Bastien frowned at her continuing interest. ‘It was a fresh start for me in many ways. I was able to see Anatole regularly and I went to a much better school.’
‘Obviously you’re close to your father,’ Lilah commented, relieved to hear that hint of indulgent warmth in his dark drawl when he referred to his parent, because really it was brutally obvious to her that Bastien had been cursed by the most utterly miserable childhood.
‘Yes. I’m very fond of Anatole. He may have been a push-over for the wrong women, but as a father, when I needed him, he was the very best,’ Bastien stated with quiet pride.
Relief filled Lilah that there had been someone loving in Bastien’s life, and she wondered why the idea of nobody having cared for him as a child should disturb her so much. His answers to her questions, however, had given her a certain insight into what had made him so tough and unyielding.
‘But that’s enough about my life, glikia mou,’ Bastien continued, smooth as glass. ‘Tell me about Josh Burrowes.’
Thrown off balance in her turn, Lilah stiffened, her spine straightening. ‘There’s nothing to tell. We were on the same course at uni. He’s one of my friends.’
Bastien lounged back in his seat as their plates were cleared and the main course served. ‘But obviously Josh wants to be something more. You should’ve told him the truth.’
Lilah’s delicate bone structure tightened. ‘I gave my friends the same story you suggested I use with my family. I said you’d offered me a job.’
Bastien rested his shimmering dark gaze on the voluptuous promise of her pink lips as she savoured the tender lamb on her plate. ‘But you should have come clean for Josh’s benefit and told him that you are mine.’
Her small white teeth gritted as if she had trodden barefoot on a stone. ‘I am not yours, Bastien.’
‘You are,’ Bastien purred in immediate contradiction, his accented drawl vibrating through her slender taut frame. ‘I know it every time I look at you. No hunger this powerful is one-sided.’
Lilah concentrated on her meal, deeming silence the most diplomatic response. She was very, very attracted to him, she admitted inwardly, but no way did she owe him that amount of truth.
As she studied him a snaking curl of warmth stirred low in her pelvis and something tightened even deeper inside her, making her shift uneasily in her seat. The hard, masculine lines of his compellingly beautiful face and the suppressed ferocity of his stunningly intense eyes welded her attention to him.
The first time she had seen Bastien she had known that she had never seen a more beautiful male specimen, and in the two years that had since passed that fact remained the absolute truth. Bastien was gorgeous. She knew it and he had to know it too.
Perspiration beaded her short upper lip, and as a member of staff stepped up to the table to refresh their wine glasses she finally dragged her attention from Bastien and breathed in deep.
‘Stefan’s wife is a fantastic chef,’ she remarked, after savouring the first mouthful of a roasted pear dessert served with chocolate sauce and then pushing the plate away in defeat. ‘But I can’t find room for another bite...’
‘Coffee?’ Bastien prompted.
‘No, thanks...’ Lilah tensed as he rose fluidly out of his seat and strolled, jungle-cat-graceful, towards her.
‘I react like a teenager around you,’ Bastien murmured thickly. ‘I can’t wait one minute longer.’
Lilah pushed her hands down on the table-edge and levered herself upright, the layers of her dress spilling out round her in peach abundance. Time to pay the piper, she thought crazily.
Bastien didn’t immediately touch her. Instead he lowered his dark head and circled her mouth almost teasingly with his own, touching delicate nerve-endings that screamed with awareness to send pulses of heat shooting down through her. Her head swam a little...her knees wobbled.
With a guttural sound low in his throat, Bastien swept her up in his arms.
‘I was so angry with you last night when I heard about you kissing Josh,’ he told her unexpectedly as he carried her up the stone staircase, contriving that feat as easily as if she weighed no more than a child. ‘Don’t let another man touch you in any way while you’re with me.’
Her senses still drowning from that extraordinarily intoxicating kiss, Lilah looked up at him with dazed blue eyes and blinked. ‘Not much risk of that.’
‘Why not? You’re a beauty. I saw it... Josh saw it,’ he grated in harsh reminder.
‘But you see things in me that I don’t,’ she muttered uncomfortably, thinking of the conventionally beautiful fashion models he generally took to his bed.
In comparison, she was an aberration. Each and every one of her predecessors that she had seen had been tall, blonde and classically lovely, with Marielle the perfect example of that ideal. Lilah, however, was small and kind of skinny. She had certainly been way too skinny and small in the bust and hip department for any of the boys to look at while she was at school, at an age where having curves had seemed so very important.
‘I know that I want you,’ Bastien spelt out. ‘Everything else fades in the face of that.’
‘Everything?’ Lilah questioned in disbelief.
‘Everything...’ Bastien husked, breathing in the coconut scent of her shampoo, the faint aroma of the cosmetics she had applied, the fragrance that was uniquely and alluringly hers. And those eyes, he savoured, those sapphire-blue eyes that shone like jewels...
He settled her down on the bed in her room, and the hunger driving him spooked him more than just a little as he looked down at her. That hunger would fade as soon as he’d had her, he told himself cynically, and in all likelihood even the sex would be a disappointment. How could it be otherwise when she had no experience? She couldn’t possibly be a truly sensual woman, his rational mind assured him. No truly sensual woman could have stayed untouched as long as she had. She might light up when he looked at her, move in his arms as though she were a sensually aware woman, but it was unlikely that she would have much to offer.
He plucked off her shoes, resisting a decidedly warped urge to stroke those tiny feet of hers. Her virginity was unsettling him, Bastien decided, desperate to suppress the strange thoughts and reactions assailing him. But if she was telling him the truth—and he had to believe it was the truth—she would be more his than any other woman had ever been. And for some peculiar reason he liked that idea, he acknowledged in bewilderment. He really liked that idea.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Lilah whispered awkwardly as he ran down the zip on her dress.
‘Sex. What else?’
‘So I asked a stupid question...deal with it,’ Lilah cut back without skipping a beat.
Above her head, an unholy grin slashed Bastien’s firmly modelled mouth. He eased the dress off a slight white shoulder and rolled the sleeves down her slim arms, completely attuned to the rising tempo of her breathing.
‘I’m not going to harm you,’ Bastien breathed with husky assurance. ‘Not in any way.’
‘I’ve heard it can hurt,’ Lilah told him stubbornly.
‘You make the prospect of having sex with me sound like some form of medieval torture,’ Bastien growled.
‘I’m going to shut up now. Zipping my mouth,’ Lilah spelt out jerkily.
Bastien tugged off the dress and tossed it in a careless heap on the carpet.
‘I saw the price tag on that dress, Bastien. You can’t treat it like that...it’s indecent!’
Bastien flung back his handsome dark head and laughed out loud. ‘I thought you were zipping it? Keep quiet...you’re making me nervous.’
‘What have you got to be nervous about?’ Lilah demanded in wonderment.
She was finding it a huge challenge not to simply dive below the sheets. There she was, with her body on display, skinny as a rail, clad only in little pale pink lacy pieces of lingerie, and she was being forced to pose like some pantomime seductress on a silk-clad bed. Goosebumps rose on her exposed skin.
Bastien slid a hand into his pocket and withdrew a jewel box. ‘This is for you.’
Lilah sat up and took the opportunity to hug her knees, covering up her all-too-bare body as best she could. ‘I don’t want gifts, Bastien.’
‘You will wear it to please me, koukla mou. The first time I saw you I wanted to see you in diamonds.’ Bastien flipped open the lid on an exquisite shimmering diamond pendant on a chain. He removed it from the box and clasped it round her slender neck.
Taken aback, Lilah didn’t move a muscle as he put the pendant on her, feeling the diamond settle cold and heavy against her chilled skin. Bastien stepped back from the bed to remove his jacket and unbutton his shirt, but the whole time his attention was fixed to her.
Lilah met dark golden eyes, tawny as a lion’s, and her skin blazed as though he had set her on fire, all sense of being cool in temperature and cold with nerves instantly evaporating. Beneath his bronzed skin he flexed washboard abs and well-developed pectoral muscles, which made her stare for a second or two. He was what a friend had once described as ‘built’—powerfully masculine in every way.
She glanced away as his long, tanned fingers reached for the waistband of his trousers, cursing her shyness, her awful self-consciousness with her own body, never mind his. He tossed some foil packets down by the bed, and the nape of her neck prickled.