hair and tried to remain calm but she was shaking like a leaf. ‘This isn’t what we’re about! Not at all.’
Javier raised his eyebrows and her colour deepened.
‘There’s only business between us,’ she insisted through clenched teeth. ‘I must have had... I don’t normally drink...’
‘Now, isn’t that the lamest excuse in the world?’ Javier murmured. ‘Let’s blame it on the wine...’
‘I don’t care what you think!’ How could he be so cool and composed when she was all over the place? Except, of course, she knew how. Because she was just so much more affected by him than he was by her and she could see all her pride and self-respect disappearing down the plug hole if she didn’t get a grip on the situation right now.
She cleared her throat and stared, at him and through him. ‘I... We have to work alongside one another for a while and...this was just an unfortunate blip. I would appreciate it if you never mention it again. We can both pretend that it never happened, because it will never happen again.’
Javier lowered his eyes and tilted his head to one side as if seriously considering what she had just said.
So many challenges in that single sentence. Did she really and truly believe that she could close the book now that page one had been turned?
He’d tasted her and one small taste wasn’t going to do. Not for him and not for her. Whatever her backstory, they both needed to sate themselves with one another and that was what they would do before that place was inevitably reached where walking away was an option.
‘If that’s how you want to play it.’ He shrugged and looked at her. ‘And from Monday,’ he said with lazy assurance, ‘bank on me being around most of the time. We both want the same thing, don’t we...?’
‘What?’ Confused, the only thought that came to her was each other—that, at any rate, was the thing that she wanted, and she could smell that it was what he wanted as well.
‘For us to sort out the problems in this company as quickly as possible,’ he said in a voice implying surprise that she hadn’t spotted the right answer immediately. ‘Of course...’
