“Yes, she—” Thomas stopped abruptly as he recognized the woman at his door. His gaze slid over her limp, dark curls, her slightly wrinkled clothes, and her makeup-free face with its irritated scowl. Inez Urso. A very angry Inez Urso, he added, noting the fire flashing in her eyes.
When her mouth opened, Thomas instinctively slammed the cell phone to his chest to prevent Bastien’s hearing the tirade he suspected was coming. He wasn’t wrong. The phone had barely hit his chest when a barrage of words shot from her full, luscious mouth and poured over him. Unfortunately, very little of it was in English. Portuguese would have been his guess. He gathered that was her mother tongue and the language she slipped into when upset, and Inez Urso was definitely upset.
When she began to move forward, Thomas automatically backed up, allowing her into the room. He was too distracted to do otherwise, finding it fascinating how a woman who had looked perfectly plain on first sight could become almost beautiful as she berated him. Her eyes were flashing, her cheeks were flushed with anger, her lips flapping so rapidly they were almost a blur. She was also waving a finger angrily under his nose, something he normally found vastly annoying if the women in his family tried it. But coming from this short woman, he found it kind of cute and couldn’t help the smile that tugged at his mouth.
Big mistake, Thomas realized at once. Inez Urso did not like his amusement and her rant took on some real energy. Unfortunately, that’s when he became aware of the chittering coming from the phone.
Thomas scowled down at it, and then glanced toward the door closing behind the little barracuda still lecturing him, judging whether he could get her back out of the room long enough for him to deal with Bastien. It didn’t seem likely, at least not without being rude and Aunt Marguerite had raised him better than that.
He held up a hand for silence. Surprisingly—she obeyed the directive, her tirade ending at once, but then he supposed she’d been close to winding down. At least, her eyes had lost some of their heat, becoming more subdued. Inez was still breathing rapidly from her anger, though, and Thomas found his eyes falling to her slightly heaving chest, noting that with every inhalation, her blouse was stretched tight, threatening to pop a button.
A sharp inhalation drew his gaze back up to her face. Her dark brown eyes were flashing again, her mouth opening to go at him once more. Thomas didn’t blame her at all…really…it was perfectly rude to stare at a woman’s chest. Aunt Marguerite would be pissed at him too. Still, he didn’t really have time to apologize properly, or let her vent with Bastien’s voice still squawking into his chest, so Thomas said, “Hold that thought.”
Inez blinked at the order, but closed her mouth and Thomas gave her an approving smile before whirling away. He hurried through the small dining area and continued on into a small hallway with two doors leading off of it. The first led into a spacious marble bathroom, the second a bedroom. Knowing the bathroom would have a lock, Thomas slid inside and then locked it for good measure lest the woman follow to finish her lecture. He then took a breath and raised the phone back to his ear. “Bastien?”
“What the hell was that about?” his cousin growled.
“Oh, I…er…sat on the remote control and accidentally turned on the television. Some foreign film was playing and I couldn’t figure out how to shut it off,” Thomas lied blithely.
“Right,” Bastien said with open disbelief. “What was the name of this movie?”
“The name?” Thomas echoed and then scowled. “How the hell would I know?”
“I don’t know, Thomas. I thought maybe you caught it before you turned it off. It sounded terribly interesting. I quite enjoyed it when the woman called the man an idiot for making her drag her butt out of bed at five o’clock in the morning and haul herself down to the airport without either tea or a shower only to have him ignore her and march out to get in a taxi and take off to the Dorchester Hotel.”#p#分页标题#e#
Thomas closed his eyes on a sigh as he recalled Bastien spoke several languages, including Portuguese.
“Hmm,” Bastien added now. “That’s the same hotel I booked you into. What a coincidence.”
“All right, all right, so it wasn’t the television,” Thomas muttered irritably and then asked, “Did she really call me an idiot?”
An exasperated sigh came through the line. “How could you walk right past her, Thomas? Why would you? For Christ’s sake! I called her to make things easier for you and you just—”