In fact, she hopped onto the covered wooden porch at roughly the same time as he swung through the front door and without a backward glance slammed it firmly in her face.
As expected, it wasn’t long before Rafael heard the woman banging on the door. At this rate, between her uncontrolled shrieking and the unholy racket she was now making, the neighbours would be reporting him!
He went very close to the door, close enough so that he didn’t actually have to raise his voice very much to be heard. ‘Go away. You’re making a fool of yourself. I don’t much give a damn whether you’re drunk or not but I don’t have time for women who think they can get their own way by screaming and yelling. So run along to where the fun is, stock up on a bit more booze and then collapse, like everyone else, into bed.’
‘If you don’t tell me who you are I’m going to have to report you to James.’ Amy lowered her voice to match his, although she wasn’t quite sure whether she sounded as cold and forbidding as he did. She just hoped that she didn’t sound like a petulant child who would resort to telling because the temper tantrum hadn’t worked.
‘I’m sober enough to know that you might not have permission to be on these grounds.’ In fact, she hadn’t drunk anything at all, despite the abundance of alcohol on offer. All manner of sightseeing tours had been laid on for them to enjoy and she wasn’t about to miss a single one of them because of a hangover. Nor was she about to squander any precious moments she could spend in James’s company by having unnecessary lie-ins.#p#分页标题#e#
It worked. To her astonishment. The man opened the door, glared at her and informed her that she could come inside.
For the first time, with the lights in the room switched on, she saw him properly. He was tall and she had been right about the raven-black hair. In fact the only thing she had missed and that was becoming patently clear was that he was incredibly, undeniably sexy. Not sexy in a magazine centrefold kind of way, but sexy in a powerful, brooding, rough-edged kind of way. It almost took her breath away, then she stared around her, curiosity temporarily silencing her.
The house might have been small but it was far from shabby. The rich patina of wooden flooring glistened, invited the eye to linger over the comfortable sitting area, which was dominated by a large, modern-style fireplace, coaxed it into straying just a bit further to glimpse a high-tech kitchen, then up a few short stairs to where, presumably, the bedrooms were.
‘Not bad for a squatter,’ she said, adding, ‘ha, ha,’ when he frowned at her. ‘Look, I’m sorry if you’re suffering a severe case of wounded pride because I called you a squatter, but I was a little shocked to find somebody out here, holed up miles away from the house.’
Rafael stared at her, fascinated against his will. Not only did she appear to have no braking mechanism controlling what came out of her mouth, but she was now wandering through the house as if she really were a guest, rather than an intruder who had managed to wrangle her way in by dint of threat.
The fact of the matter was that Rafael did not want his presence on the grounds to be an open secret. He genuinely didn’t want to be a dampener on proceedings, nor did he want to feel obliged to join in the fun. He had his own idea of fun. Dinner with friends, intimate jazz clubs with like-minded women. Certainly not drinking till dawn around a pool at the family mansion in the Hamptons with a random selection of people he didn’t know from Adam but was pretty sure he wouldn’t particularly like. Just as he didn’t particularly care for the woman standing in front of him, making no pretence at covering up her nosiness.
‘So if you’re not a squatter, then who are you?’
I just own the company you work for, Rafael was tempted to inform her. It didn’t surprise him that the woman had failed to recognise him. As she was a member of the ‘forgotten crew’, he suspected that whatever job she did would be fairly low profile and definitely out of sight. It had to be said that he was also rarely in London, choosing to oversee things from New York, and judging from her accent she was definitely one hundred per cent Londoner.
‘I’m the…gardener,’ Rafael improvised.
‘And you live here?’
‘Where else would you expect me to live?’
‘In a small, average house on a small, average estate somewhere fairly close by…like any other normal gardener…’
‘In case it missed you, this isn’t exactly a small, normal garden. It’s a full-time job, hence my residence on the grounds.’