escort!
Listening to Bastian growl at the steward’s efforts to ensure his comfort, Emmie rolled her eyes and picked up a magazine. He was in a bad mood and he wasn’t polite enough to keep it to himself. Those lustrous eyes below those thick sooty lashes were positively smouldering, his spectacular bone structure set like granite below his bronzed skin. Why? He was the one who had launched the kissing thing. Men! Who needed them? Odette always had, she reflected unhappily.
Emmie had few happy memories of her childhood years with her mother. Odette had divorced her father when he went bankrupt. It had been a very bitter divorce and when the twins’ father had remarried and begun a second family, he had immediately decided to forget that he already had two children. Emmie had last seen her father when she was twelve years old. She knew where he lived, knew what his wife looked like and the names of her half siblings: that was the joy of the Internet, which enabled spying from afar and which had satisfied her curiosity. With her sister, Kat’s encouragement she had written to her father when she was a teenager requesting contact but he had never bothered to respond, his silence making his lack of interest clear. His detachment teamed with her mother’s lack of affection had hurt deeply.
While she was still getting work as a model, Odette had enjoyed a never-ending stream of men in her life and she had brought every one of those men home. The only one who had even been passably nice and semi-interested in Odette’s daughters had been the father of Emmie’s youngest sister, Topsy, a South American polo player, whose affair with her mother had died a natural death when he went home again.
Emmie had sworn that she would never need a man in her life. Men were demanding and difficult; men took over; men were selfish. She watched Bastian help himself to a drink from the built-in bar without offering her anything and suppressed a sigh: he was putting out enough moody bad-tempered vibes to cast a claustrophobic storm cloud inside the spacious cabin.
‘You sulk like a girl…Do you throw a tantrum afterwards as well?’ Emmie heard herself say without even thinking about what she was saying. But she was fed up, really fed up. Here she was dressed up exactly as he had requested, punctual, smiling…well, not perhaps smiling, she conceded reluctantly, but at least she was willing to try, which was more than he was.
In astonishment, Bastian swung round and settled outraged golden eyes on her in disbelief. ‘What did you say?’
‘You’re very temperamental and I’m doing the best I can but I suppose I shouldn’t have used those particular words,’ Emmie responded ruefully. ‘If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I’d like a drink as well. A pure orange if you have it…’
The slightest tinge of colour accentuated his carved cheekbones at the unspoken reminder that he had not offered her a drink. He lifted a bottle and uncapped it.
‘It’s all right, you can relax,’ Emmie told him with helpless amusement as he extended the glass to her. ‘I already know you don’t have any manners.’
‘What the hell gives you the idea that you have the right to insult me?’ Bastian thundered down at her.
Emmie was not intimidated. ‘I didn’t think it was an insult to tell you the truth. You never say please or thank you and you walk through every door first. You’re a very rich and powerful man, most people you meet are subordinate to you and naturally you have learned to take advantage of that. Might is right. Money talks. That’s how the world works, so I can’t even blame you for it.’
Bastian was stunned by the level of sheer indignation rising inside him, but then he could not remember ever having been attacked in such a way by a woman before. Generally women bored him stiff with their fawning flattery. Who did she, a little office worker going nowhere, think she was to criticise him? And if this was ‘trying to please’, what did she do for an encore? Pull a gun on him?
‘I do not take advantage of my employees!’ Bastian shot back at her, because although he would very much have liked to say otherwise he could not recall the words ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ ever figuring much in his vocabulary. But then he was a man of few words, he reminded himself furiously, but he made those few words count and issued clear concise instructions that were rarely misunderstood. In addition, for the past two years running his company had won an award for being one of the best to work for, offering as it did unrivalled working conditions to its employees.
‘Well, you certainly take advantage of Marie,’ Emmie fielded without hesitation. ‘I did her time sheets and I know that for a fact. I’m sure you pay her an excellent salary—’
‘I do,’ Bastian sliced in grittily on the score of his trusted PA, while wondering how on earth he would tolerate Emmie for an entire weekend without killing her.
‘But I doubt if it’s enough to warrant keeping a married mother of three working until eight at night on Christmas Eve,’ Emmie tossed back. ‘Or for taking her abroad to work on her fortieth birthday, so that she had to reschedule her party.’
‘I didn’t ask Marie to work late on Christmas Eve. As for her birthday, as I have no idea when her birthday is I can’t comment. But I will point out that if she didn’t choose to mention a prior arrangement to me, you can’t blame me for it!’
‘It was Christmas Eve. You told her the work was urgent and she did it,’ Emmie expanded gently. ‘Of course she did. She’s very diligent. A considerate employer would have appreciated her position on that particular day of the year.’
Bastian ground his even white teeth together. ‘Keep quiet,’ he told her harshly. ‘I don’t want to hear another word out of you for the remainder of the flight!’
Emmie made a teasing zip-up gesture across her lips, which went down like a lead balloon. She veiled her eyes, cloaking the amusement there and then glanced at him again. She knew she was annoying him and she didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty. Well, he shouldn’t have kissed her, she reasoned, still resenting that breaking down of boundaries. That had been a step too far in their pretence. She glanced up again, collided unwarily with burning golden eyes and felt heat surge as if he had lit a torch inside her. Her cheeks burned. Standing there, tall, lean and dark as sin, even with that brooding sardonic slant to his hard chiselled features, he was too gorgeous for words.
‘You shouldn’t have kissed me,’ Emmie said abruptly into the heavy silence.
‘And how do you expect to put on a convincing act of being my girlfriend in my home if you can’t cope with one little kiss?’ Bastian derided.
‘There was no need for you to touch me. There were no witnesses at the airport who needed to be convinced of anything,’ Emmie pointed out. ‘We’ll get along better if you respect the ground rules—’
‘What ground rules?’ Bastian demanded grimly.
‘Please don’t touch me unless you absolutely have to.’ Emmie studied him with clear blue eyes and lifted her chin. ‘You may have bought my time but don’t make the mistake of believing you’ve bought anything else.’
‘Are you saying that you have never slept with a client?’ Bastian pressed with so much incredulity in his voice that she wanted to slap him hard.
‘Never,’ Emmie told him vehemently.
‘Next you’ll be telling me you’re a virgin and pure as driven snow!’ Bastian exclaimed, throwing his long powerful body down into a seat and flipping open his laptop with an air of purpose.
As
