Bedded at the Billionaire's Convenience(20)

‘You’re going to work?’

‘Extraordinary, isn’t it? For some of us, the working day never ends. And, by the way, I would offer you the loan of pyjamas, but I don’t possess any…’

He disappeared out of the kitchen and Georgie made her way upstairs.

Having thoroughly and unashamedly explored the house in his absence, she knew where he would be working. She also knew where his bedroom was and now she found herself feverishly picturing him in his giant king-sized bed without pyjamas.

Had he made that passing remark about not possessing any just to make her feel uncomfortable, or was she reading too much into a throw-away statement of fact?

It struck her that she had been hopelessly naïve in her assumptions about Pierre.

She had nurtured a very handy one dimensional image of him, but the flesh and blood was turning out to be vastly different and strangely disturbing. Of course, his lifestyle was not one that she could really comprehend. Why spend all that time working to accumulate more money than could be reasonably spent in one person’s lifetime? But he was hardly the automaton she had imagined.

And the possibility of his having a current girlfriend was one she had not even contemplated, although now, thinking about it, why ever not? The man was good looking and incredibly wealthy. He would have had no problem landing any woman he wanted. But still, she had travelled to London in the blithe belief that, deception or not, she was doing the right thing and therefore it would work out.

And now that he had been cornered into going along with her plan, she realised that it wouldn’t be long before he really started disliking her for her interference in his life. Indeed, Lord only knew, he probably disliked her already, more than he previously had.

Sleep did not come easy.

She imagined him downstairs in his office, scowling at his computer or maybe calling his girlfriend because he surely couldn’t be so cold hearted as to leave her totally out of the loop.

And then, what on earth were they going to tell Didi when it was all over? Georgie hadn’t been lying when she had confessed to Pierre that that was something about which she had spared precious little thought. In her fear and anxiety over Didi’s frame of mind, she had jumped feet first in at the deep end. Belatedly, she realised that she might find herself floundering in the water without a lifebelt anywhere near.

She woke the following morning to find the house empty, which was something of a relief.

There was a note on the kitchen counter from Pierre politely wishing her a safe trip to Devon and love to Didi. Georgie read it, then tossed it into the bin. Something about that aggressive, black handwriting made her shiver with apprehension.

And on the trip back down, with her book optimistically opened in front of her, she found herself frowning at the passing scenery outside and wondering just what she had let herself in for.#p#分页标题#e##p#分页标题#e#

Then, even worse, she caught herself wondering what he was up to.

Mostly, though, she thought how her intrinsically soft nature had a habit of landing her in situations that had not turned out according to plan. She thought of the adopted goose five years previously, which had terrorised the postman so badly that she had been forced to fetch her own mail from the post office. In fact, there had been, over the years, a series of stray animals that had somehow ended up outstaying their welcome until, finally, she was left with only her chickens, thank heavens.

But this situation did not involve stray animals. It was dawning on her that this might turn out to be a situation that was a runaway car, and she might be wrong but didn’t runaway cars always end up wreaking havoc?





CHAPTER FOUR




USUALLY when Pierre had visited his mother, and by his reckoning it had not been for at least five months, he had been driven. Freed from the tedium of the traffic, he had been at liberty to carry on working in the back seat of the Bentley, only surfacing when the car had pulled up the drive to the cottage.

Today he had chosen to drive himself. The words Quick Escape were there, somewhere, at the back of his mind.

He hadn’t spoken to Georgie since their bizarre meeting a week ago. He hadn’t trusted himself because, and it didn’t matter how reluctant he was, he was now an accomplice to her hare brained scheme. She hadn’t liked him using that particular word, but no other word fitted the bill better, particularly after the two conversations he had had with Didi, during which he had virtually been obliged to don a hard hat just to ward off the onslaught of misplaced excitement and hesitantly breathless curiosity.

The polite surface affection that had always existed between them had been breached and he had found himself on the back foot, not quite knowing how to deal with a mother who now seemed vibrantly interested in him. What had he been up to? How wonderful that he could have had the time to slowly nurture his relationship with Georgie, taking it a step at a time! How anxious she had always been that he worked too hard, that his priorities were in the wrong place! That he would never find the right woman to slow him down and make him realise that there was more to life than the inside of an office!