a point. He could tell her his name was Jack the Ripper and she’d have trouble caring. But still...
‘I should go home,’ she managed to say, trying to remember the good girl she always figured she was and the plan she’d had—something about a taxi and a bottle of Riesling in the fridge and a cheating cousin she wanted to forget about—but she was having trouble remembering the details and wasn’t that a revelation?
Wasn’t that what tonight was supposed to be all about—forgetting?
He pulled away, letting her go even though the distance between them was scant inches. Even now her body swayed into the vacuum where his had so recently been. ‘Is that what you want? To go home?’
She saw the tightness in his shadowed features as if it was physically hurting him to hold himself back, she felt the heat rising from his strong body and she knew what it must be costing him to leave her to decide when the power in his strong limbs told her that he was powerful enough to take whatever he wanted. The concept was strangely thrilling. The perfect stranger. Powerful, potentially dangerous, but giving her the choice.
A choice never so starkly laid out in her mind.
A choice between being responsible and playing it safe and going home and sitting stewing about what she’d missed, or being reckless for once in her life and taking what was on offer—one night with a man whose touch promised to make her forget all the things she’d wanted to forget. One night with a stranger. Her cousin would be horrified, and right now wasn’t that good enough reason in itself?
Besides, all her life she’d played it safe, and where had that got her? Nowhere. She’d done nothing wrong and yet she’d lost more today than she’d ever thought possible.
Tonight was no night to play it safe.
‘No,’ she said, her tongue tasting an unfamiliar boldness on her lips. ‘I want to spend the night with you.’
‘One night,’ he said, and she recognised it as a warning. ‘That’s all I can offer you.’
‘Perfect,’ she said with a smile because that was all she wanted. ‘One night is all I want.’ Tomorrow she could pick up the shattered pieces of her promises and work out where she went from there.
His eyes glinted in the street lighting, a flash of victory that came with a spark of heat, and he reached out his fingers to push a wayward tendril of her hair behind her ear, making her skin tingle. ‘My name is Rashid.’
‘Tora,’ she said, even as she trembled under his touch.
He took her hand and brought it to his mouth, pressing it to his lips. ‘Come, Tora,’ he said.
NICE, SHE REGISTERED vaguely as he swept her through the marble-floored lobby of one of the oldest and classiest hotels in Sydney. Very nice. People dreamed of spending a night at The Velatte—ordinary people, that was. Clearly the man at her side was no ordinary person. But then, she already knew that. No ordinary person had ever set her pulse racing just by his presence. No average garden-variety man had ever set fires under her skin merely with his touch.
And now it was anticipation of a night with this far from ordinary man making the blood spin around her veins and her knees feel weak.
The lift whisked them to a high floor, his arm wound tightly around her, another couple in the lift the only thing that kept him from pulling her into his kiss, if the heated look in his dark eyes she caught in their reflection in the mirrored lift walls was any indication—mirrored panels that also gave her the chance to steal a closer look at the man she’d agreed to spend the night with. The flash of strobe in the darkened bar had shown her a face of all straight lines and planes—the dark slash of brows, the sharp blade of his nose, the angles of his jaw—but now she could see the softer lines of his mouth and the fullness of his bottom lip and the curve of flesh over high cheekbones. The combination worked.
It was then she realised that his eyes weren’t black but the deepest, deepest blue, like the surface of the bottomless ocean on a perfectly calm day.
He was beautiful, way too beautiful to be by himself, and the good girl in her wondered why he was, while the bad girl in her—the newly found bad girl who drank cocktails in basement bars and threw herself at random men on a whim—rejoiced. Because right now she was the one here in this lift with him.
He opened the door to his room that turned out to be a suite because it was a sitting room they entered, decorated in modern classics in grey and cream and illuminated with standing lamps, lending the room a subtle golden glow. Oh, no, this man was definitely not ordinary. He was either loaded, or his employer’s accountant was going to have a heart attack when the expense-account bill came in.
‘It’s huge,’ she said, overwhelmed, wondering just who this man she’d met in a nightclub and with whom she’d agreed to a night with actually was.
‘I got an upgrade,’ he said dismissively, as if that explained a suite fit for a king, as he headed towards a phone. ‘Something to drink?’
Her mouth was dry but only because every drop of moisture in her body had been busy heading south ever since he’d asked her to spend the night. ‘Anything,’ she said, and he ordered champagne for two and put the receiver down, the fingers of one hand already unbuttoning his shirt.
‘The bedroom’s through here,’ he said as he led the way into a room with furniture in both gloss white and dark timber, with white louvre glass doors opening onto a terrace beyond. A super-king-sized bed with a plump quilted headrest and snowy white bed linen held pride of place against the opposite wall.
‘So,’ he said as he reefed off his shirt and tossed it onto a chair in the corner, exposing a chest that wouldn’t have looked out of place on her annual firefighters’ fundraising calendar. ‘Shower first?’
She stood transfixed, drinking in his masculine perfection, the sheer poetry of tightly packed muscle under skin, until his hands moved to his belt, and with a jolt she realised she should be doing something, too, not standing around ogling him and waiting to be seduced.
This wasn’t a seduction after all. Clearly he’d done his seducing in getting her here. This was more like getting down to business.
‘Oh, right,’ she said, her tummy a mass of flutters, the bad girl inside her overruled by the good girl who was suddenly aware of how far out of her league she was, and not just because this man came with serious money. Here he was, shedding clothes and shoes in a lighted room more easily than an autumn tree shed its leaves in the wind and no doubt expecting her to do likewise. She slid off her shoes, her fingers playing at her buttons as she remembered what she’d put on this morning, wishing she’d worn something a bit more exciting under her boring black skirt and shirt than her even more boring underwear. Not that she had a seduction collection, exactly, but she might have managed to wear something that at least smacked of lace.
She swallowed as she pulled the shirt free from the waistband of her skirt and eased it over her shoulders, feeling more self-conscious by the second as she stood there in her department-store skirt and regulation bra. ‘I didn’t dress for...’
He looked at her, a frown tugging at his brows, as he shrugged off his trousers, revealing denim-coloured elastic fitted boxers that fitted his hard-packed
