Anger chased it. Good Lord. The man was addled. He could not make up his mind, and he was going to make her addled in the process. Maybe that was his aim! Having received no success this morning, he was going to tease her to desperation, manipulate her into debasing herself again—
His mouth slid across her cheek to her ear. “Spy holes,” he murmured, his hand idly brushing the line of her waist. “Lean down to sniff the roses. Take a look.”
Spy holes? Great ghosts! What sort of business partner did Lord Weston encourage these days?
Alex began to nuzzle her neck. A pleasurable chill lifted the hairs at her nape. She shrugged his mouth away with one shoulder. He caught her shoulder and squeezed. “Someone might be watching,” he said into her ear. His hot breath made her shiver again. “Hurry up and take a look.” His tongue flicked along her lobe. “Or give them an excuse for your dallying here.”
She cleared her throat. “Let me have a look at these flowers!” she said brightly.
He winced and stepped back. All right, her delivery needed work. She would have to spend a few minutes mustering the Barbary Queen before she dared set foot outside their rooms.
She bent over, making a show of fingering one petal, meanwhile fighting the urge to reach up and touch her ear where he had licked it. He made her knees weak with one stroke of his tongue. This was not a magic any cautious woman would encourage.
His tanned hand slid over hers. “This one,” he said, lifting a finger to indicate a rose nearby. “Beautiful,” he said, and then stroked his finger back down hers, delicate as a man admiring the brushwork on a piece of priceless china. The contrast of his tanned skin against hers, the gentleness of his touch and the strength of his hand, riveted her. She almost missed the way his knuckles touched the wall before he removed his hand to his side. “The shade is striking. Dye, do you think?”
Had he not indicated the spot on the wall, she would never have noticed the spy hole. It was minute, pricked cleverly at the tip of one velvet floret.
Assuming, of course, that it was a spy hole, and not simply the shoddy workmanship of an underpaid assistant.
She straightened. “The roses are Gloire de Dijon, Alex. A lovely but not uncommon breed. I do not think dye was required.”
“Oh? I really must expand my knowledge of such things.” He was walking along the wall now, his fingertips lightly dragging across the wallpaper as he appeared to idly inspect the furnishings. A framed watercolor of the Venetian canals caught his interest; he paused before it, staring hard. “Remarkable taste Barrington has,” he murmured. “Have you ever been to Venice?” He glanced at her. “Stayed at the Piazza once. What a view it offered.”
She looked from the painting toward the bed. A very direct view, indeed. If people were spying on them, so much for hoping that he would sleep on the floor.
He walked to the far wall, then stopped before the mirror atop the toilette, brushing down his suit jacket, running his fingers through his hair. It struck her that watching him primp was almost comical; he did not wear spectacles in public, but in all other ways, he seemed to possess very little vanity.
Perhaps he skipped the specs for the same reason she did. She always felt vulnerable when she wore them in public. They stripped her of one of her greatest weapons: her ability to ignore what she did not wish to see.
The idea was curious. What might Alex wish to ignore?
His family.
Any cause to change his itinerant lifestyle.
She cleared her throat. “Have a clear view of yourself, then?”
He turned back toward her, smiling wryly in acknowledgment of the double meaning. “Yes,” he said. “I do wonder if this room is comfortable enough to suit you? I know you prefer something a bit more . . . ornate. We could always take a room in Cannes.”
Two rooms, even. How very tempting. “Let me take one more look around,” she said, and walked back into the dressing room.
A moment later, he joined her. The room was very small; when he walked inside, the enforced proximity set her nerves to firing. She stood very still, enduring the malfunctioning of these million small cells, which leapt and shivered at the prospect of some accidental contact with him.
It took him less than a minute’s scrutiny to conclude that it was not similarly sabotaged. In the course of this silent survey, some slight adjustment brought his thigh into her skirts. She would not pretend to fidget, would not conspire to heighten this intimacy. It was not even intimacy: his leg was only touching the fabric of her gown.
And yet . . . she could guess now what lay beneath his clothes. He was a tall man, built on lean lines, and she had seen him without his shirt; she knew beyond doubt that his broad shoulders were not merely a trick of his bone structure. Throat to chest to arms to thighs to calves, his body was strapped with muscle. Clearly he disciplined it as firmly as he did his business concerns, not to mention the affection he allowed himself for those who loved him.