I didn’t swoon, you tried to cripp—’
He saw the blood drain from her face as she realised what she had been about to say and stuttered to a halt.
‘I mean—I meant—I didn’t—’
Oh, he would enjoy this. Finally, a crack in this Ice Queen’s façade. This was the most out of her comfort zone he’d seen her since that screen had pulled back and she’d realised he hadn’t taken her ‘back off’ bait.
He raised an eyebrow, waiting for her to speak.
‘I wasn’t thinking.’ The words rushed out of her as she desperately tried to backtrack and swerve around the very politically incorrect word that had nearly escaped her mouth. ‘I would never use that word if I was talking about...’
Flames were devouring her face and there was an earnest, beseeching look in her eyes. OK, that was probably enough.
‘Relax—’ he nudged her shoulder with his own ‘—I know that you didn’t mean anything by it. It’ll take a lot more than accidentally dropping the C-word into conversation to offend me.’ He’d learnt pretty quickly after his accident that it was the intention behind a particular word that would offend him, rather than the word itself. In his opinion, that word used among friends was far less offensive than being labelled ‘brave’ by someone who knew nothing at all about him.
In her horror at what she had been about to say, the fight had left her body, and she now sat comfortably in his lap, leaning just ever so slightly into the arm around her waist. Maybe sitting a little too comfortably. He might have lost a lot of the sensation from his legs, but his spinal injury was incomplete—doctor-speak for the fact that his spinal cord hadn’t been completely severed—and those nerves that were still attached? Boy, were they doing an awesome job right now. And his eyes? There was nothing wrong with those. Nothing wrong with his nose, either, which was drinking in the rich scent of her hair by the lungful; or his hands, which were begging for permission to take hold of that stubborn chin, angle her luscious mouth down towards his own, and take the kiss that he’d been completely unable to stop imagining from the moment that he had first seen her, however much he had tried.
Or maybe he didn’t need to use his hands at all, because she was turning towards him all of her own accord. Those big hazel eyes were locked on his, until they dropped and he just knew that she was looking at his lips. He flicked a tongue out to moisten them, to tempt her into reacting to him. Her skin flushed again as she watched him, her eyes not leaving his mouth. He moved closer, a centimetre, and then another, waiting for the moment when she blinked, when she realised he was getting too close, and froze up on him. When there was nothing but a couple of millimetres between them he breathed in another lungful of that intoxicating scent and closed his eyes, desperate for the moist warmth of her lips on his.
And then the wind was knocked from his chest and they were wheeling across the floor. Someone must have barged his chair out of the way. His hands went to his wheels as her arms tightened around him.
Brakes, Mauro. He’d never been so relieved to have made such a schoolboy error. If he’d put on the brakes he wouldn’t have just been barged across the terminal building. She’d still be sitting in his lap, her lips on his, rather than scrambling herself upright. He was going to have to be more careful if he wanted to keep his life exactly as he liked it, with nothing getting in the way of his ambition and his achievements. The only relationships he had space for were simple, honest flings where both parties knew what they were getting and were happy with the bargain.
A relationship with Amber would be anything but simple. Something about the brittleness of the front she showed the world told him that she had been broken. It was as if the pieces of her didn’t fit together quite right, leaving chinks to the hurt and vulnerable woman underneath. ‘What the hell? Did someone just push you?’ She spun around, looking for a fight. Nice deflection, he thought, wondering why she was so angry at herself.
‘Leave it, Amber.’
There had been a time when he’d have chased anyone trying to push him around—literally or metaphorically—and shown him just how much damage a bloke with a spinal-cord injury was capable of inflicting with his fists. It just so happened that when you used a wheelchair you were at the perfect height for one or two particularly vulnerable targets. But he’d long accepted that some people would act like idiots around him. He could either let the anger consume him, as it had sometimes threatened, or he could learn to rise above it. To be the bigger man and show the world what he was capable of with his medals rather than with his fists and fury.
He glanced up at the flight information screen and realised that they had no time to pick a fight anyway. There wasn’t even time to head back to the lounge and meet Ayisha and the cameraman—they’d have to hope that they would make their own way there without them.
‘Come on,’ he said to Amber, his resolve cracking for a second and brushing his hand against her hip. ‘They’re calling our flight.’
* * *
As the car swung into the driveway of the villa Amber caught her breath. The low-slung walls of the building were rendered in white, which in the late afternoon sun seemed to glow a warm orange. Three sides of the building wrapped around a central swimming pool, with expansive glazing, so every part of the house had a view of the water. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, Amber could see straight through the building, through more windows, to the clear blue-green of the Mediterranean. She stopped as she was climbing out of the car for a moment, stalled by the beauty of Mauro’s home.
Somehow, even though Ayisha had told her to expect luxury, she’d been expecting the sort of villa she and her ex, Ian, had stayed in during happier times; the sort with slightly noisy plumbing and grass growing between uneven paving stones in the garden. This—this was something else.
Imagine being able to call this your own, she thought, her mind wandering back to her bedsit in a grimy part of London. She was grateful to have a roof over her head at all, but to think that this was real life for Mauro, not a week of playing house... Their lives couldn’t be more materially different. It was bad enough that he was a millionaire, successful in every aspect of his life, whereas she was just holding onto her job by a thread. They had to rub it in her face with this beautiful house as well. Not that he was going to be interested in her, with her bargain basement clothes and her grubby flat. Not that she wanted him to be.
She turned to look at Mauro.
‘This is beautiful.’
‘Thanks,’ he said with a nonchalant shrug. ‘Come on, I’ll show you around.’
She wasn’t sure why, but somehow she found the idea that they were staying in his house more unsettling than if the production company had hired somewhere neutral. As if it handed him a massive advantage over her. And that wasn’t the only thing unsettling her. There was the memory, too, of what had happened in the airport. The way that she had sat in his lap, hypnotised by his mouth. The slight smile tugging at the corner of his lips, the way his tongue had moistened them, readying them to meet her own.
If they’d not been interrupted...
But thank God they had, and she didn’t have to think about how that sentence could end.
As Mauro gave her a guided tour of the property, she was blown away by the sheer luxury of the place. The gleaming chrome of the coffee machine, the soft, supple leather of the sofas, the expansive cotton and silks on the beds. Every now and then a detail caught her eye—a
