He’d moved just one step higher than she was, but appeared to tower disconcertingly above her.
‘Ha!’ She tried to move past him and found her efforts blocked by his superb masculine body. ‘Let me pass.’
‘No. Not until I’ve said what I have to say.’
She looked up into the hard severity of his tightly controlled features, her expression pained and wounded in the sunlight.
‘I’ll admit it started out that way, with me wanting to give you a taste of your own medicine. But revenge is a pretty cold bedfellow, and I don’t want to dwell on the past any more than you do. I made love to you last night because there wasn’t anything in the world I wanted to do more. And if you remember I let you make the decision. I didn’t force your hand.’
‘But you knew that if you kissed me I wouldn’t have any choice in the matter.’
‘No, I didn’t know that. I thought because of what you’d said when things got rather heated down there that evening in the garden you’d just tell me to go to hell.’
‘I wish I had!’
‘Why? Because then you’d still be hiding behind the safety of your lost memory? Is that how you would have preferred it?’
Guilt and shame propelled her forward, but as she tried to make her escape again his arms came up to stop her. His chest felt solid beneath her hands, making her gasp with the betraying sensations that even now were mocking her decision to leave.
‘Let’s just accept that last night satisfied something in both of us—whatever it was that needed to be satisfied. But I’m not having you cutting off your nose to spite your face just because you’re nursing a very strong case of hurt pride. You need this job, and I sure as hell don’t want all the hassle of trying to find another temporary assistant when you’ve adapted to the position far more easily and effectively than someone who had been doing it for years.
‘I don’t want to be the result of you and your little boy winding up homeless—or dependent upon your great-aunt, if that’s how you’d both end up. As for the car... Whatever feelings I might have been harbouring about you, life dealt you a pretty miserable hand all round—especially after we broke up. I was only trying to make things a little easier for you. It wasn’t meant as a trinket with which to buy your favours or more delightful interludes like last night.
‘And don’t pretend it wasn’t delightful,’ he chided softly, when she turned her head, her jaw clenching against the responses his words were producing in her. ‘For both of us. Whatever you feel about it now. Go home, by all means,’ he acceded, ‘but take the car. It’s a company vehicle. I had Simon take me up to the office to pick it up for you this morning,’ he enlightened her—which at least went some way to explaining why he’d left without waking her or even leaving a message for her earlier. ‘You can use it until... Well, until this assignment ends...or until you cease to work for my company—whichever is the longer.’
He had obviously made up his mind that she’d be in the office on Monday morning.
‘It isn’t—’ It isn’t going to work, she was about to say. But the shrill ring of his cell phone cut her dead.
‘Magenta!’
She heard his urgent command but she was already running up the steps, away from him. She was relieved when, catching the sudden impatience with which she heard him speaking, she realised that he had stopped pursuing her to take the call instead.
She couldn’t take the car because it would symbolise just another payment from him, she thought bitterly when she stepped under the jets of the shower a few minutes later. Like the dress and its accoutrements. Like this job. Which was why she couldn’t possibly carry on working for him for another day. If she agreed to do so then she would be letting him manipulate her, as he had been doing from the beginning, she thought wretchedly. But that didn’t stop her mourning the young man who had worshipped her, read her poetry and given her gifts he could scarcely afford, who had argued for her against his family’s harsh judgement. In contrast to the mature Andreas, who could afford to give her everything now. Everything, that was, except his love...
A knock on her bedroom door as she was towelling herself dry had her quickly shrugging into a white cotton robe. Her stomach turned over when she saw Andreas standing there outside her door.
‘I have to fly to Paris for an urgent meeting and I won’t be back until late tomorrow evening,’ he told her, sounding none too pleased about the prospect.
He’d obviously already showered, because his hair was curling damply against the clean white shirt he’d put on under his dark suit, and it was difficult to ignore what his cologne was doing to her. He was, Magenta thought achingly, with sensual shivers running through her, the epitome of every woman’s fantasy.