say Andy was surprised by the invitation would be putting it mildly.
Although she did know, after finally giving in and looking him up on the Internet, that Darius wasn’t now, nor had he ever been, married, or even engaged to be married. In fact, at the age of thirty-three he had never been involved in a single serious relationship, as far as Andy could tell from the information available on him.
Which, surprisingly, hadn’t been as detailed as she had expected it to be.
There had been plenty of articles on how successful he and his brother were in business; it appeared they owned half the known universe, not almost all of it, as she had first thought!
There were also numerous publicity photographs of him and his brother, and others taken of him at exotic locations all over the world, with beautiful and glamorous women on his arm. Noticeably the majority of those women had been tall and shapely brunettes.
But Darius Sterne’s private life seemed to be exactly that: private.
Oh, on the surface of it there appeared to be plenty of details.
She’d discovered the names of the schools he had attended, followed by a degree at Oxford University. She’d read up on the social network site that had been the start of the successful business empire that he had owned with his twin brother for the past twelve years. As well, there had been a brief mention of the fact that his father had died when he was thirteen, and his mother had remarried when he was fourteen. But that was all it had been; there was nothing tangible about Darius himself. Nothing about Darius Sterne the man, or his relationship with the rest of his family, apart from that business partnership with his twin. And despite Kim’s warnings of a lurid past—and present?—there had been no ‘kiss and tell’ newspaper articles from any women Darius might have scorned.
Although Andy suspected that the reason for the latter was because Darius either owned, or had influence over, most of the world’s media.
She now also knew he lived mainly in a penthouse apartment in London, but also owned other homes in several capital cities around the world, including New York, Hong Kong, and Paris.
But again, none of those things were personal to the man.
After reading everything she could find that had ever been written on Darius, the only thing that Andy knew with any certainty was that she wasn’t, in any way, shape or form, his type!
And yet here he surprisingly was, and asking her to go out with him again.
‘Why?’ She picked up a towel and draped it about the dampness of her neck and shoulders, making sure it also covered her breasts. Her cheeks warmed as she walked across the smooth wooden floor towards him. Thankfully, without any sign of the limp she sometimes developed when she was tired.
And how, Andy wondered irritably, considering that she was covered completely, did the intensity of Darius’s gaze as he watched her approach somehow manage to make her feel as if she were naked from head to toe instead?
‘Saturday is only two days away,’ she taunted as she came to a halt just feet away from him. ‘So did your original date have to cancel?’
Andy gave an inner wince even as she asked the question; if Darius Sterne’s original date had cried off, for whatever reason, then there was a multitude of women who would happily have taken her place. He certainly didn’t need to resort to going to the trouble of seeking Andy out, for the sole purpose of inviting her to go with him.
‘I didn’t have a previous date.’ He raised dark brows, as the same thought obviously crossed his own mind. ‘It is a bit short notice, I admit, but I only arrived back from a lengthy business trip at six o’clock this morning.’
‘And no doubt you immediately thought of me!’ she dismissed scathingly.
‘What makes you think I ever stopped thinking of you?’ he challenged.
Andy found it hard to believe that Darius had given her a single thought after their first meeting, especially when he seemed to have been out of the country for the past week.
And yet he was asking her to believe that just hours after his return he had come here to see her?
Andy was determined not to read too much into that. ‘Arrived back from where?’
‘China.’
‘They don’t have telephones in China?’
His jaw tightened at her sarcasm. ‘You didn’t give me your telephone number or email address.’
‘I didn’t give you the address of my dance studio either, but you don’t seem to have had any trouble finding that out for yourself,’ she countered.
His eyes glittered his displeasure at the underlying sarcasm in her voice. ‘I thought you would prefer that I came here and made the invitation in person.’
‘Did you?’ Andy mused. ‘Or did you imagine I might find it harder to refuse you in person?’
Darius had convinced himself this past week that Miranda Jacobs couldn’t possibly be as intractable as he had thought she was being that night at his club. That maybe she had just been playing hard to get last week, in an effort to pique his interest. Just five minutes back in her infuriating company, and he knew that Miranda was every bit as stubborn as he had first thought she was.
He wasn’t used to being told the word no, by any woman. Not once, but twice!
Darius slid his hands into the pockets of his suit trousers, rather than reach out and touch Miranda, not sure which would win out if he did touch her: his need to shake her or kiss her!
‘You didn’t seem to have any problem with saying no to me in person last week.’
She gave a shrug of those slender shoulders. ‘Which begs the question, why are you bothering to ask me again, when you already know the answer?’
Darius breathed in sharply, his hands clenching in his trouser pockets, as he once again fought the need he felt to reach out and shake this woman. An impulse he resisted because he had every reason to believe he would then be tempted into kissing her. Senseless! ‘I thought the charity benefitting from the dinner might be of interest to you,’ he bit out between tightly clenched teeth.
Andy eyed him guardedly, very aware of the tension thrumming through Darius’s lean and muscled body, as he now stood just inches away from her.
Of excited awareness thrumming through her own body.
Just as she was also aware of how alone they were in the studio, with only the distant noise of the traffic outside to disturb the tension between the two of them.
She gave a slow shake of her head. ‘Why are you doing this, Darius?’ she asked softly. ‘What possible interest can you have in taking out a failed ballerina?’
‘You didn’t fail, damn it!’ Darius cut in harshly, his brief elation at finally hearing her call him Darius having been completely overridden by the anger he now felt at hearing her describe herself as a failure.
Once he had accepted that his desire for Miranda wasn’t going to go away, he had made it his business to find out all that he could
