later, accompanied by the rustling of the paper bag as he obviously unpacked its contents.
She had seriously underestimated him over this, Diana now realised. She had thought that, once he discovered she had left the hotel before his arrival, he might just follow her to the airport; it had never occurred to her that he would follow her back to London!
But it should have done, she now berated herself. Who better than she to know how arrogantly single-minded this man could be when he set his mind to it?
By the time she followed him into the kitchen he had unpacked croissants, pastries and fruit into bowls and on to plates—a traditional French breakfast, in fact! This man didn’t do anything by halves, Diana acknowledged; he had told her he would be joining her for breakfast, and a true continental breakfast it was going to be. It might almost have come from France itself. In fact—he might just have done exactly that. Chris had told her his father flew around the world in his own jet; there was no reason why he shouldn’t have brought breakfast back from Paris with him this morning!
‘Ah, coffee.’ He picked up the pot Diana had made only minutes earlier, pouring them both a fresh mugful. ‘It’s good,’ he told her appreciatively after the first sip.
Diana was still stunned into silence. This flat, with its simplicity of design, was her own private little haven. And this man had just invaded it without a qualm. Certainly without an invitation!
‘Drink up,’ he encouraged briskly as her mug of coffee remained untouched on the marble worktop. ‘And we’ll take the food through to the sitting-room.’ He easily balanced the plates in the expansive strength of his hands. ‘I had a brief glimpse of that room on the way in here; I’d like to have a closer look,’ he added almost to himself, striding out of the kitchen with sure steps.
Once again Diana followed him dazedly, feeling as if she were following in the wake of a tidal wave!
He was dressed totally in black today, in a loose short-sleeved shirt with black fitted trousers that drew attention to the lean length of his legs. He looked every one of his thirty-nine years, lines of experience beside his eyes and mouth, and yet at the same time he possessed a dangerous magnetism that made age irrelevant.
‘Puddle,’ Diana finally managed to say weakly as Reece put the laden plates down on the rug in front of the bean-bags.
He looked up at her with raised brows. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The cat,’ she explained a little impatiently, feeling as if she were being treated—and for the most part, acting, she freely admitted—like an idiot.
But once again his unexpected appearance had thrown her completely; it was the only excuse she could give herself for her lack of force, for allowing him to invade her home in the way he had. But her strength had always been of a different kind than force. It was only now, when faced with Reece Falcon himself, that she realised how ineffective that might be in dealing with him!
* * *
Gobsmacked.
Not very grammatical. Certainly not very delicately put. And it certainly wasn’t a turn of phrase Reece could ever remember using before. But it so perfectly described how the Divine Diana had looked when she first opened the door and found him standing on the other side of it!
And she wasn’t faring much better now either, burbling on about Puddle being the name of the cat that lay stretched out on one of the bean-bags. He didn’t get the relevance of the introduction of the cat into the conversation at all. Unless she thought perhaps he didn’t like them, or was allergic to them? As it happened he liked cats, approved of their detached independence from the people who thought they owned them; he respected their intelligence. He had never been able to appreciate hearing a woman being called a cat; he had never yet met any woman who portrayed anything like their majestic aloofness—not and actually meant it, that was!
And yet…
He studied Diana as she stood a short distance away from him. He knew a little more about her now, having called his assistant, Paul, once he had realised Diana had left Paris early this morning without seeing him, instructing the other man to have any information he could find concerning the model Divine available to him once he reached London. It hadn’t even occurred to him that it wouldn’t be; Paul was as efficient as he was highly paid, and only Reece knew he was the highest paid in the business.
Paul had two files waiting for him, one on the professional model Divine, the other one a personal file on Diana Lamb. Reece had been surprised at the briefness of the latter, barely three sheets of paper long, whereas the professional file was so thick with photographs and newspaper articles about her work that it had to be put on a desk to be read.
There had been hundreds—no, thousands—of photographs in this second file of the lovely Divine, of the model wearing everything and nothing—— No, never really nothing. The beautiful Divine had never been that sort of model, and, while Reece had been able to see the golden perfection of her body in minuscule swimwear, her nakedness had remained tantalisingly elusive. He had found those provocative photographs so much more erotic to look at than complete nudity could ever have been.
The personal file on Diana Lamb, for different reasons, had been just as frustrating. There was no childhood history at all, but, as this wasn’t the part of Diana’s life he was interested in, that hadn’t disturbed him unduly. He might be able to find something in her background with which to hit Chris if the couple persisted with their relationship, but for the moment it wasn’t too important.
The adult Diana Lamb, it appeared, led a very quiet life, no high-profile romances—he had asked Paul to check into there being any low-profile ones—no scandals either, just a calm, uncluttered life that didn’t include family, and not too many friends either, friendship with this woman seeming to be an exclusive club not too many people were admitted to.
And yet Chris, his wayward, frivolously irresponsible son, had been allowed into that select club. That fact, for reasons he wasn’t yet sure of, irritated the hell out of Reece.
And so the information Paul had managed to gather together about this woman, hastily as it had been done, didn’t really tell him much more than he already knew: the model Divine was one of the highest paid in the business, while Diana Lamb was an extremely elusive woman.
‘Puddle likes bread and cakes,’ she impatiently explained her earlier warning about the cat now.
Reece turned to look down at the cat as it stretched before getting lazily to its feet. ‘Stay!’ he instructed softly, silver gaze meeting lime-green in a silent battle of wills.
The cat was the first to look away, falling back down on the big bean-bag before curling up and going back to sleep, looking for all the world as if he had never had any interest in the food so temptingly laid out before him.
Now if only he could elicit the cat owner’s co-operation in the same way he might be in business!
As it was, Diana gave the sleeping cat a look that told it exactly what she thought of its disloyalty, before sitting down gingerly on the edge of the same big cushion.
Reece thought she looked even younger today without the heavy make-up she had been wearing the evening before for the show. In fact, she didn’t look as if she was wearing any make-up at all today. And he could tell by the way the T-shirt reached baggily to her mid-thighs that she hadn’t worn the body-hugging leggings for effect but for comfort.
If
