Oh, shit...
‘Did you say something?’
Not out loud, he was almost certain, but his reaction had been so strong that she had undoubtedly read his mind. ‘You can’t use my name,’ he warned, gesturing around the studio, ‘or any of this to generate publicity.’ This was his world. He had created it. No one else. He wouldn’t have it touched by his family or the Chase.
‘It’ll be a low-key approach,’ she assured him, far too easily. ‘Nothing flashy, nothing to embarrass you. You have my word.’
‘Your word, in this instance, is worthless. Once it’s on the Net you’ll lose control.’
‘Only if I get it right.’
‘Is that supposed to reassure me?’
She frowned, obviously confused by his attitude. ‘It’s just a house, Darius.’
She was wrong, but he couldn’t expect her to understand his love/hate relationship with the place. With his family. ‘You’ve got all the answers,’ he said dismissively.
She shook her head. ‘If I had all the answers, I wouldn’t be here,’ she said, ‘I’d be at Morgan and Black, lining up viewings with the property managers of the kind of men and women who can afford to buy and maintain an English country house to use for two or three weeks in the year. During the shooting season,’ she added, in case he didn’t get the point, ‘or maybe for Christmas and the New Year, before they move on to Gstaad or Aspen for the skiing.’
‘That’s...’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing.’
He shouldn’t care who bought it, or how little they used it... He didn’t. And he had no reason to trust her, or to believe that she’d lost her job for anything other than sheer incompetence. Only the fact that Miles Morgan had lied about a breakdown, publicly humiliating her in a way that even if she had been grossly negligent would still have been unforgivable. And that he’d disliked the man on sight.
What Natasha Gordon had done to him on sight was something else. The fact that he wasn’t thinking with his brain was reason enough to stay well clear of any hare-brained idea she came up with, but the Revenue would not wait forever for the inheritance tax he would have to pay on the estate. The truth of the matter was that he couldn’t afford to wait until the fuss died down.
‘Okay.’
Tash was used to being looked at. She had no illusions about being any kind of a beauty, but—cosseted and nurtured on all that was good and nourishing by a mother who’d nearly lost her—she’d developed from a skin-and-bones kid into an unfashionably curved lushness that men seemed to find irresistible.
She’d quickly learned to keep both flirtatious vendors and buyers at a distance, but Darius Hadley had not flirted with her. The connection was something else, something visceral, and now he was looking at her with an intensity that heated her to the bone.
With each stroke of his pencil on the paper she became increasingly conscious of her body. Every line he drew felt like a fingertip stroked across her skin. It was as if she was coming undone; not just her top button, but every part of her was unravelling as she became exposed to him.
Far from keeping her distance, she’d barely stopped herself from reaching out, laying her hand on the solid muscle of his arm, sliding a finger along the dark hair gathered in a line along his forearm. But one touch would never be enough; it would be lighting the blue touchpaper, setting off a chain reaction that nothing could stop. And the problem with that was...?