Читать книгу Indecent Deception - Линн Грэхем, LYNNE GRAHAM - Страница 7

Chrissy took one glazed look at him and then closed her eyes. ‘D-don’t you think you ought to put some clothes on?’

‘I want an explanation!’ Blaze grated as though he were the one with the grounds for most complaint.

She could still see him in her mind’s eye. Six feet three inches of lean, all-male virility and not a stitch of clothing to interrupt the view. Embarrassment, bewilderment and incredulity held her in paralysis. What was he doing in this house? What was he doing in the only bed? What, worst of all, had she allowed him to do to her?

‘W-will you get out of here?’ she spat, lifting her lashes too soon and catching a glimpse of his long golden back view as he hauled up a pair of jeans.

‘This is my room!’ he roared back at her.

Chrissy was trembling. ‘You’re going to w-wake Rosie...’

‘Rosie?’ Aghast, he strode round to her side of the bed and stared down in disbelief at the small curled-up shape showing only a fluff of tousled hair above the blankets. ‘She’s in here as well? We might’ve—she might’ve seen— Bloody hell!’

Without warning, he bent down, scooped Chrissy bodily out of the bed and, striding to the door, he deposited her on the landing. Then, practically on tiptoe and with an exaggerated care which would have been sheer comedy in any other circumstances, he closed the door. He needn’t have bothered. Rosie slept like the dead.

‘We’ll discuss this downstairs,’ he bit out fiercely.

‘I’d l-like to know w-what you’re doing here,’ Chrissy dared, shivering with cold and barefoot into the bargain.

‘Downstairs,’ he repeated with arrogant emphasis. ‘And the explanation had better be good.’

Ignoring him, Chrissy went back into the bedroom and crossed the floor to where her case lay open. Pulling out an outsize sweater, she donned it in haste.

‘If you wake that baby, I’ll hit the roof!’ he spat like an avenging angel.

‘Nothing short of an earthquake wakes her when she’s really tired,’ Chrissy muttered.

‘Am I supposed to be grateful for that?’ He took the stairs two at a time.

‘W-well, it’s more than I’ve got to be grateful for,’ Chrissy shot at him shakily. ‘How d-dare you put your filthy hands on me?’

‘Hell’s teeth,’ he seethed. ‘I didn’t know it was you!’

He strode into the kitchen, illuminating lights all the way.

‘I thought the electricity was off,’ she breathed irrelevantly.

‘Switched off. The builders forgot to put it on again.’ Blaze threw himself down on a chair by the scarred kitchen table and fixed smouldering sapphire-blue eyes on her shrinking figure. ‘What were you doing in my bed?’

‘It’s the only bed in the house,’ she protested, wondering how on earth he was managing to make her feel the one most in the wrong.

‘The furniture I had in storage was supposed to arrive this afternoon.’ In the long pause, he studied her intently and there was a new, disturbing light in that all-enveloping gaze. ‘I didn’t check when I came in. I put on the electric, came upstairs and got into bed in the dark. I didn’t want to wake you and the kid up by making a lot of noise—’

‘Your consideration o-overwhelms me.’ Furniture in storage. The truth had been shouting at her from the instant she sat up in that bed. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it. ‘Th-this is your h-house, isn’t it?’

‘Yeah, and I’m a lot like Baby Bear when I find someone uninvited in my bed,’ he drawled sardonically.

He hadn’t denied it. Westleigh Hall belonged to him yet he had hired her without telling her that fact. Indeed he had deliberately deceived her. A deep flush carmined her fine skin. She was so shaken by the realisation that her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth. This was her employer. Blaze Kenyon. What was he playing at? What was to happen now? Had he offered her the job as a cruel joke?

Dimly she had assumed that her new boss might be a little strapped for cash and that was why he was willing to take on someone without references or any real experience. Blaze’s Ferrari put paid to that idea. She found it hard to believe that Blaze had not been able to find someone more suitable...someone without a child in tow.

‘I didn’t know it was y-your bed... It was the only bed,’ she reminded him in an undertone. ‘We had to sleep somewhere. There was no light, no food, no heat—’

‘Money for food.’ With a flourish, Blaze slapped down a handful of notes and a small sheet of paper instructing her to do some shopping. It had been sitting on the top of the fridge, which was taller than she was. With only the aid of a torch, she would never have seen it.

‘We only got here at t-ten.’ She explained about the bomb scare. ‘I didn’t see the note.’

‘I was expecting food tonight,’ he divulged grimly.

Chrissy understood why women occasionally battered men to death. She thought of their joyless arrival and the complete absence of anyone willing to show them how to settle in.

‘If the furniture didn’t come, Hamish should have taken you back to the lodge to spend the night with him and Floss,’ Blaze mused impatiently. ‘Weren’t you prepared to accept the offer?’

She nearly told him the truth, but that might get the charmless Hamish into trouble. If there was the smallest chance that she could work here...and she couldn’t afford not to fight for that chance...it wouldn’t be a good idea to get on the wrong side of Blaze’s other employees. ‘I didn’t want to bother them,’ she muttered. ‘I think he was busy.’

‘I pay him to be busy at what I tell him to be busy at.’ It was chillingly cold and she suppressed a shiver. ‘Why don’t you put on the kettle? I could do with something warm...considering that the something that was warming me up appears to be out of bounds.’

‘K-kettle?’ she echoed jerkily, naïvely unbalanced by that softly added double entendre.

‘The object with the spout and the flex.’

Mercifully she espied it on the top of the fridge. She filled it although she felt more like throwing it at him. ‘W-why didn’t you tell me that I’d be working for you?’

‘I didn’t want you to turn it down without thinking it through,’ he murmured flatly. ‘You weren’t going to get a second chance. I need a housekeeper without a lot of fancy ideas and you need a job. Basically, that’s all there was to it.’

But she sensed something more. Biting at her lower lip, she glanced across at him. His shirt hung open, framing the muscular brown breadth of his chest and the curling black hair hazing his pectorals before it arrowed down over his flat stomach. In the act of staring, she caught herself up and shut her eyes on an aching sense of chagrin and confusion. Was she becoming like all the rest? Couldn’t she take her eyes off him? Or was it that much harder now since that night all those years ago when he had touched her and the whole world had vanished as though he had pressed a destruct button somewhere deep down inside her?

And if that was true, how did she feel after tonight? She did not feel equal to meeting those fiercely intelligent eyes of his. She might have believed she was dreaming, but she had responded wildly to those intimacies. She had never felt like that before, but then she hadn’t had much opportunity to experiment, she reminded herself. Maybe any experienced male could make a woman feel like that...but only if the chemistry was right.

That shook her rigid. How could she continue to deny that she found him physically attractive? She had melted in his arms. She had been electrified by his touch. And if that was so obvious to her, how much more obvious was it to him? All of a sudden, she knew she couldn’t bear to stay in this house and work for him.

‘The kettle’s boiling.’

He was so cool now. What had happened in that bed might almost have existed only in her imagination. ‘I don’t think I can stay after—’

He expelled a long, laconic sigh. ‘After what? I didn’t know you were there. I turned over and found a female body and reacted on instinct...’

Chrissy was mortified. ‘That’s s-so disgusting.’

Blaze raised a winged brow. ‘You talk like a teenage virgin, but you didn’t find Rosie under any gooseberry bush—’

‘I don’t w-want to talk about it!’ In her distress, her back was rigidly presented to him.

‘You must concede that I have some grounds for curiosity. Did you love Rosie’s father?’

She spun round. ‘No!’ she rebutted with sharp distaste and then abruptly she remembered that she was talking for her mother, not herself. Reddening, she muttered, ‘I thought I did but, when it came down to it, it was j-just an infatuation.’

‘Are you in touch with him...?’ Unusually he hesitated. ‘I mean, do you visit him?’

‘No.’

‘Are you waiting for him?’

Feeling foolish, she shook her head, refusing to look at him.

‘That would appear to bring us back to what happened between us—’

‘Leave it alone!’ she broke in fiercely.

‘Why should I?’ Blaze traded. ‘Another few minutes and I’d have had you—’

Chrissy shuddered. ‘No!’

With veiled eyes, he surveyed her appearance in the sloppy sweater that did little to conceal the slender length of her perfect legs. Tousled dark hair with brighter streaks the shade of autumn leaves cascaded round her triangular face, highlighting luminous green eyes and a wide, generous mouth. ‘You’re incredibly sexy,’ he breathed in a different tone of voice altogether, an almost predatory purr deepening his vowel sounds.

It was like being touched. With difficulty, she dredged her stunned scrutiny from him and doggedly asked, ‘D-do you take milk and sugar?’

There was a pin-dropping silence. She pretended not to notice it. He hadn’t meant what he had said; of course he hadn’t. It was just that certain dangerous boundaries had been breached between them. It was just that it was second nature to him to lapse into that incredibly physical intensity with a woman. Or maybe, having sunk low enough to touch her, even half asleep, he felt he had to justify that intimacy by exaggerating her attractions. Whatever, if she ignored it, it would go away, and sooner or later she would stop squirming with embarrassment.

‘Blaze...’ she had to prompt shakily

‘One sugar, no milk.’

The raw tension visible in her slim shoulders eased. She set a cup and saucer down about a foot from him.

‘I only bite after midnight on request,’ he said softly. ‘Join me.’

It wasn’t an invitation, it was a command. She tensed and it really sunk in then that she was utterly dependent on his goodwill. In a series of stiff movements, she made herself a coffee and sat down awkwardly at the table with him.

‘You don’t like me. Relax,’ he urged as her head jerked up in dismay. ‘It really doesn’t bother me.’

Involuntarily she meshed with those astonishingly blue eyes.

‘It does have a certain novelty value,’ he pointed out smoothly.

‘Good,’ she managed, and hurriedly smothered a yawn.

An odd slanting smile curved his expressive mouth. ‘Start worrying if the novelty value starts to pall,’ he advised.

It was three in the morning. Word games were beyond her. She propped her chin on her hand. ‘Where do I sleep?’

‘Go back upstairs. I’ll stay down here for a while.’

At the door she hesitated. ‘A while?’

He groaned impatiently. ‘Look, I refuse to knock Hamish and Floss up in the middle of the night. That’s a big bed up there. I shall lie down fully clothed on my half—’

‘You can’t!’ Chrissy was livid at the very idea.