him … accept what he was so clearly offering her. The opportunity to share what was flaring between them so powerfully, so enticingly, to explore with him a new, sensual world that she had never before encountered but which was now drawing her like an enticing flame …
No!
It was impossible! Unthinkable. Leon Maranz moved in a world she didn’t want to have anything to do with. The slick, shallow, glossy, money-obsessed world her father inhabited, which was nothing to do with the reality of her life—a reality that had no room in it for any priority other than her grandmother. A life that could have no place for Leon Maranz or anything he offered.
No place!
Which meant it was time to stop this now. Right now.
Before it’s too late …
The disturbing words whispered in her head, and she knew she had to cut them out—decisively and sharply. Stop what must not start.
‘I don’t think so, Mr Maranz.’
Her voice was like a scalpel, severing the air between them. Severing the opportunity to negate the rudeness she knew he did not deserve, but which she was driven to deliver from a sense of urgent, primitive self-preservation.
Because if she didn’t—if she allowed him to get through to her, to smile at her … smile with her … get past her defences—then what would happen?
What would happen if she let him ‘start again’?
The question rang inside her head, demanding an answer. An answer she refused to give. Not now—not when the adrenaline was pumping in her veins and dominating her mind, urging her to do the only sensible, safe thing even if it meant being rude. She needed to minimise her exposure to this man by any means possible.
She gave a small smile, tight and insincere—dismissive. ‘Do please excuse me …’
She walked off, unbearable tension in her back, knowing with a cold burning in her body that she had behaved inexcusably rudely, but knowing she had had to do so. Because the alternative—the one that she’d thrust out of her head urgently, ruthlessly—was unthinkable.
Quite, quite unthinkable.
Behind her, as he watched her threading her way back into the crowded, opulent reception room, Leon Maranz stood, his face tight.
Anger was spiking in him. Yet again she’d blanked him! Cut him dead. Then walked off as if he didn’t exist!
His eyes, watching her stalk back into the main reception room, darkened to black slits. Emotion seethed in him as she disappeared from view. Her rudeness was breathtaking! Unbelievable!
Who the hell does she think she is to do that to me? To hand that out to me? Talk to me in that way?
Once again he felt that old, suffocating, burning sensation in his chest that he’d used to feel long years ago. He had thought it would never strike him again. Yet at Flavia Lassiter’s curt dismissiveness it had reared up in familiar, ugly fashion. Bringing with it memories he didn’t want. Memories he’d left far, far behind.
He fought it back, mastering the destructive, dark emotion, refusing to let it poison his mind. It was unnecessary to evoke it now—that burning sense of being looked down on, looked through, that had evoked his burst of anger at her. No, her rude rebuff of him was not for that reason. He forced control over his wayward reaction to her cutting rejection, subduing it. In its place he reached for an alternative—an explanation for her rudeness, her dismissal of him, that was far more palatable to him. One he could seize on.
Every masculine instinct told him there was another, quite different reason for her behaviour. One he should welcome, not resent. Her glacial attitude might have attempted to freeze him out, but all it had done was reinforce a quite different interpretation.
It was only a mask. A mask she had adopted in an attempt—however futile!—to conceal from him her true reaction to him. A reaction he had seen flare betrayingly in her eyes as he had smiled at her. It had told him exactly what he’d wanted to know, confirmed what he had felt with every masculine instinct, with all his years of experience in feminine response—a reaction that mirrored his to her.
Desire.
A simple, brief word, but it was the one he wanted—the only one he wanted. Nothing else. Because desire was the only emotion he wanted to associate with Flavia Lassiter. Everything else about her could be put aside as unnecessary for what he wanted. And pointless—and destructive.
The anger that had spiked in him as she’d stalked away ebbed away completely, the bunched tension in his muscles relaxing. There was no need for either anger or tension. No need at all. He was sure of it. Flavia Lassiter could be as dismissive of him as she liked, but it was only a mask—a futile attempt to deny what it was useless for her to deny. The fact that everything about her told him she was as responsive to him as he was to her.
Tension eased from his shoulders. His features lightened. He strolled back into the main reception room, a strategy forming rapidly in his mind. For now he would let her be. It was clear to him she was fighting his impact on her, and that she was resisting facing up to it. OK, it was sudden. He allowed that. And for a woman like her, clearly used to being in strict control of herself, adept at presenting an outwardly composed and indifferent front, that was understandable. For the moment, then, she could stay safely behind the crystalline shield she was holding him at bay with. When the time was right he would shatter it completely. And get from her exactly what he knew with complete certainty now he definitely wanted …
As did she …
It was just a matter of time before she accepted it. That was all. A slight smile started to play around Leon’s mouth. The prospect of persuading her was very, very enjoyable.
CHAPTER TWO
HOW Flavia got through the rest of the evening she didn’t know. It seemed to go on for ever. She kept a perpetual eye open for Leon Maranz, and was grateful he seemed to be keeping himself away from her. She could see her father with him and Anita sometimes—clearly more than happy to be so—but more often than that he was surrounded by any number of other guests. Especially female ones, she noticed without surprise and with a distinct tightening of her mouth. She avoided her father as well, because the last thing she wanted was to have him grill her on why she’d been so short to his favoured guest.
Her avoidance continued even when the endless party finally wound down, the guests all left, and her father and Anita headed off to a nightclub. Whether or not Leon Maranz had gone with them she didn’t know, and refused to care. She could feel only relief that he had gone, and that the ordeal of the evening was finally over.
The moment she could, Flavia disappeared into her bedroom. For the first time since her gaze had lighted on Leon Maranz that evening she started to feel the tension ebb out of her. Safe at last, she thought with relief.
But as she stood under the shower some minutes later she had cause to question that assumption. Leon Maranz might be out of the apartment but he was not out of her head. Far from it …
The water pouring over her naked body was not helping—running down her torso, between the valley of her breasts, down her flanks, her limbs … It was a sensuous
