looked at her with leisurely, assessing eyes. He was clearly used to having what he wanted when it came to women. She sensed it included immediate gratification.
‘I... Look... I didn’t ask you to stay here...because...because...’ She cleared her throat and subsided into awkward silence.
‘Of course not, but I’m not the only one feeling this thing, am I?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘No? We’ll run with that for the time being, shall we? Tell me about the house.’
Rose blinked. Somewhere along the line she’d stopped being the feisty lawyer with the social conscience and had morphed into...a gawky adolescent with a teenage crush on the cute new boy in class. The chemistry between them was overwhelming. It slammed into her like a fist and the fact that he felt it as well, felt something at any rate, only made the situation worse. She’d spent a lifetime protecting herself from her emotions getting the better of her, had approached men with wariness because she knew the sort of scars that could be inflicted when bad choices went horribly wrong. On no level could this man be described as anything but a bad choice. So why was she perspiring with nerves and frantically trying to shut down the slide show of what could happen if she gave in...?
‘The house?’ she parroted, a little dazed.
‘You were telling me that you inherited the house...that your mother was given it...’
‘Right.’
And how had that come about? she wondered. When she was the last person who made a habit of blabbing about her personal life?
Disoriented at the chaos of her thoughts, she set to finishing the meal—anything to tear her gaze away from his darkly compelling face—but her hand was shaking slightly as she began draining pasta and warming the sauce.
‘My mother had a fling with a guy,’ she said in a halting voice, breathing more evenly now that she wasn’t gawping at him like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
‘Happens...’
‘Yes, it does.’ She swung around to look him squarely in the eyes. ‘Especially when you’re in mourning for the man you thought you’d be sitting next to in your old age, watching telly and going misty-eyed over the great-grandchildren...’
‘What do you mean?’
Rose sighed. ‘Nothing.’
* * *
‘Tell me more.’ Art hadn’t eaten home-cooked food in any kitchen with any woman for a very, very long time. He dug into the bowl of pasta with gusto, realising that he was a lot hungrier than he’d thought.
He was eating here, just a stranger passing through instead of a billionaire to be feared, feted and courted by everyone with whom he came into contact. This was what normality felt like. He could scarcely remember the feeling. He wondered whether this was why he was intensely curious about her because she, like this whole experience, represented something out of the ordinary. Or maybe, he decided, it just stemmed from the fact that no information he could glean from her would be put to waste, not when he had a job to do. This was all just part of the game and what else was life but an elaborate game? In which there would inevitably be winners and losers and when it came to winning Art was the leader of the pack.
Far more comfortable with that pragmatic explanation, Art shot her an encouraging look.
‘It’s no big deal.’ Rose shrugged and twirled some spaghetti around her fork, not looking at him. ‘My father died when I was quite young and for a while my mum went off the rails. Got involved with...well...it was—’ she grimaced and blushed ‘—an interesting time all round. One of the guys she became involved with was a rich young minor aristocrat whose parents owned a massive property about ten miles away from here. It ended in tears but years later, out of the blue, she received this house in his will, much to everyone’s surprise. He’d been handed swathes of properties on his twenty-fifth birthday and he left this house to Mum, never thinking he’d die in a motorbike accident when he was still quite young.’
‘A tragedy with a fortunate outcome.’ Art considered the parallels between their respective parents and felt a tug of admiration that she had clearly successfully navigated a troubled background. He had too, naturally, but he was as cold as ice and just as malleable. He had been an observant, together teenager and a controlled, utterly cool-headed adult. He’d also had the advantage of money, which had always been there whatever the efforts of his father’s grasping ex-wives to deprive him of as much of it as they possibly could.
She, it would seem, was cut from the same cloth. When he thought of the sob stories some of his girlfriends had bored him with, he knew he’d somehow ended up summing up the fairer sex as hopeless when it came to dealing with anything that wasn’t sunshine and roses.
‘Guilty conscience,’ Rose responded wryly. ‘He really led my mother off the straight and narrow, and then dumped her for reasons that are just too long-winded to go into. Put it this way—’ she neatly closed her knife and fork and propped her chin in the palm of her hand ‘—he introduced her to the wonderful world of drugs and drink and then ditched her because, in the end, he needed the family money a lot more than he needed her. He also loved the family money more than he could ever have loved her.’
‘Charming,’ Art murmured, his keen dark eyes pinned to the stubborn set of her wide mouth.
‘Rich.’
‘Come again?’
‘He was rich so he figured he could do as he pleased and he did, not that it didn’t work out just fine in the end. Mum...came home and picked up the pieces and she was a darn sight better off without that guy in her life.’
‘Came home...? Picked up the pieces...?’
Rose flushed. ‘She disappeared for a while,’ she muttered, rising to clear the table.
‘How long a while?’
‘What does any of this have to do with the protest?’
‘Like I told you, I’m a keen observer of human nature. I enjoy knowing what makes people tick...what makes them who they are.’
‘I’m not a specimen on a petri dish,’ she said with more of her usual spirit, and Art burst out laughing.
‘You’re not,’ he concurred, ‘which doesn’t mean that I’m any the less curious. So talk to me. I don’t do domestic and I don’t do personal conversations but I’m sorely tempted to invite you to be the exception to my rule. My one-off, so to speak...’
TELL ME MORE...
Art bided his time. Curiosity battled with common sense. For some reason, over the next three days he kept wanting to return to the story of her past. His appetite to hear more had been whetted and it was all he could do to stamp down the urge to corner her and pry.
But that wasn’t going to do.
He
