'Hello, Jewel.'
FOUR
For a couple of seconds I do nothing. Just stand there, a gentle breeze lifting my hair from my neck, savoring the sensation of unfolding drama and the reckless abandonment his voice has brought into my being. I know when I turn around the world will be different.
I prepare myself and face him slowly. Even so the breath catches in my throat. I blink and stare at him.
He towers over me in an emerald suit. Sexual energy glimmers off him like the wavy heat effect in a desert. His eyes-green marbled with violet or black, beautiful at any rate-glow with desire. Every fiber in my body contracts and buzzes as if he is a great dynamo and I am some dumb equipment that is absorbing too much energy. And the worse part: he knows it.
'Or is it Lily?' His sinful lips caress my name like a kiss.
Heat prickles up my arms. 'It's whatever you want it to be.'
He lets his wicked, smoldering gaze drift over my body. 'I want it to be Lily.'
I shrug. 'OK,' I say carelessly.
He takes a drink from a passing tray and hands it to me. Our fingers brush and I shiver. Visibly. His eyebrows lift, but his eyes remain inscrutable. My cheeks flame with sexual tension. I grip the glass tightly. Shit. What the hell is this? Christ in heaven. Get a fucking grip, Lily. I can't believe how affected I am by this man. I need time to sort myself out.
I force a smile onto my lips. 'Thank you,' I say politely, and make to move away. His hand shoots out and touches my bare arm. This time my reaction is clear. I jerk my hand away.
'We don't have a no touch policy in this house,' he observes quietly.
'I don't believe we've been introduced. Who are you?'
Green sparks of amusement dance in his eyes. He knows I know exactly who he is. 'Who do you want me to be, Lily?' His voice is lazy like a deadly snake coiled in the sun. One wrong move …
An unfamiliar warmth shivers and fizzles through my veins. 'My lover's brother.'
The amusement vanishes from his eyes-the reptile has been rudely awakened-replaced by a bolt of blazing fury.
My heart stops. I resist the instinctive reaction to back off. For a few moments, or it could have been thousands of years, we stare at each other and then he turns on his heels and strides away, his back ramrod straight.
I grip the champagne glass tightly and watch his tall figure cut through the human crush. He stands out the way a hawk stands out in a crowd of canaries. A woman in a sophisticated ivory velvet evening gown lays a manicured hand on his sleeve. He stops and bends his head to her. She says something. Her laugh is tinkling. I feel a furious tightening in my belly. I am jealous. I am sickeningly jealous of the horny bitch.
'Did you miss me?' Shane asks in my ear.
At the sound of his easy voice, relief floods me. It's like having a stiff drink on a cold day. The warm waves radiate out from the middle of your belly. I turn toward him. 'Desperately.'
'How desperately?' His teeth flash.
'You don't want to know.'
He laughs. 'Come on. I want you to meet my brother.' Before I can protest he puts his hand on my elbow and steers me along toward his brother and the beauty in the ivory dress. She has coffee-colored hair and empty silver eyes.
'Jake, I want you to meet Lily.'
Jake turns stiffly toward me. 'We've already met,' he says dryly.
'Oh! When?'
'Moments ago.' He seems cold and uninterested.
Shane looks at me quizzically.
'You didn't give me a chance to tell you,' I say weakly.
'Aren't you going to introduce me, darling?' the woman says adoringly, as she slides her hand up his black shirt. Her hand dislodges his jacket and I see its pale blue lining. Jealousy shoots like quicksilver into my blood, scorching it. I look up and meet his eyes. They are dark and carefully veiled.
'Andrea Mornington, Lily Hart,' he says curtly, then very deliberately curls his arm around her waist.
'Hello, Lily,' Andrea says, turning her empty eyes toward me, except they are no longer empty but precise and direct, like a key turning in a lock. She perfectly understands what has not been spoken.
I force a smile. 'Please excuse me, I need to find a washroom.' As I turn away, Shane's hand falls on my wrist. 'Are you OK?'
I look into his eyes. Already I can see the weight of responsibility he has taken for my well-being. It warms and saddens me. 'Yes. I'll be back soon.'
I don't have to look at his brother to know he is watching me. I feel it like a dagger in my back or an act of fate.
I don't find the washroom. Instead I drift inconspicuously into an adjoining room. It seems to be a salon of some kind. As with everything else in the house it is beautiful. There is nobody in there. I close the door and lean against it.
The attraction is so inconvenient, so absurd that I had never even considered the possibility. And yet here it is. I want him so bad it is like an ache. I push away from the door, put my glass of champagne on a low table, and walk to a tall window. I stare out of it into the dark and see only my ghostly reflection.
A dozen thoughts come and go. I know I should be going back to Shane, but the part of me that loathes to see them together is the stronger. My thoughts are interrupted by a sound at the door.
I whirl around in surprise.
For God's sake! An emerald suit and a diamond encrusted ring on his pinkie! He should have looked ridiculous, but he does not. He starts walking toward me-sure, confident, leonine. Dazzling.
There is an arrogance and authority to the set of his jaw that is not at all to my liking. His gaze is aggressively bold and virile. His eyes travel down my body.
'Lost?'
'No, I was trying to be alone.'
His eyes dip down and linger suggestively and I am certain deliberately on my breasts. The mental disrobing is meant to unruffle me.
'Positively breathtaking,' he murmurs softly, but with a hint of sardonic amusement.
'Insufferably arrogant, aren't you?'
'It has been said,' he concedes with a wry grin.
'What do you want?' I ask. My voice rings out like a bell in the vast room. I hear the panic in it, the revelation that I do not trust myself.
He stands in front of me, his cheekbones flushed with sexual heat. 'Isn't it perfectly obvious what I want?'
'Not to me.'
'I want you to stay away from my brother.'
I blush. Then I laugh mockingly. 'You're a gangster. Don't act high and mighty with me.'
He smiles slowly, his eyes crinkling with amusement. 'Say that word again.'
I blink. 'What word?'
'Gangster.'
'Why?'
'Because you make it sound so sexy I want to go out and become one.'
'Am I supposed to believe that you're not one?'
He shrugged disinterestedly, but his eyes take on a new glitter. 'I can be if you want me to be.'
Suddenly I feel so flustered I can't even look at him. I drop my eyes.
'Is that what you really want … Lily? A gangster?'
'It's the last thing … '
He moves, and fast. 'So what the fuck are you doing playing nice with his brother,' he snarls and gripping my forearms pushes me roughly against the wall by the window.
I do what I did when I was nine years old and I opened the front door of my nan's house and there were two unsmiling skinheads outside. One of them was holding a hammer. I didn't pause or consider. I simply reacted.
'Let loose the two Alsatians, Nan,' I screamed.
For a second the heavily tattooed heads looked at each other, and then they bolted away so fast there was not enough time to say skin. My nan didn't have a dog.
Again I let my instinct guide me.
I grab Jake's surprised face and, pulling it down, kiss him hard on the mouth, except, unlike the skinheads situation, the problem does not run away.
His mouth opens to mine. The kiss sears my lips, shocking. I stagger and grab a handful of dark hair. Supporting hands come around my waist like bands of warm steel forcing me into his unyielding body, and I melt into it, fuse with it. My insides turn to fucking mush and my toes curl in my shoes. Thick juices leak into the gusset of my panties. For those few seconds I even stop breathing!
Then, without warning, he tears his mouth away from mine, and coiling strong hands around my forearms pushes me back against the cold wall. He stares at me with these wild, animal eyes, the pupils so huge it is as if he has been running or has come out of a dark room. Mesmerized, I gaze up at him. I have never seen anything like it. Anything so feral and beautiful. He takes a deep breath.
'What the fuck?' he bites out harshly.
'Sorry,' I say as coolly as I can manage. 'When a man shoves a woman up against a wall he usually wants to ravish her.'
He is breathing hard. Through short gasps of air he grates, 'Stay the fuck away from my brother.'
His voice is cold and menacing and a great white shark is swimming in his eyes, but I know that if I reach out and touch the front of his five thousand pound suit trousers I will find him tight and hard inside them.
'So I'm good enough for you but not good enough for your brother.'
He laughs bitterly. 'No, you're good enough for any man's bed. The problem is Shane would want to marry you, and we both know you're not the marrying kind.'
'What makes you think I wouldn't marry Shane?'