Satisfaction soared through him. Oh, this sultry, sophisticated chanteuse, with her vampish allure, her skin-tight dress and over-made-up face, might be appearing as cool as the proverbial cucumber—but that flash in her eyes had told him that however resistant she appeared to be to his overtures, an appearance was all it was...
I can reach her. She is vulnerable to me.
That was the truth she’d so unguardedly—so unwisely—just revealed to him.
He changed his stance. Glanced at the man hovering in the doorway. A slight sense of familiarity assailed him, and a moment later he knew why. He was the accompanist for the chanteuse.
For a fleeting moment he found himself speculating on whether the casual familiarity he could sense between the two of them betokened a more intimate relationship. Then he rejected it. Every male instinct told him that whatever lover the accompanist took would not be female.
Bastiaan’s sense of satisfaction increased, and his annoyance with the intruder decreased proportionately. He turned his attention back to his quarry.
‘I shall take my leave, then, mademoiselle,’ he said, and he did not trouble to hide his ironic inflection or his amusement. Dark, dangerous amusement. As though her rejection of him was clearly nothing more than a feminine ploy—one he was seeing through...but currently choosing to indulge. He gave the slightest nod of his head, the slightest sardonic smile.
‘A bientôt.’
Then, paying not the slightest attention to the accompanist, who had to straighten to let him pass, he walked out.
As he left he heard the chanteuse exclaim, ‘Thank goodness you rescued me!’
Bastiaan could hear the relief in her tone. His satisfaction went up yet another level. A tremor—a discernible tremor—had been audible in her voice. That was good.
Yes, she is vulnerable to me.
He walked on down the corridor, casually letting himself out through the rear entrance into the narrow roadway beyond, before walking around to the front of the club, where his car was parked on the forecourt. Lowering himself into its low-slung frame, he started the engine, its low, throaty growl echoing the silent growl inside his head.
‘Thank goodness you rescued me!’ she had said, this harpy who was trying to extract his cousin’s fortune from him.
Bastiaan’s mouth thinned to a tight, narrow line, his eyes hardening as he headed out on to the road, setting his route back towards Monaco, where he was staying tonight in the duplex apartment he kept there.
Well, in that she was mistaken—most decidedly.
No one will rescue you from me.
Of that he was certain.
He drove on into the night.
* * *
‘Give me two minutes and I’ll be ready to go,’ Sarah said.
She strove for composure, but felt as if she’d just been released from a seizure of her senses that had crushed the breath from her lungs. How she’d managed to keep her cool she had no idea—she had only know that keeping her cool was absolutely essential.
What the hell had just happened to her? Out of nowhere...the way it had?
That had been the man whose assessing gaze she’d picked up during her final number. She’d been able to feel it from right across the club—and when he’d walked into her dressing room it had been like...
Like nothing I’ve ever known. Nothing I’ve ever felt—
Never before had a man had such a raw, physical impact on her. Hitting her senses like a sledgehammer. She tried to analyse it now—needing to do so. His height, towering over her in the tiny dressing room, had dominated the encounter. The broad shoulders had been sleekly clad in a bespoke dinner jacket, and there had been an impression of power that she had derived not just from the clearly muscular physique he possessed but by an aura about him that had told her this man was used to getting his own way.
Especially with women.
Because it hadn’t just been the clear impression that here was a wealthy man who could buy female favours—his mention of Le Tombleur had been adequate demonstration of that—it had been far, far more...
She felt herself swallow. He doesn’t need money to impress women.
No, she acknowledged shakily, all it took was those piercing dark eyes, winged with darker brows, the strong blade of his nose, the wide, sensual curve of his mouth and the tough line of his jaw.
He was a man who knew perfectly well that his appeal to women was powerful—who knew perfectly well that women responded to him on that account.
She felt her hackles rise automatically.
He thought I’d jump at the chance!
A rush of weakness swept through her. Thank God she’d had the presence of mind—pulled urgently out of her reeling senses—to react the way she’d managed to do.
What was it about him that he should have had such an effect on me?
Just what had it been about that particular combination of physique, looks and sheer, raw personal impact that had made her react as if she were a sliver of steel in the sudden presence of a magnetic field so strong it had made the breath still in her body?
She had seen better-looking men in her time, but not a single one had ever had the raw, visceral, overpowering impact on her senses that this man had. Even in the space of a few charged minutes...
She shook her head again, trying to clear the image from her mind. Whoever he was, he’d gone.
As she got on with the task of turning herself back into Sarah, shedding the false eyelashes, heavy make-up and tight satin gown, she strove to dismiss him from her thoughts. Put him out of your head, she told herself brusquely. It was Sabine Sablon he wanted to invite to dinner, not Sarah Fareham.
That was the truth of it, she knew. Sabine was the kind of woman a man like that would be interested in—sophisticated, seductive, a woman of the world, a femme fatale. And she wasn’t Sabine—she most definitely was not. So it was completely irrelevant that she’d reacted to the man the way she had.
I haven’t got time to be bowled over by some arrogantly smouldering alpha male who thinks he’s picking up a sultry woman like Sabine. However much he knocked me sideways.
She had one focus in her life right now—only one. And it was not a man with night-dark eyes and devastating looks who sucked the breath from her body.
She headed out to where Max was waiting to walk her back to her pension, some blocks away in this harbourside ville of Pierre-les-Pins, before carrying on to the apartment he shared with Anton, the opera’s composer.
As they set off he launched into speech without preamble. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘in your first duet with Alain—’
And he was off, instructing her in some troublesome vocal
