Читать книгу Avoiding Mr Right - Sophie Weston - Страница 8

CHAPTER THREE

SHE did. And for a week Christina’s mind was in two places at once.

One part of her brain was organising hotels and describing antiquities, the other was locked in a timeless embrace with a man she hardly knew—a man who had made sure she hardly knew him. A man who had given her a carefully edited account of himself which had left out all the essentials, possibly including his real name. A man who had said they would never meet again and then, for some unfathomable reason, had changed his mind.

Except that the reason was not unfathomable, however much Christina pretended to herself. It had all been there in the kiss—intensity, anger, need. Christina had never felt that she needed anyone before, not in that immediate, physical way. Nor had she felt the same driving need coming back at her, plucking her out of normality and onto a plane where all she could see or touch or taste was him.

‘Sex,’ she said to herself. ‘That’s all it is. Strong attraction, sure, but nothing more than a passing thing. Ignore it and it will go away.’

Only it didn’t. There were times when she barely noticed her pleasant church group from the American Midwest. They were in Europe for the first time and endearingly enthusiastic about the sights at Mycenae and Delphi. Christina tried hard to share their enthusiasm. She even succeeded sometimes. But the dark, magnetic figure of Luc was always there, always lurking. And all too often he just swamped the rest. It was not like any sexual attraction she had ever felt before.

It’s not real, she told herself.

But it felt reat—horribly real. More real than anything else she could remember. It was almost frightening. That stopped her dead in the shadow of a classic column. He had said that she was afraid of him, hadn’t he?

‘Ridiculous,’ she said aloud.

But on the long, hot coach journey back to their hotel Christina was remembering all too vividly every word he had said. It was nonsense that she was afraid of him. Of course it was. She was self-possessed and independent and she was not afraid of anyone.

But, if she admitted the truth, there was something in that dark, demanding presence that sent little chills through her. Not fear, naturally, but something uneasy that told her she had no defences against him. Or anyway, none that seemed to work.

The unwelcome truth was that Luc Henri overwhelmed her. He had.only to look—let alone touch—and she started to vibrate like a musical instrument played by a master. And she did not even know who he was!