her arms but as she slid them around his neck he broke the connection, lifting his head a fraction to look at her for a moment and murmur, ‘Not raspberry...’
Not raspberry?
He was frowning a little as he straightened so that he was looking down at her. Five-inch heels. She needed five-inch heels...
‘And not that important.’
As his hand slid away from her she took a step back, grabbed behind for the freezer for the second time, steadying herself while her legs remembered what they were for. And for the second time that morning wished she’d kept her mouth shut.
‘Not important?’ No, not that important...
Oh, God! Forget raspberry—if she ever blushed she wouldn’t be raspberry, she’d be beetroot. It was the skirt all over again, only that had been him looking. This had been her losing all sense as her wayward genes, the curse of all Amery women, had temporarily asserted themselves and reason, judgement, had flown out of the window. It was that easy to lose your head.
Just one look and she had wanted him to kiss her. Wanted a lot more. Stupid, crazy and rare in ways he couldn’t begin to understand, Alexander West had read something entirely different into her motives. Had thought that she was prepared to seduce him to get what she wanted...
‘It’s just ice cream,’ he said, dismissively.
Just?
‘Did you say “just ice cream”?’
Focus on that. Ice...
‘How did you get in here?’ he demanded, irritably, ignoring the question. ‘The shop isn’t open.’
The change of mood was like a slap, but it had the effect of jarring her senses back into place.
‘I used the side door,’ she snapped, almost as shocked by his dismissal of ice cream as something anyone could take seriously as a sizzling kiss that had momentarily stolen her wits. And which he had swept aside as casually.
No way was she going to tell him that Ria had given her a key so that she could collect her orders out of hours. She wasn’t going to tell him anything.
It was only the absolute necessity of verifying that Ria had completed her order that kept her from doing the sensible thing and walking out. Once she knew it was there, she could come and pick it up later when he had gone.
‘It was locked,’ he countered.
‘Not when I walked through it.’ The truth, the whole truth and very nearly nothing but the truth. ‘Unlike the front door. You’re not going to get Ria out of trouble if you shut her customers out,’ she added, pointedly.
Alexander West gave her a long, thoughtful look—the kind that suggested he knew when he was being flimflammed. He might look as if he were about to fall asleep where he stood, but, as he’d just demonstrated, he was very much awake and apparently leaping to all manner of conclusions.
Not without reason where the key was concerned.
As for the rest...
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
‘I did pay for my order in advance,’ she said, doing her best to blank out the humming of her pulse, determined to divert his attention from a smile that had got her into so much trouble—and which she’d stow away with the suit, labelled not suitable for office wear, the minute she got home—along with her apparent ability to walk through locked doors. Just in case he took it into his head to use those long fingers, strong capable hands, to do a pat-down search.
Her body practically melted at the thought.
‘Maybe,’ she said, her voice apparently disconnected from her body and brisk as a brand-new yard broom, ‘since you appear to have taken charge in Ria’s absence, you could find the rest of it for me?’
Better. Ignore the body. Stick with the voice...
‘You paid in advance?’
Much better. He wasn’t just diverted, he was seriously surprised and his eyebrows rose, drawing attention to the hair flopping over his forehead and practically falling in his eyes.
Sorrel found herself struggling against the urge to lean into him, to reach up and comb it back with her fingers, feel the strength of that hot body against hers as she put her arms around his neck and fastened it tidily out of the way with an elastic band.
Fortunately, she didn’t have a band handy but, not taking any chances, she kept her fingers busy tucking a stray wisp of her own hair behind an ear. Then, just to be safe, she rubbed her thumb over the little ice-cream-cornet earring that had been a birthday gift from her ideal man, Graeme Laing. The well-groomed, totally focused man for whom travelling meant brief business trips to Zurich, New York or Hong Kong.
Travelling for business was okay.
‘It is normal business practice,’ she assured him.
‘“Normal” and “business practice” are not words I’ve ever heard Ria use in the same sentence,’ Alexander replied.
‘That I can believe, but I’m not Ria.’
‘No?’ Her assertion didn’t impress him. He didn’t even ask what kind of business she was in. Clearly his interest in her didn’t stretch further than her underwear. He had to have known—his kiss had left her clinging to the freezer for support, for heaven’s sake—that she had been lost to reality, but he hadn’t bothered to follow through, press his advantage.
He’d simply been proving the point that she would do anything to get her ice cream.
He had been wrong about that, too. She hadn’t been thinking about her order, or the major event that depended upon it. She hadn’t been thinking at all, only feeling the fizz of heat rushing through her veins, a shocking need to be kissed, to be touched...
She cut off the thought, aware that she should be grateful that he hadn’t taken advantage of her incomprehensible meltdown.
She was grateful.
Having got over his shock at Ria’s unaccountable lapse into efficiency, however, Alexander shrugged and the gap along his shoulder seam widened, putting her fledgling gratitude to the test.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Show me a receipt and you can take your ices.’
‘A receipt?’
That took her mind off his disintegrating clothing, and the sudden chill around her midriff had nothing to do with the fact that she was leaning against an open freezer.
‘It is normal business practice to issue one,’ he said.
She couldn’t be certain that he was mocking her, but it felt very much like it. He was pretty sharp for a man with such a louche lifestyle, but presumably financing it required a certain amount of ruthlessness. Was that why he felt responsible for Ria’s problems? She was full of life, looked fabulous for forty, but good-looking toy-boy lovers—no matter how occasional—were an expensive luxury.
‘You
