The Real Romero(32)

                Lucas tilted his head to one side, as though seriously considering her rhetorical question.

                ‘Possibly,’ he said slowly, his dark eyes roving over her flushed face. ‘I’m surprised you stuck it out in a job where you were forced to take orders.’

                Milly glared. It had taken a lot of tongue biting to work in a hot, understaffed kitchen where she had never been given the opportunity actually to produce anything of her own...but she still didn’t care for him pointing that out to her.

                ‘There are always up sides to any situation,’ he told her, accurately reading the expression on her face and following her thoughts as seamlessly as if they were written in big, bold letters across her forehead. ‘You can waste time feeling sorry about yourself and moaning about the job you’ve lost...’

                ‘I wasn’t moaning!’

                ‘Of course you were. Or, you can see it as a good thing. So you no longer have to run around taking orders from someone you don’t particularly like in a job that was going nowhere anyway. And, getting back to your sweeping generalisation that I lead women on because I can, I think it’s wise for me to dispel that myth before it has time to blossom into another full-blown argument.’

                His dark eyes were cool and Milly stiffened.

                ‘I’m not interested in—’

                ‘Well you’d better start working up an interest because, frankly, I wasn’t interested in hearing you compare me to the bum who let you down.’

                Milly reddened because she knew that she had been unfair.

                ‘You were high-handed,’ she began weakly in her defence and the temperature in his eyes dropped a few notches from cool to glacial.

                ‘I’ve already told you that I would never sleep with any woman who was involved with someone else. Likewise, I would never sleep with any woman if I was involved with someone else. The thought of that disgusts me, so I couldn’t be further from the unprincipled bastard you got yourself involved with.’ He didn’t take his eyes off her face. ‘When I go out with a woman, she is safe in the knowledge that I’m not going anywhere else and I’m not looking anywhere else either.’

                Milly shivered at the rampant possessiveness in his voice. She wondered what it would be like to have that possessiveness directed on her, to have this big, powerful man focus all his attention on her, to the exclusion of anybody else.

                ‘And yet you’re not a jealous guy.’ She moved on the conversation to dispel the alluring thought of him wanting her so badly that he literally didn’t have eyes for any other woman. Her skin tingled, as though he had brushed it with his fingers, and her whole body shrieked into heated response.

                ‘I’ve never had cause to be.’

                ‘Because all those women who come running when you snap your fingers wouldn’t dream of ever giving you anything to be jealous about?’ She thought of the way everyone had looked at him in that expensive café, on the street as they’d been leaving...

                Something stirred at the back of her mind but she shoved it aside because she wanted to hear what he had to say.

                ‘Because I have yet to meet anyone I’m interested enough in,’ Lucas answered bluntly. He picked up his phone, searching for the signal that might or might not appear at any given moment. The lines were down but hopefully not for long. Like anywhere else where the weather could become suddenly and wildly unpredictable, there was no telling when normality would be restored.