Читать книгу The Italian's Baby of Passion - Ким Лоренс, Susan Stephens - Страница 17

‘THERE is no doubt about it. Sam is my son, there’s no question.’

Scarlet shook her head and, hand pressed to her mouth, ran towards the bathroom. ‘Excuse me!’ she gulped, polite to the end, and then she bolted.

She was in too much of a hurry to close the door behind her and Roman heard the sound of her painful retching. It was several minutes later when she returned, paler and graver, but her composure was obviously paper-thin.

‘If you think you can take him off me…I know you’ve got money.’

Roman could almost see the sinister plan he hadn’t made to snatch the child away from her forming in her mind.

‘Don’t be melodramatic.’

‘I’ll run away and you’ll never find us,’ she threatened wildly. Now that makes me sound like stable, responsible parent material.

‘I can see you’ve cast me in the role of evil villain to your wilting heroine.’

‘I’ve never wilted in my life.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. I can’t abide a clingy female.’ He reached out and took her shoulders. When there was no resistance he drew her gently towards him. ‘I’m not going to take Sam off you. I just want to be part of his life.’

And he had a right to be part of his life, but what sort of upheaval would that cause for Sam, not to mention herself. Scarlet didn’t feel capable of working out the implications of this; she no longer knew which way was up, let alone what was a lie or the truth!

Scarlet, totally focused on convincing him she wasn’t going to let him take Sam, didn’t even feel the pain as her neatly trimmed nails gouged into the soft flesh of her palms.

‘Sam’s life is with me,’ she asserted loudly.

Roman inhaled sharply and his hands fell from her shoulders. ‘He is my son. This will be much easier, Scarlet, if we work together. If we’re friends.’

‘Friends? Even if none of this had happened we could never be friends,’ she asserted hotly.

On this at least Scarlet could be totally confident. How could you be friends with someone whose way of life was a total anathema to you, someone with whom you didn’t have anything in common and someone who, furthermore, made your hormones act in an indiscriminate and mortifying manner?

Irritation showed in his deep-set shadowed eyes as he heard her out.

‘A little bit of give and take here—would it be too much to ask?’ he wondered, dragging his hand wearily through his already disordered hair.

Scarlet experienced an irrational urge to smooth down those disordered locks. ‘Me give Sam, and you take him! Sam is three—where were you when he had chicken pox? Were you there to hold his hand when they stitched up his head when he fell off his bike?’

‘I didn’t know I had a son.’

So far he’d only thought about the changes having a son was going to make to his life. For the first time he paused to consider the things he had already missed out on, things he would never see, like the child’s first steps. He was unprepared for the feeling of profound loss.

‘And now you do, so what? Are you going to change your entire lifestyle?’ I don’t think so. ‘It’s obvious you haven’t thought this through. What do you plan to do—fit Sam into your schedule between making your next million or wooing your next supermodel? You can’t walk in here and demand to be part of Sam’s life.’

‘I’m not demanding anything.’

‘That’s not the way it looks from where I’m standing.’

‘There are things I can give Sam.’

‘Money—?’ she suggested scornfully.

‘Financial security, certainly,’ he agreed levelly.

‘Well, that was predictable. I wondered when the pound sign would start flashing.’ She raised an eyebrow and produced a disdainful sniff. ‘Well, you can put your chequebook away; we don’t want your money,’ she completed contemptuously.

There was a short simmering silence. Looking down his patrician nose at her, he drew himself up to his full height. ‘Does it give you a nice sense of moral superiority to be able to throw my money back in my face?’

‘You can’t buy me,’ she gritted defiantly.

‘I’m not trying to, neither am I trying to score points. I’m trying to consider my son’s best interests.’

‘So am I!’ she rebutted uneasily, aware that her responses were becoming increasingly childish.

‘Are you? I’m a wealthy man—do you expect me to leave my son nothing?’

‘Well…I…I hadn’t thought…’

‘Sam will be the main beneficiary as soon as my solicitor has drafted my new will,’ he told her quietly.

She might want to reject his money, but Sam was his son. ‘You want to make him a beneficiary. I suppose that’s reasonable,’ she admitted.

‘I want to make him the beneficiary.’

‘Oh!’

‘There is no one else. Obviously I’ll reimburse you for any—’

‘I don’t want reimbursing. Don’t you understand? I don’t want anything from you! I think you’re—’

‘Shall we leave your feelings towards me to one side for a moment?’

Scarlet deeply resented him taking upon himself the role of impartial reason. ‘Feelings for you!’ she parroted. ‘I don’t have any feelings for you one way or the other.’

‘I’m perfectly aware I hardly come out of this looking good.’ You couldn’t defend the indefensible. ‘But it takes two and your sister denied me the right of knowing my son.’

‘You leave Abby alone!’ Scarlet yelled. ‘I’d say she knew what she was doing.’

‘So you think she made the right decision?’

‘Too right I do,’ Scarlet responded with hardly a qualm about lying through her teeth. ‘A spoilt, commitment-shy playboy is hardly most people’s idea of father material.’

A muscle in his lean cheek clenched more obviously with each successive insult she flung at him. Scarlet knew she was being wildly unfair, but hitting back at him was a knee-jerk reaction she had no control over.

His face went blank, his eyes flat and cold as they scanned her face.

‘This isn’t a situation of my making, but I’m going to do the right thing whether you like it or not. You’re going to have to work with me on this, Scarlet.’

He was obviously very comfortable with issuing ultimatums, but Scarlet was not at all comfortable about meekly acquiescing!

When he got bossy her automatic response was to do the opposite of what he said and, if at all possible, in a manner that would dent his air of ineffable superiority.

‘And if I don’t?’ People must have been doing what he said all his life to make him so damned sure of himself.

His shoulders lifted expressively as his eyes moved briefly across her faintly flushed face. ‘We both want what is best for Sam, so you will.’

Scarlet felt a shiver trace its icy path up her spine. The silky words held an unmistakable threat and, even though he never deliberately used his undoubted physical presence to intimidate, it was hard not to be daunted by his tenacity.

‘If you wanted what was best for Sam you’d go out that door and forget we exist,’ she charged in a furious hiss.

‘It’s not going to happen.’ His tone was not without sympathy, but there was no room for negotiation in his manner. The expression on his lean face was totally implacable. ‘I have a son, Sam has a father and a family who will all want to know him. Are you going to deprive him of that?’

She blinked, an expression of confusion spreading across her face. How often had she wished that she could offer Sam a large, loving family? ‘Do your family know about Sam?’

‘My mother doesn’t need the results of a DNA test; she was totally confident from that first moment she saw him that Sam is my son. She’s completely over the moon about having a grandchild. I would imagine the champagne is even now on ice.’

‘And will she have told your father?’ Despite herself, Scarlet found herself interested by his colourful background.

Roman shook his head.

She got the impression he didn’t want to discuss his father. It was only a feeling, his cloaked expression was un-revealing, but it was enough to make her speculate.

‘But he’s not going to be happy about having a grandchild?’

‘My father is an inflexible and obstinate man. You understand him better if you accept one thing: he is blind to shades of grey. For Dad things are either right or wrong. You can safely assume that having a child outside marriage will fall into the wrong category.’

‘He would reject Sam?’ The thought that anyone could wish to punish a child for what they, in their narrow-minded way, perceived as the sins of the parents brought a ferocious, protective scowl to her face.

‘No, of course not.’ Impatiently he brushed aside her anxiety.

His response seemed spontaneous enough, but Scarlet remained unconvinced. Sam’s grandfather sounded pretty scary and not at all nice.

She shook her head slowly from side to side. ‘You mean not on the surface, that he’ll be acting one way and feeling another…?’ She shook her head with even more vigour as she thought about it. ‘There is no way I’m having Sam exposed to that sort of atmosphere.’

‘Dad isn’t intolerant.’

‘Isn’t that slightly contradictory? You’re the one who called him “inflexible” and “obstinate”.’

‘He’d probably say the same thing about me.’

His candour took her aback. ‘Well, he doesn’t sound like an ideal role model for a little boy to me.’

Roman adopted a mock bewildered expression. ‘How can you say that when you can see how well I’ve turned out?’

Scarlet frowned. She hated it when he made fun of himself that way; it made him almost likeable. She knew it was very important not to like him.

‘You don’t get on with your father?’

Would it do Sam any favours to be accepted into the bosom of this dysfunctional family? Or am I just grasping at straws? Looking for a reason, any reason, not to cooperate when deep down I know full well I have no right to deny Sam a father and an extended family.

‘That hardly makes me unique, but, yes, we disagree on most things. My father holds some firm views on everything including modern morals—mine mostly.’ He rotated his head as if to relieve the tension in his shoulders.

‘That’s silly; surely he knows most of the stuff in the papers is exaggerated to sell newspapers.’ Dear God, if you took every article about him seriously he could be in Paris and New York at the same time!

‘Scarlet Smith…are you defending me?’ He studied her for several seconds before adding, without the mockery that had laced his previous comment, ‘I’m touched.’

Their eyes collided and Scarlet blushed to the roots of her hair. ‘Everyone knows that you should take the celebrity stories with a pinch of salt,’ she retorted crossly.

Her face got even hotter and her scowl even fiercer as he continued to look at her, one dark brow raised.

‘My father believes there’s no smoke without fire,’ he commented after a painfully long pause—painful for Scarlet anyway.

‘People do and I suppose his generation—’

‘Sure, there is the generation gap, but it’s more than that,’ Roman interrupted. ‘Before he met my mother, Dad had planned to enter a seminary.’

Scarlet’s eyes widened. ‘Seminary? Isn’t that where you train to be a priest?’

‘It is,’ Roman confirmed.

‘Gracious!’ she exclaimed unthinkingly. ‘No wonder he doesn’t approve of you!’

‘You and he will get on famously,’ Roman predicted drily. ‘There’s also…’ Betraying an uncharacteristic indecisiveness, he stopped and raked a hand through his dark hair. ‘Well, you might as well hear the story from me as you’ll undoubtedly hear a version of it from my father when you meet him.’

Scarlet was so curious she let the assumption that she would one day meet O’Hagan senior pass without comment.

‘I was engaged to a girl—Sally.’

Her eyes widened. ‘You were engaged?’

‘Yes, about five years ago. Why so surprised, Scarlet? Most men of my age have had at least one serious long-term relationship.’

‘But I thought you were…’

‘A shallow, womanising pig?’ he suggested. He observed the surge of guilty colour in her cheeks with a cynical smile. ‘Relax, there’s no need to totally retrench, the two are not necessarily mutually incompatible.’

‘Did your father not approve of her?’

‘Far from it, he adored her. He still does. I’d known Sally since we were children—her parents are tenant farmers on the estate. We were always in and out of each other’s houses.’

‘The girl next door?’

He nodded. ‘There was nothing then, but we met up at college and were involved briefly, but it was nothing heavy. Then a few years later we met up at a party. A month later we were engaged. My family, especially my father, was over the moon,’ he recalled.

‘But you couldn’t go through with it.’

Roman’s dark, saturnine features clenched. His lip curled into a self-derisive smile as their eyes met.

‘No, actually she couldn’t go through with it. She ran off on the eve of the wedding with my best man.’

‘Gracious! That’s…that’s…’ She gave a helpless shrug. Very little he could have told her could have shocked her more. Any response seemed hopelessly inadequate. ‘I’m sorry. That must have been awful for you.’

‘I’ve had better days, but it happened a very long time ago.’

Despite his apparent indifference Scarlet couldn’t help but wonder if behind that casual attitude he was hiding his true feelings. Did he still love this woman who had dumped him so ignominiously? Had he gained his playboy reputation as a result of trying to forget his lost love?

‘I don’t understand. If she dumped you how come your father blames you?’

‘There was a note. She asked me not to tell her parents until she had a chance to talk to them. I’m assuming she never did. Nobody but Mother and I know she ran off with Jake.’

‘But—’

‘It didn’t last…she left for France and came back three weeks later alone. As far as my father is concerned I had the perfect woman and I drove her away. Maybe,’ he mused, ‘he was right. There’s a possibility that you’ll meet her in Ireland—she’s a teacher at the local primary school these days.’

‘When you meet up…’ she began, then the implication of his words hit home. ‘I won’t be going to Ireland.’

‘I’m sure Sam will be a lot more comfortable if you do.’

‘That’s moral blackmail!’ she accused angrily.

‘It’s also common sense,’ he pointed out. ‘Don’t worry, my parents will love Sam,’ he promised in a warmer voice. ‘There’s no sinister reason I haven’t spoken to my dad yet, I simply wanted to sort out things with you before I spoke to him.’

‘“Sort out?”’ she repeated, her mouth forming a twisted smile as she angrily studied his lean face. As if I can be filed away like a completed contract. ‘Are we sorted now?’ she asked bitingly.

‘I simply meant…’ Their eyes made contact, his lashes came down, but not before she had seen the seething frustration in those dark depths. ‘You are one prickly female, do you know that?’

‘I don’t like the idea of being sorted.’

‘It’s a figure of speech.’

‘Then maybe you should choose your words with more care.’

‘Dear God, I’m already walking on eggshells around you,’ he claimed. ‘The next logical step would be for us to communicate through a third party. Think about it,’ he suggested heavily. ‘All I knew for sure when I came here was Sam was my child, and you weren’t the mother. I needed some answers.’

‘What did you think I’d done, kidnapped him…?’ she suggested sarcastically.

‘I hadn’t ruled out anything. As I’ve already said, all I knew for sure was you weren’t the mother.’

‘How convenient I’m not beautiful and blonde,’ she jeered. ‘Or you might not have realised it was impossible for me to be Sam’s mum.’

A dark line of anger appeared along the crest of his cheekbones as their eyes made contact. His were darkly furious as they narrowed to angry glittering slits.

‘I’m beginning to think there’s an element of jealousy in your hostility.’

‘“Jealousy?”’ she parroted shrilly. ‘You think I’m jealous that you slept with my sister? You must be mad.’ Her scornful laugh had a hollow sound to it.

‘I was thinking more along the lines of you being jealous because there is someone else with a claim to Sam and you’re possessive, you want to keep him all to yourself. But if the other works?’ One dark brow quirked suggestively.

A scorching flush travelled over her entire body as she gasped into the static silence that followed his words.

‘I wouldn’t sleep with a man like you if my life depended on it!’

‘Not very original,’ he mused, his hooded eyes trained on her heaving bosom. ‘But you get full marks for conviction,’ he commended.

His tone of amused condescension made her want to throw something large and heavy at his smug face. She hadn’t expected the news she didn’t want to sleep with him to send him into a deep depression, but there was no need for him to treat it like a joke.

‘And,’ she continued contemptuously, ‘if I was choosing a father for my baby, you wouldn’t even make the list!’ She stopped, an expression of horror stealing across her face as she drew back from the very brink of revealing her sister’s shameful secret.

As much as Scarlet didn’t like the man, she didn’t dislike him enough to rub his nose in the humiliating fact that, far from getting accidentally pregnant, her sister had planned the entire thing. If he did go on to become part of Sam’s life—and, while she wasn’t ready to admit that out loud just yet, deep down she knew it was going to happen—what would she do then? How was she to know that revealing the truth would not colour any relationship father and son might come to have?

Would Roman feel differently about his son if he knew he had been tricked and used…? It wasn’t inconceivable a man could resent a child born of such circumstances. No, she decided, nothing could be achieved from coming clean.

For several moments Roman remained silent. When he finally responded he no longer appeared in the mood to be diverted by her comments.

‘Having Sam provides you with the perfect excuse for you not getting out there, doesn’t it?’

She responded with a grimace of genuine confusion to his observation. ‘“Getting out there?”’

‘Have you always been scared of relationships?’

‘You think I use Sam as an excuse? That I’m commitment-phobic?’ She released an incredulous laugh. ‘What you know about relationships could be printed on a matchbox. And if by “getting out there” you mean joining the singles scene and hanging out in bars waiting to be picked up, I’m really not that desperate.’

‘I’m happy for you. I wish I could say the same myself, but this conversation is enough to make anyone desperate—’ He broke off and heaved a deep sigh. ‘Do you think we could concentrate on the main objective of this conversation?’

She watched as he linked his hands behind his head and dropped his head back, the action exposed the long, powerful length of his brown throat. Her tummy muscles quivered.

‘What is the main objective of this conversation?’ she asked huskily.

Roman unlinked his hands and let them fall to his side. ‘I’d like to get to know my son, and before you say anything hear me out.’ Their glances locked and slowly, grudgingly, Scarlet nodded. ‘I don’t expect this thing to happen overnight. Obviously it will be better for Sam if I become part of his life slowly…gradually.’

‘If you become part of Sam’s life, you’re going to become part of mine.’

‘Exactly,’ he agreed, not reacting to the horror etched on her face. ‘Which is why I thought you might have some ideas on the subject.’

Scarlet stared at him incredulously. ‘Are you kidding? After what you’ve just thrown at me I can’t even think straight!’

‘Well, we’ll just have to put our heads together, won’t we?’ he gritted.

‘I wouldn’t be seen dead with any part of my body within thirty feet of the corresponding part of yours!’

His features tautened. ‘Listen, my tolerance levels on this are pretty high because I know you think I’m a bastard. That I can accept,’ he said heavily. ‘But we need…You’ve got to think of Sam,’ he reproached sternly.

As if she had been thinking of anything else for three years! He didn’t have the faintest idea.

‘You’ve got to stop turning this into something personal.’

Scarlet planted her hands on her hips and threw her head back. She was literally trembling with reaction.

‘Wanna bet?’ she drawled.

‘Right, you want personal…fine.’ He covered the space between them and grabbed the back of her head with one hand; with the other he framed her face. She looked at him with eyes wide and shocked; she smelt of flowery soap, shampoo, and warm woman, and Roman’s body reacted violently to the combination.

‘Is this the sort of personal you had in mind?’

Even while he was saying it the voice in the back of his head was telling him he’d been looking for an excuse to do this ever since he’d met her. Once he started kissing her the voice wasn’t telling him anything, because his brain took a back seat.

In the moment before her soft lips parted to allow his tongue to slide deep inside her warm mouth he heard, or rather felt, the broken whimper in her throat. The erotic little rasp sent a lick of heat through his blood and a corresponding jolt through his already rock-hard body.

She melted into him like warm butter. There was no hint of resistance in the body he had drawn against his, just heat and softness and the promise of more. Greedily he accepted the sweetness so unexpectedly offered him and it was only several hot, frenzied heartbeats later that he lifted his head.

The effort to do so was physically painful.

They didn’t immediately step apart, just stood, bodies leaning into each other, breathing hard. Roman’s fingers were still meshed into the shiny strands of slightly damp hair on her head and she had hold of his shirt in both hands.

When the drumming in his ears got quieter he could make out the words she kept repeating over and over. ‘Oh, my God…oh, my God…!’

‘Right, that was stupid,’ he said, leaning his chin against the top of her head. ‘But inevitable,’ he added half to himself. ‘Considering the level of attraction.’

His comment succeeded in jolting Scarlet free from the sensual lethargy that had engulfed her. With a cry she tore free of him and backed away, her angry eyes fixed on his taut features.

‘The only thing that’s inevitable between us is mutual antipathy.’ She rubbed her hand across her reddened, swollen lips. The action was purely symbolic; she didn’t believe for a moment it would succeed wiping away the memory of his searing kiss.

She had never been kissed that way before, not in a way that had made her crave more than air the pressure of someone’s lips on her own. It made her dizzy and breathless all over again to think of his tongue stroking inside her mouth.

His eyes trailed across her face, lingering on the soft, swollen contours of her full lips. He shrugged. ‘If you say so,’ he said thickly.

‘Don’t use that patronising tone with me,’ she flared, wrenching her hungry gaze from his face. This wasn’t the time to indulge in a staring match. ‘And don’t treat me like a child.’

As she glared straight ahead her eye-line was on a level with his powerful chest. A chest that moments ago her breasts had been crushed against, softness against iron hardness. Her body had been plastered so close to his that she had been able to feel the heavy thud of his heart mingled with her own. Her eyes lifted as she tried to drag her thoughts clear of the dangerous memories.

Far from saving her, the retreat brought her eyes into direct contact with Roman’s dark, deep-set, very angry eyes. Her lashes came down but not before a wave of sheer sexual longing had nailed her to the spot.

‘Then don’t act like one,’ he advised, his manner clipped and impatient. ‘I don’t force myself on women.’

Scarlet shook her head to clear the sensual fog that made it hard for her to think straight. ‘Hell, no, you’re irresistible,’ she husked sarcastically. ‘You don’t have to.’ Well, not with me, he doesn’t.

The memory of her total surrender was terrifying. One kiss and she’d been his to do anything he wanted with. She had never relinquished control that way in her life and if the memory of it wasn’t enough to terrify her, the fact that she had liked feeling that way, that part of her wanted to recapture the feeling, was!

His jaw tightened another notch in response to her sarcastic jibe. ‘You can’t pretend that you were some sort of unwilling participant.’

Can and will, Scarlet thought, responding to his claim with a provocative shrug of her slender shoulders.

‘That you didn’t want to kiss me as much as I wanted to kiss you,’ he continued between gritted teeth. ‘That neither of us wanted it to stop. You can’t pretend those things and expect me to treat you seriously, can you?’ By the time he had finished the incredulity in his voice had become scorn.

She looked away from his relentless hard stare and gulped. It had been pretty foolish of her to assume that a man who possessed his vast experience of women would not know how she had felt.

‘Like you said, it was stupid.’ It was clearly pointless to keep up the illusion that she hadn’t kissed him back.

A speculative expression slid across his dark features. ‘Possibly…’

She shot him a startled look. ‘What do you mean, “possibly”?’ she demanded suspiciously. ‘There is no way we can go around kissing without it…’ Roman raised a quizzical brow as she stopped, flushing to the roots of her hair with mortification.

‘Not without it leading to other things,’ he finished for her smoothly. ‘I realise that.’

Her chin lifted. ‘It’s not that I couldn’t have stopped.’ The question was when?

‘You just didn’t want to.’ A faint, strangled sound was the only thing that could get past the emotional thickness in Scarlet’s throat. ‘Neither did I,’ he added.

Her eyes widened at his earthy admission.

Their eyes locked. His were filled with a raw hunger that snatched the breath from her lungs. She felt dizzy, and her stomach dipped as though she’d just stepped into a bottomless black hole. The whooshing sound in her ears intensified the sensation of light-headedness.

‘You didn’t…?’ She flushed with mortification to hear the amazed delight in her voice.

It doesn’t take much to please you, does it, Scarlet? A man saying he didn’t want to stop. As if that is such a life-changing occurrence? Of course he hadn’t wanted to stop. Men never did; it was in their nature. They took what was on offer.

Well, I’m not on offer! Once more with a little more conviction, Scarlet.

While she was still thinking he took action and a step that brought him closer, close enough for her to smell the warm male scent that rose from his body. The smile, the dangerous confident smile on his face kick-started her pulse. Now was the time to tell him she wasn’t interested, spell it out once and for all.

She instinctively knew that with Roman saying no would be enough.

She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out to break the silence. His movements were unhurried, deliberate even, but for Scarlet he seemed to move in slow motion. She wasn’t aware that she had been holding her breath until he took her face between his big hands.

Her breath escaped in a series of uneven gasps as his brown fingers moved along the curve of her jaw.

‘You have lovely hair,’ he rasped, releasing the clip that confined her curls on top of her head. Quite deliberately he fanned it out around her face, running his fingers through the silky damp strands.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s brown.’

Roman paused in the act of sliding his hands down her back. A baffled expression crossed his handsome face. ‘This is something you need to apologise for?’

‘And it’s too fine. I can’t do anything with it.’

She felt his laughter. ‘Brown and fine suits your face.’

He tilted her head back to inspect the face he referred to. Scarlet was very conscious of his other hand, which was resting very firmly on the curve of her bottom.

‘A nice face,’ he decided just before he kissed her.

Scarlet gave a sigh as all the strength left her limbs. She had no choice or, for that matter, desire to do anything but let her body mould itself to his lithe, lean male frame.

‘Please…Roman,’ she moaned when his head lifted. She buried her own in his shoulder with a muffled sob.

He placed a finger under her chin and tilted her face up to him. ‘Please what?’

‘This is stupid. You know this is stupid. Things are complicated enough without putting…’ the colour deepened in her cheeks ‘…this,’ she added with an agonised grimace, ‘into the equation.’

‘This is not going to complicate things,’ he contradicted, running a finger over the downy soft curve of her cheek. A distracted expression drifted over his hard, strong-boned features. ‘God, but your skin is so soft,’ he marvelled, his voice a deep, throaty purr. ‘So incredibly soft.’

Scarlet dragged his hand from her face. It was so large compared to hers, his brown fingers long and tapering, she could feel the definite suggestion of calluses on his palm. These were not the hands of a man who was desk-bound.

As if reading her mind he offered an explanation. ‘The gym bores me. I prefer to climb; it helps me concentrate.’

Once he’d said it she had no problem seeing him clinging to a rock face, using a combination of skill, strength and recklessness, pitting himself against a rock face and the elements, solo because he was not a natural team player.

‘There’s not much climbing to be had in London.’

‘There are some very good climbing walls, though, and I don’t live in the city all the time.’

Responding to a sudden crazy impulse, she raised his hand to her mouth and pressed an open-mouthed kiss into his open palm.

She felt his sharp inhalation and with a self-condemnatory groan dropped his fingers as though burnt, which in a way she was. The expression ‘playing with fire’ could have been created specially to cover this situation.

‘Sorry!’ she said in an agonised whisper. ‘I shouldn’t have. This is not sensible.’

A reckless-sounding laugh was wrenched from his throat. ‘Who needs sensible?’

Scarlet lifted her head. ‘Me.’

His dark, glittering eyes scanned her face. ‘Fine, then look at it this way. Let’s use what we’re feeling.’

Scarlet managed to drag her eyes from his mouth. Her brain felt slow and stupid as she parroted, ‘“Use” it? Use what?’

‘The fact there is a strong sexual attraction.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What do you normally do when you feel this way?’

A difficult question to answer honestly when she had never felt this way before. She had never longed to plaster herself against a man she barely knew; she had not fantasised about feeling his weight on top of her or wanted to explore every inch of his body with her hands and lips. Honesty was clearly not an option here.

‘I don’t do anything. I’m too busy for relationships and I don’t do one-night stands.’ She could understand it if he found her last claim difficult to believe after the way she’d behaved.

‘I doubt if one night would be sufficient.’ Roman slanted her a heavy-eyed look of such sensuous promise that her knees trembled. ‘You would date the guy…right?’

‘“Date…?”’ she echoed as though he were talking a foreign language. ‘You’re not suggesting me going to dinner or the movies with you is going to help anything?’

‘When you are attracted to a man and the feeling is reciprocated that is what most people do…though dinner is not essential and personally I’m adaptable and could skip this preliminary stage of the mating ritual.’

‘Too much detail!’ she interrupted, holding up her hand to halt the flow of information and shaking her head vigorously from side to side.

‘Think about it. Sam needs to get to know me, but not in a forced, fake way. If we were dating—’

‘Which we’re not.’

‘If I was the new boyfriend we’d be bound to spend time together.’

He sounded so damned pleased with himself Scarlet was torn between laughter and hysterical tears. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you? You want me to pretend we’re going out together so you can get to know Sam.’

Me the girlfriend of Roman O’Hagan—sure, and the world really is going to believe that. Heavens, even a three-year-old would see through that one!

‘Not pretend, no.’

The colour seeped out of her face and then flooded back. ‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Sam must be used to seeing your boyfriends around the place?’

She shook her head, still stunned by his suggestion. ‘No, he isn’t.’

‘Don’t you have a social life, then?’ he asked, clearly not taking her statement at face value.

‘Of course I have a social life. I go to a yoga class and I belong to a quilting—’

His dark brows twitched. ‘Quilting? I frequently can’t tell if you’re on the level or you’re trying to wind me up.’

‘I don’t see why me talking about quilting can possibly be considered trying to wind you up.’

‘I’m not talking about quilting!’ he exploded.

‘Quilting is very relaxing,’ she informed him with dignity. ‘And you have something pretty and practical to show for your efforts at the end of the day. I’ve not got very far yet, but just because you’ve no aptitude for something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stick with it.’

‘I am sticking with it but I can’t guarantee for how long. Will you quit talking about quilting?’ he revealed in a low, driven tone. ‘I’m talking about sex, unless you’ve taken some vow of celibacy. Please tell me you’ve not,’ he begged.

An expression of shock spread across his face when, instead of sharing the joke, she looked away. ‘You don’t date…not at all?’

‘Of course I date.’

‘I don’t see what the problem is, then. Why not date me?’

When he said ‘date me’ she was pretty sure it was a euphemism for sleep with me. ‘You don’t see the problem because you’re a sandwich short of a picnic and unused to dealing with rejection.’

‘Rejection I can deal with, but not from a woman who starts trembling with desire and undressing me with her eyes every time she’s in the same room as me.’

The mortified heat rushed to her cheeks. ‘My God, you are so colossally arrogant,’ she breathed.

A wolfish grin split his dark lean features as he looked down into her outraged face. ‘Maybe I am, but also I’m right. Aren’t I, Scarlet?’

Scarlet wasn’t going down that road.

‘You want reasons? Let me see—where shall I start? How do you know I don’t already have a boyfriend?’

‘You said you don’t have time for boyfriends.’

‘Well, I don’t.’

‘That probably explains your short temper.’ His fuse was certainly getting extremely short.

He could trace the source with great precision to the moment he had walked into her office and found her struggling into that too-tight top. When you lived in a society where you were constantly bombarded with images of provocatively undressed women it was kind of ironic that he had got so totally hung up over a one-blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of bare flesh.

‘Everything is about sex with you, isn’t it?’ she accused. ‘You’re obsessed,’ she condemned crossly.

It took something as simple as a throw-away comment sometimes. His dark eyes trailed across her face, the soft contours of which he knew were already fixed in his memory. So was the sound of her laugh and her glare and the way…in fact he could access all her facial expressions any time he liked and also sometimes when he didn’t like.

‘You might not be wrong there,’ he agreed.

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘I think you do. I think you also know how good sex could be for us,’ he rasped in a throaty voice that turned the heavy feeling low in her belly into an actual ache. ‘But for some reason you’re denying it.’

She closed her eyes and counted to a hundred slowly; all it did was panic her into impetuous speech.

‘Actually I don’t know a damned thing about sex,’ she heard herself announce loudly. ‘And before you offer I don’t want any lessons from you.’

‘Lessons…now that conjures up some very interesting—’ He stopped dead, the teasing expression fading dramatically from his face. Eyes narrowed, he subjected her to a hard, searching scrutiny. ‘Good God!’ he ejaculated hoarsely. ‘You’re a virgin.’