voice and his mouth hardened. He wondered if she would have been quite so gushing if she’d known the truth about his background. About the hardship and pain and the sense of being an outsider which had never quite left him.
‘Isn’t it?’ he agreed evenly as he stared at the house. With its acres of parkland and sense of history, places like this didn’t come on the market very often and Conall still couldn’t quite believe it was his. Coming hot on the heels of his London deal, it had been a heady time in terms of recent property acquisitions. Had he ever imagined being a major landowner, when he was eighteen and mad with rage and injustice? When the walls of the detention centre had threatened to close in on him and he had been looking down the barrel of an extended jail sentence?
He turned off the ignition, his glance straying to Amber’s large handbag, and it wasn’t the sight of the printout about Prince Luciano which caught his eye—although he was pleased to see she’d been doing her homework—but the intricate doodles on the edge of one of the pages which stirred a faint but enduring memory.
He frowned. ‘I remember seeing some drawings like this in your apartment that first day.’
She stiffened. ‘What, you mean you were snooping around?’
‘They were half hidden behind a sofa. Were they yours?’
‘Of course they were mine—why?’
Ignoring the defensive note in her voice, he narrowed his eyes. ‘I thought some of them showed real promise and a few were really very good.’
‘You don’t have to say that. Anyway, I know they’re rubbish.’
‘I don’t say things I don’t mean, Amber. And why are they rubbish?’
She shrugged, but the words seemed to take a long time coming. ‘I used to paint a lot when we were in Europe and my mother was otherwise occupied. But when I went to live with my father, he made it very clear he thought they were no good—that a kid of six could throw some paint at the canvas and get the same effect, and that I was wasting my time.’ She flashed a brittle kind of smile. ‘So I stopped trying to be an artist and became the society girl that everyone expected. Those paintings you saw were years old. I just...just couldn’t bear to throw them away.’
Conall experienced a moment of real, silent rage as he read the brief flash of hurt and helplessness in her eyes. Were adults deliberately cruel to troubled teenagers, or was it simply that they didn’t know how to handle them?
But maybe she’d always been difficult to handle—in so many ways. Right now she looked like every teenage boy’s fantasy in her wet shirt, with his bulky jacket draped around her slender shoulders, making far too many lustful thoughts crowd his mind. ‘I’ll show you around the house so you have plenty of time to acclimatise yourself before the party, but the guided tour can wait until later. First you need to get out of those wet clothes.’
As soon as the words had left his lips he wanted to take them back, because they sounded like the words a man would say to a woman just before he began touching her. Silently chastising himself for his own foolishness, he got out of the car and opened the door for her.
Still hugging his jacket to her, Amber followed him inside the house into a huge oak-panelled hallway from which curved a majestic staircase. Enormous bucketfuls of white flowers stood on the floor, obviously waiting to be transplanted into vases, and she could hear the sound of female voices coming from a room somewhere and a radio playing in the distance.
‘Last-minute party prep,’ he said, in reply to a question she hadn’t asked. ‘You’ll meet the team later. Now come with me and I’ll show you to your room.’
Her clothes were still clinging damply to her body and Amber guessed she should have been cold—but cold was the last thing she felt right now. Her blood felt heavy and warm as she followed Conall upstairs and her heart was beating painfully against her ribcage. She barely noticed the beautifully restored woodwork or the walls covered with paintings, so fixated was she on the hard thrust of his buttocks against the black denim of his jeans. She could feel her throat growing dry as she stared at the back of his neck, unable to tear her gaze away. With his black hair curling over the collar of his cashmere sweater and his muscular physique rippling with health and strength, he looked in total command of the situation, which she guessed he was. But the weird thing was that she didn’t do this. She didn’t drool over men who treated her as if she were a naughty schoolgirl. Truth was, she didn’t drool over anyone. She bit her lip as she remembered the accusations which had been levelled at her in the past. Cold. Frigid. Ice queen. Valid accusations, every one of them. Yet when Conall looked at her, he made her want to melt, not freeze.
Pushing open the door of a second-floor bedroom overlooking the parkland at the back of the house, he put her case down. ‘You should be comfortable enough in here,’ he said abruptly.
Amber glanced around, suddenly shy to find herself alone in a bedroom with him. Comfortable was an understatement for such a lavish room and she was grateful he’d given her somewhere so lovely to sleep, with its heavy velvet drapes and enormous four-poster bed. She looked up into his face, knowing she ought to be asking intelligent questions about the forthcoming party but it was difficult when all she could think about was the curve of his lips and the shadowed roughness of his jaw.
‘What time do you need me?’ she said, her words sounding jerky as she moistened the roof of her mouth with her tongue.
‘Come downstairs at around seven and I’ll show you the painting. The Prince is arriving at eight-fifteen and his timetable is worked out to the nearest second. I’d better warn you that lateness won’t be tolerated when you’re dealing with royals.’
‘I won’t be late, Conall.’ Amber took off his jacket and handed it to him, feeling chilled as the leather left her skin and missing the subtle scent which was all his. ‘And thanks for lending me this.’
But he didn’t take the jacket from her. He just stood there as if someone had turned him to stone. His brilliant eyes gleamed from between the dark lashes and his golden skin suddenly seemed taut over his cheekbones. ‘You know, you’re really going to have to stop doing this, Amber,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve given you several chances but my patience is wearing thin and, in the end, I’m only made out of flesh and blood—the same as any other man.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Oh, come on.’ His voice was edged with a note of irritation. ‘There are many parts you play exceedingly well, but innocence isn’t one of them. Much more of those big green eyes gazing at me like that and licking at your lips like a cat which has just seen a mouse—and I’ll be forced to kiss you, whether I want to or not.’
Amber looked at him, genuinely confused. ‘Why would you even consider kissing me if you didn’t want to?’
He laughed, but his laugh contained something dark and unknown and Amber felt as if she were a non-swimmer paddling on the edge of the shore, not noticing the powerful tug of the undercurrent edging towards her.
‘Because you’re not my kind of woman and because I am, in effect, your employer.’ His voice dipped to a silken whisper. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to.’
His unmistakable passion mixed with the complexity of her own feelings filled Amber with a sudden sense of power and she tilted her chin to look at him defiantly. ‘Well, if you really want to kiss me that badly, why don’t you just go ahead and do it?’
‘I
