Visconti's Forgotten Heir(18)

‘Why?’ If his home had made her speechless, then his eyes were holding her spellbound as he moved with the stealth of a stalking cat across the pastel-tinted Turkish carpet that graced the pale oak floor. ‘For refusing to stay in the lowly situation you clearly saw me in? For having the gall to claw my way to the top?’

‘I can’t image you clawing your way out of anywhere, Andreas. Fighting, maybe—metaphorically speaking. Or slaying anyone who stood in your way.’

He laughed that soft laugh that seemed to ring alarm bells in Magenta. But then he reached out and gently tilted her chin with his finger.

For a moment, with his penetrating eyes probing the wary depths of hers, silence seemed to wrap them in some sort of sensual bubble. She was aware of a clock ticking quietly on the white marble mantelpiece, the poignant scent of the roses, and Andreas’s steady breathing that seemed to mock the rapidity of her own.

Her breath seemed to stand still as his fingers trailed lightly down her throat, but then his fingers curled around the open-backed torque and gently tugged at the clinging silver, bringing Magenta’s hand slamming down over his.

‘Take it off,’ he ordered softly.

‘No.’

‘Six years ago I wouldn’t have needed to ask.’

‘Six years ago we were different people.’ They must have been, otherwise how would she have found the nerve to take him on? she wondered. Let alone try and cross him—humiliate him? And if everything he had intimated was true then that was what she had done.

‘Really?’ An elevated eyebrow assured her that he didn’t believe it. ‘Do people really change that much?’

No longer trying to rid her of her necklace, his fingers were now playing along the sensitive skin beneath the heavy curtain of her hair, his touch so light that Magenta’s lids came down against the exquisite yet dangerously stirring action. She could feel his eyes on her face—glacial eyes, reflecting a chilling satisfaction because he knew how he was affecting her.

Now, with her eyes flickering open, and in response to what he had just said about people changing, she was startled to hear herself utter a simple yet heartfelt, ‘You have.’

‘Yes, well...’ he breathed, just as his cell phone started to ring.

He turned away, taking his phone out of his pocket and answering his caller with brisk efficiency, as though Magenta were the last thing on his mind.

However she remembered him being before, he was cold and cynical now, and she listened to him speak with growing amazement at the authority he wielded. He would command respect, she realised, from the office cleaner right up to his peers at top executive level. Yet she knew instinctively that he would offer them respect in turn.

And because of what had happened in that lift the other day he obviously had no respect for her whatsoever, believing she was easy. Believing she was still the same girl who had...what? Left him for some other man?

She was standing by the window when he finished speaking on the phone, re-energising her spirits with the peace and serenity of the sunny gardens. There were a couple of willows beyond the lawns, their graceful boughs overhanging what had to be a narrow body of water winding its way through his property. Closer to hand, the tennis court looked inviting enough to make her want to play. Across the terrace, which swept down and wrapped itself around the other side of the house, she glimpsed a pool area, half hidden by trees, its clear blue water sparkling beneath the glittering sky.

‘Andreas...’ she began, tensing at the soft sound of his approach over the luxurious carpet. ‘Just because I—I was stupid enough to—to get carried away in that lift the other day, don’t—’ She was losing the fluency of her speech, just as she had in the early days during and after her spell in hospital, and she gritted her teeth, her fingers clenched like curled claws sinking painfully into her palms. Dear Heaven! Don’t let me fall apart now!

‘Don’t what?’ he enquired, his face a mask of questioning complexity.

‘Don’t think I’m easy.’

He uttered one of those low, sexy laughs, his brows drawing together as his gaze slid downwards.

Surprising her, he caught her hand and dragged it up, unfolding her tight, tense fingers. His hooded eyes took in the red half-moons her nails had left in the soft flesh and she caught her breath as he suddenly dipped his head and pressed his lips to the angry marks.

‘I promise you I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do,’ he murmured, his breath warm and recklessly exciting against her palm. ‘Now, let’s get to work.’

He was the CEO again, speaking to her as he would to any employee—as he had to that caller on the phone—confident in the knowledge that he only had to touch her to make her want him to do all sorts of things to her. Because she had shown him he could....