we are both grown up now, ne? I have been married and you have been married. What is it that you say—about a lot of water?’
‘Has flowed under the bridge,’ she filled in automatically, and remembering how she had helped him with his English was curiously more poignant than anything else. She slid her legs down off the stool and wished she hadn’t. She was a tall woman, but Dimitri managed to make her feel like a tiny little thing; and her skirt was suddenly feeling as though it had shrunk in the wash.
‘Gallons of the stuff!’ she joked, thinking that soon this would be over. It had to be. He would see sense and realise that they couldn’t possibly ever be friends, and they certainly couldn’t be anything else, either. Not now.
He smiled then, but it was an odd, grown-up smile that Molly didn’t recognise and it threatened her more than a smile ever should.
‘So I will come to your party,’ he stated softly.
She stared at him. ‘My p-party? What are you talking about?’
‘You are having a party, Molly.’
Had he turned into a mind-reader? Were there balloons and boxes of champagne glasses lying around the place, giving him clues? Feeling half mad and disorientated, Molly looked round the kitchen. No. ‘How the hell did you know that?’
She wasn’t thinking straight, or clearly—and there was usually only one reason why a woman acted in such a distracted way, he noted with a warm sense of triumph. ‘You sent me an invitation, remember? “To The New Residents!”’ he quoted drily.
Of course she had. She had posted them all the way down the road; she always did. Her heart had begun to thunder and she wasn’t such a self-deluding fool as to deny that part of the reason was excitement. But it would be madness if he came. Sheer and utter madness.
‘I sent an invitation to all my neighbours,’ she said wildly. ‘Because it’ll probably be noisy, and late.’
‘Well, then.’ He shrugged his broad shoulders. ‘You want to pacify your neighbours, of which I am one? Then pacify me, Molly.’
‘Dimitri,’ she appealed, steeling herself against the sensual undercurrent in his tone, wondering if that had been deliberate or just part of the whole irresistible package he presented. ‘You can’t seriously want to come?’
‘Oh, but I can,’ he demurred. ‘It will be good for me to mix a little while I’m here, don’t you think? And besides—’ he gave a slow, curving smile ‘—I like parties.’
She bet he liked them!
‘Well, of course I can’t uninvite you now,’ she observed slowly. She raised her face to his with a defiant tilt to her chin, in a gesture which told him quite clearly that she could cope with his presence. She certainly wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of being barred! ‘So if you insist on coming, then I guess I can’t stop you.’
When she lifted her face like that, she was almost begging to be kissed and the desire to do so almost took his breath away. What would she do if he kissed her? he wondered. ‘You could stop me if you wanted to,’ he taunted softly. ‘You just don’t want to. Do you, Molly?’
Not if she was going to show him that she didn’t really care one way or the other. ‘Oh, it’ll be interesting to see your predatory instincts at work with my friends,’ she said sweetly. She made a great pantomime of looking at her watch. ‘Now I really do have things to do—shall I show you out?’
Without waiting for an answer, she marched out of the kitchen towards the hall, and, reluctantly, Dimitri began to follow her. He was being dismissed! It was behaviour that he simply would not have tolerated from another woman and he felt the dull, hot ache of frustration as she opened the door. Then allowed himself to think of the tantalising inevitability of what was going to happen between them.
He glittered her a smile.
The kiss could wait.
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