he was doing now was not what he had planned to do.
It should not have come to this. He should have stopped it, halted it in its tracks, forced it by main strength back down into the subterranean depths of his being where it belonged.
But he couldn’t—and now, unstoppable, incurable, it had taken the ascendant. Brought him to this moment.
His eyes held hers, his hand had taken hers, and now nothing else mattered.
Except one thing.
The answer to his question.
He saw her eyes flare. Her lips part.
And then, like a long, slow exhalation, he heard her speak.
‘I can’t …’
For a moment he was still—quite still. Then, his eyes never leaving hers, never letting hers go for an instant, a second, he spoke, too.
‘Why not?’
His fingers, without conscious volition on his part, had tightened around hers.
Her eyes were huge, haunted. Haunting.
‘I can’t,’ she said again. Her voice was a thread of breath. ‘I have …’ She swallowed, and for a moment her face was stark and bleak. ‘Commitments.’
‘There is someone else?’ He spoke sharply, like a knife cutting.
The moment of truth now. Truth on so many points. All of them impaling him.
Slowly, she nodded. ‘Yes. Someone very important to me.’
He let go her hand. Forsaking it as if suddenly it were a poisonous snake. His jaw tightened.
‘And yet,’ he said, clipping out each word, harsh and hard, ‘you chose to dine with me tonight?’
She bit her lip. He could see it, and it sent a punishing flare through him to see the whiteness of her teeth indent into the soft curve of tender flesh.
‘I … I had to.’ She was forcing the words out, he could see, her eyes still wide and huge. ‘I told you—’
His eyes narrowed. Something in her face was pinched suddenly.
‘Ah, yes, your charming employers—threatening you with—what is that clumsy English expression? Ah, yes—threatening you with the sack if you did not accept my invitation to dinner.’
She’d slipped her hand from the table.
‘Yes,’ she said in a small voice. Her eyes would not meet his.
He got to his feet. It was an abrupt, sudden movement.
‘I regret, then, mademoiselle, that I have so mistaken the situation. Permit me, if you will, to offer you my apologies for having done so. And now allow me to place my car at your disposal. Feel free to be driven either to your place of employment or to your home, and, of course, to your “very important someone”.’
He gave a curt nod of his head and walked away.
Fury blasted through him. Blind, explosive fury. A white rage behind his eyes, obliterating everything.
It was irrational, deranged, insane.
He knew it was—knew it and didn’t care. Didn’t care as he strode out of the restaurant and across the marbled foyer to the bank of lifts. He punched the button savagely.
He wanted out.
Damn her. Damn her to hell for what she’d done. Letting him get sucked, deeper and deeper, into that running tide. Gazing at him like that all evening, sending her message to him as loud and clear as if she were using a PA system. Sitting there looking so extraordinarily beautiful that it had taken all his strength, all evening, not to reach out for her.
And then, when he had, she’d turned him down.
The fury blitzed in him again. She’d turned him down. Said no.
No.
A single word.
Denying him what he wanted.
Her.
Because that was what he wanted—he wanted her. He wanted her now—right now—tonight. He wanted her to be here, her hand enclosed in his, waiting to step inside the lift, the lift that would be closed and private. And he would turn her to him, and slide his hands around that slender, pliant waist, and slant his mouth down over her soft, sensuous lips and taste, taste the sweetness she would offer.
He would mould her body to his, feel the ripe mound of the breasts that he’d been seeing all evening, and would have the exquisite sensation of their pressure against his hard, muscled torso. His hands would shape her spine, fingers splaying out, reaching to the delicate, sensitive nape of her neck, while his mouth played sensuously, arousingly, with hers.
He felt his body tightening, felt the tide that had been running stronger and stronger all evening reach that point non plus that was unbearable to endure—all courtesy of one, single word.
No.
The lift doors sliced open as the lift arrived, and he stepped forward.
And halted.
He frowned, struck by a memory.
‘No’ had not been the word she had used. She had used a quite different word.
Slowly his hand came up to halt the doors closing again, forcing them back with unnoticed strength so that they juddered apart. Then he stepped back onto the marble floor.
Lissa Stephens hadn’t said no to him. She had said, ‘I can’t.’
He stilled. Slowly, the white rage of frustration and denial and the fury born of something he knew he had to push aside drained from him.
All logic, all reason had left him—swept away on that tide. He took a harsh, heavy breath, standing immobile by the lift. That tide which had swept away everything else except the single, overriding imperative of the evening.
But that hadn’t been the purpose of this evening. This evening had been about something quite different.
Emotion drained from him to be replaced by bleak, belated recognition. In his head sounded yet again the low, strained sound of her voice.
‘I can’t …’
And she had said exactly why that was so. Because of the existence of ‘someone very important to me.’
Like a squad of booted soldiers the words marched back inside his head from which that swirling, overpowering tide had swept them. But they were back now, with their heavy, booted tread that trampled on anything and everything in their way.
Logic, reason, sense.
With bleak, controlled acquiescence he let
