The Millionaire's Revenge(46)
‘You’re right.’ She squirmed until she was facing him, slippery with soap and water, and their quick shower, as it turned out, took them a lot longer than they had anticipated.
This was what he wanted. Or so he told himself in the warmth of the kitchen, holding a glass of chilled wine in his hand and looking at her as she busied herself in the kitchen, having insisted that he sit down and let her cook.
At his beck and call. One touch, and she was on fire. Click his fingers and she would melt in his arms.
So why was there still a thread of dissatisfaction gnawing away at the pit of his stomach? Had he not achieved exactly what he had wanted? If he turned his back now and walked away, he knew that she would be the one to hurt, so why the ache? He owned the house, the land, her body. He had got his revenge and now he felt sullied, somehow, by it.
‘There was no need to put yourself to all this trouble,’ he said abruptly, and she turned to face him with a frown.
‘What’s the matter? What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing is wrong. Why should anything be wrong?’ he asked irritably.
‘No reason whatsoever,’ Laura replied, covering the frying-pan with a lid and drying her hands on a towel. She reached for her wineglass on the counter and took a sip of wine, then she perched against the ledge of the counter and folded her arms. ‘You’re free to go any time you want.
‘Gabriel,’ she said coolly. ‘Don’t imagine that because we’ve slept together that there’s any need for you to try and play the gentleman now. In case you’d conveniently forgotten, you were the one who suggested staying on for something to eat.’
‘And in case you’d conveniently forgotten, you were only too delighted at the suggestion.’ Flushed, as she had been, after their third bout of love-making! For some reason, the thought of her murmuring things she thought he wanted to hear when in the throes of passion made his teeth snap together in fury.
It was something of which Laura did not want to be reminded. Let that be a lesson to her, she thought angrily. Nothing between them was normal and it was pointless pretending that it could ever be! They were not some domesticated little couple playing at happy families. They had made love but love was the last thing that came into the act. The thought of him sitting there, squirming because he would rather be off now that he had slept with her, filled her with mortification.#p#分页标题#e#
‘It seemed sensible!’ she shot back. ‘Not that I have much choice, anyway! After all, this is your house. I am only acting the part of dutiful employee.’
‘And was that what you were doing earlier on?’ he rasped. ‘Acting the part of the dutiful employee?’
Laura was the first to look away. She didn’t want to see the jeering cynicism stamped in those beautiful black eyes. More importantly, she didn’t want him to see the furious, blinding panic in her own eyes.
God, she thought with dawning, incredulous horror, I’ve fallen in love with him. All over again. Maybe, she thought with clammy dismay, she had never fallen out of love with him. She had just managed to submerge it all until he came back into her life and then, well, it had just been a question of time before she’d catapulted back into his arms. She could have coped better if she had thought that she had been acting the part of the dutiful employee! ‘No,’ she whispered numbly.
She had turned away and Gabriel, his body tense, wanted desperately for her to turn back to him so that he could read what was going on in that seductive head of hers. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself and to regain some of his self-control.
‘Look,’ he said to her back, ‘there is no point in us arguing with one another.’ Why the hell wouldn’t she look at him? The thought that he might have blown it filled him with sudden, suffocating dread. ‘I just did not want you to feel that you had to slave over a kitchen stove to cook food for me when I would more than happily have taken you somewhere to eat.’
‘I had to cook for myself anyway,’ Laura muttered, which shoved his simmering anger a few notches higher. She had succumbed to lust and so, heck, why not invite him to eat with her? Not as if she were putting herself out!
‘Women, home-cooked meals and me do not mix.’ Pride slammed into place with ferocious ease, it’s been my experience,’ he said dismissively, ‘that a woman who cooks food wants more than I am ever prepared to give.’
‘In which case,’ Laura replied with equal dismissiveness, ‘you have nothing to fear from me in that area.’