‘I’m surprised your mother wasn’t a bit more curious as to the circumstances of our meeting.’ She walked towards the window and looked outside to a moonlit night and the soft glow the moon cast on the silent, gently swaying trees and bushes. The window was open and she could breathe in the cool, salty tang of sea breeze. Beyond the lawns, trees and shrubbery, she could see the black, unmoving stillness of the sea, a different shade of darkness from the darkness of the sky. She could have gazed out at the scenery for ever, were it not for the presence of Theo, lounging by the door, sending ripples of awareness zinging through her body as lightning-fast as quicksilver.
She turned back around, perching against the window ledge, hands gripping the sill on either side of her. ‘I mean...you happened upon an injured dog at the side of the road, whilst out driving in the country? And, concerned citizen that you are, you took it to the nearest vet who just happened to be me?’
Theo flushed darkly and frowned. Deceiving his mother did not come naturally to him. In fact, he had never deceived her about anything, not even about the unsuitable women who had liberally littered his life in the past. But the physical change he had seen in her was worth it. He hadn’t been lying when he had said that it was the happiest he had ever seen her.
He wasn’t about to let anyone climb on the moral high ground and start lecturing him about the rights and wrongs of the decision he had made when all that mattered, as far as he was concerned, was the end result. Least of all when that someone was a woman who was only in it for the money.
He quietly shut the door and walked towards her. She had changed from one sexy-as-hell outfit into another sexy-as-hell outfit. What surprised him wasn’t his mother’s lack of suspicion at the story he had told her, but her lack of suspicion at just how damned sexy a country vet could look.
But it wasn’t just the way the soft, straight elbow-length dress in pale coral outlined the curves of her body. In itself, the dress hardly shrieked sexy...on anyone else it would just have looked like a pleasant, relatively expensive silk dress. But on her... Something about the shape of her body, the slightness of her waist, the soft flare of her hips, the shapeliness of her legs, combined with an air of startled innocence...
Just looking at her now was doing all sorts of things to his body. She was wearing a strapless bra. She was too generously endowed to go braless but, bra or no bra, it didn’t take much for him to recall the sight of those cherry-tipped breasts and the way those cherry tips had tasted.
He raked his fingers through his hair and stopped abruptly in front of her, glaring into narrowed, bright blue eyes.
‘Why would my mother question how we met?’ he asked roughly, looking away, but then looking at her again and trying hard to resist the temptation to stare down at the contour of her body under the wispy dress.
‘It just seemed a very unlikely story,’ Becky muttered, folding her arms and sliding her eyes away from him.
‘No more unlikely than some of my other introductions to women,’ Theo muttered.
‘Like what?’
‘Three years ago I did a charity parachute jump from my jet and landed in a field where there was a shoot going on. Some butter advert. She was tall, blonde, Swedish and almost ended up flattened by me when I landed. We went out for nearly three months. Ingrid was her name.’
‘And now here you are. With a country vet.’
‘Like I said, I’ve never seen my mother happier.’
‘Because she thinks that we’re going to give her a happy-ever-after story,’ Becky murmured, eyes cast down. She shuffled and then glanced up at him.
‘I know what’s going through your head, Becky. You think I’m being cruel because sooner or later she will discover that there will be no happy-ever-after...’
‘Aren’t you?’ Before she had met his mother, Marita Rushing had been a name. Now she was a delightful, living, breathing woman, shrouded in sadness, but still ready to smile at the prospect of her son settling down. Deceit had never felt so immediate and yet she could still recall the way they had hugged and that feeling she had had that he was simply doing something he hoped would be for the best in the long run. ‘Forget I said that.’ She sighed. ‘Do you have any plans as to how we fill our time while we’re here?’
Theo had planned to work, whilst ensuring he cast a constant supervisory eye on Becky to make sure she kept her distance. He wanted his mother to like her, wanted her truly to believe that he was capable of forming relationships with girls who weren’t five-minute visitors to his life because they were so utterly unsuitable. He wanted Marita to regain her strength so that he could bring her back to London. But he didn’t want Becky to bond too firmly with his mother. After all, she wasn’t going to be a permanent fixture in his life.
He also planned to have a word with his aunt to establish just what his mother’s frame of mind was whilst she was recuperating at the villa.
And, lastly, he wanted to probe her about any potential interests his mother might have mentioned which he could weave into her life once she was in London.
There was still the matter of the cottage which, once bought, would be a welcome distraction from any brooding thoughts.
He frowned, recognising that the whole cottage-purchase scenario was mired in all sorts of ethical tangleweed. Something else he would see to when the time came.
For now...
‘One step at a time’ seemed the best way forward. First thing in the morning, he would check the cupboards to see what alcohol there was lurking. His mother had been restrained that evening, with just the one glass of wine. He needed to make sure that any drinking had been a temporary blip and not something that might require an intervention.
Work would have to take a back seat.
Between all the things he knew he would have to do, all the necessary obligations he would have to see to, a sudden thought threaded its way through, curving, cornering and bypassing duty, obligation and necessity, like a tenacious weed pushing past the well-laid rose bushes in search of light and air...
Time out.
Two weeks.
‘There’s a lot to see here,’ he told her huskily. ‘It’s to be expected that we do some exploring.’
Becky looked at him in some alarm. ‘Exploring?’
‘That’s what couples sometimes get up to when they go on holiday together,’ Theo inserted.
‘But we’re not a couple,’ Becky pointed out uneasily.
‘Go with the flow, Becky.’
‘That’s easy for you to say.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Nothing.’ She sighed, very nearly trapped by her own treacherous thoughts. It was easy for him to treat this like just some situation that could be enjoyed while it lasted. His emotions weren’t involved. Hers were. A spot of sightseeing would be, for him, just a spot of sightseeing. Whilst, for her, it would be more sinking into the quagmire that was already engulfing her, making it almost impossible for her to stand back and take an objective view of what they were doing.
‘And you’re going to have to stop all that touching stuff,’ she heard herself say in a burst of defiance.
She’d been thinking of how vulnerable it made her feel just being in his company. She’d been imagining what it would be like for them to be out and about, like a normal couple, doing something normal like sightseeing. Then she’d thought about him holding her hand and how that would feel, the sparks that would run through her—the stolen sensation of it actually being true, that they actually weren’t playing a part...
She’d never thought that it would be possible to project so many scenarios into such a small space of time. Ten seconds and she had seen her life flash past straight into a black void of a future where every minute snatching stolen moments in the present would be weeks spent trying to find a way back to the light in the future.
And then she’d thought of him touching her, those devastating little touches that had meant nothing to him...
Now she just couldn’t
meet his eyes, because he would be wondering where that cool, collected woman had gone, the one who had agreed to go through with this because of the tangible rewards at the end of it. The one who had chatted to his mother as though the charade were no more difficult than anything else she had ever been called upon to do.
‘What touching stuff?’ Theo murmured in a low, husky voice.
‘You know what I mean...’ She looked at him with sullen defiance and he smiled, a slow, utterly mesmerising smile that made the breath hitch in her throat and brought her out in a panicked cold sweat.
‘I haven’t been touching you,’ he said softly. ‘This...’ He trailed one long finger along her collar bone and then allowed it to dip under the neckline of the dress, before pausing at the dip between her breasts, in that shadowy cleavage that was rising and falling as though she were recovering from running a marathon. ‘This is touching you. I haven’t been doing that, have I?’
‘Theo, please...’
‘I like that. I like it when you beg for me...’
‘This isn’t what it’s about. This is...is...’ His finger had slipped deeper, was now trailing over the top of her strapless bra, making gentle inroads underneath, and she could feel her nipples poking painfully against the bra, wanting the thing he was teasing her with. ‘This is a business arrangement,’ she finished in a breathless whisper, shifting her body, but not nearly firmly or fast enough to avoid his devastating caress.
‘I know, but I can’t seem to take my eyes off you, Becky. And where my eyes go, my hands itch to follow...’
‘You promised.’
‘I did no such thing.’ He stepped back with an obvious show of reluctance. ‘If you don’t want that kind of touching, then I’ll refrain, but Becky—if you look at me with those hot little stolen looks, and you lick your lips like you’d love nothing better than to taste me, you can’t expect me to keep my hands to myself.’
‘I don’t mean to do that!’
Theo dropped his eyes, appreciating the subtle message that way of phrasing her words had given him. She ‘didn’t mean to do that’ implied that she was fighting to uphold the ‘no sex’ stipulation she had put on this little game of theirs, if it could be called a game. Which meant that she still wanted him as much as he still wanted her, but she was a good girl whose innate moral code could not permit random sex with a man with whom there would and never could be any future. She had succumbed once, and had probably used every argument under the sun to justify that weakness, but she was determined not to succumb again.
And he itched to touch her. He’d wanted it the second he’d decided to get in touch with her again and he hadn’t stopped, even though he had his own inner voices urging caution.
Or at least urging him to pay some attention to his pride...irritating little voices reminding him that he had never chased a woman in his life before and that there was no reason to start now. But he’d spent the entire evening fighting a war with a libido that was out of control...
‘But you do it anyway,’ he drawled softly. He held his hands up in a gesture of phoney surrender before shoving them into the pockets of his trousers. ‘And, while you do that, don’t expect me to play ball...’
CHAPTER EIGHT
TEN DAYS AFTER they arrived, Becky woke to the crippling pain of a headache, aching bones and the first, nasty taste of fever in her mouth.
And, for the first time in living memory, she thought that she might actually be pleased that she was about to come down with a cold. Or flu. Or any other virus that would give her an excuse to stick to her bed for twenty-four hours because the past few days had been the sweetest of tortures.
Theo had laid his cards on the table. He wasn’t going to play ball. She’d set her rules down and he’d coolly and calmly told her that he was going to ignore them.
So she had expected a full-on attack and had been bracing herself to deal with that. She had, as ammunition, plentiful supplies of simmering anger, self-righteous moral preaching and offended outrage that he should dare to ignore her wishes.
If he wanted to stage an assault, then she would be more than ready for the fight, and she knew she would fight like a cornered rat, because her defences were fragile and her determination was weak and full of holes.
She was utterly and completely vulnerable to him and that, in itself, gave her the strength to cast him in the role of veritable enemy, which she felt was something she could deal with.
But there was no assault.
If anything, some of that intimate touching stopped. She would feel his eyes on her, a lazy, brooding caress that did all sorts of things to her senses, but those intrusive fingers on her skin when there was nothing she could do about it were no more. Indeed, after dinner, when they had fallen into the habit of sitting in one of the downstairs sitting rooms—an airy space where, with the windows flung open, the sound of the distant sea was a steady background roll—he would often sit opposite her, legs loosely spread, arms resting on his thighs, leaning forward in a way that was relaxed whilst still being aggressively alert.
Peeling her eyes away from him was proving a problem.
And, without her armour to fall back on, she had been reduced to playing a waiting game of her own which meant that she was always on full alert.
Several times she had asked him whether he might not like to escape and do some work.
‘I’m perfectly happy to find a quiet corner somewhere and read,’ she had told him. There were lots of those in the villa, although her favourite space was outside, curled up in a swinging chair on the veranda, from where she could see the stretch of front lawn with its shady trees and foliage and beyond that the flat ocean, a distant band of varying shades of blue.
‘Don’t you go worrying about me,’ he had delivered in a soothing tone, although his eyes had been amused. ‘It’s delightful that you’re concerned but, in actual fact, I’m managing to keep on top of my work very well at night.’
Which meant that the long days were spent in one another’s company. They had had two trips into Portofino, where he had shown her around the picturesque harbour with its rows upon rows of colourful houses nestled in the embrace of the lush hills rising behind them. They had lunched at an exquisite and very quaint restaurant and she had had far too much ice-cold Chablis for her own good.
But his self-restraint had turned her into a bag of nerves and she had a sneaking suspicion that he knew that, which in turn made him all the more restrained.
For much of the time they were together, however, his mother was chaperone and companion.
For that, Becky was relieved because it afforded her a certain amount of distance from Marita Rushing. Becky knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if she and the older woman were alone together for long enough they would become firm friends and the deceit in which she was engaged would feel even more uncomfortable than it already did.
She also suspected that Theo was deliberately making sure that he worked late at night, when everyone was asleep, so that he could keep a watchful eye on his mother, to ascertain her levels of alcohol intake.
‘I honestly don’t think she has a problem,’ Becky had told him quietly the evening before, as they had been about to head off to their separate quarters.
‘How would you know?’ he had said roughly, but then had shaken his head, as though physically trying to clear it of negative thoughts. ‘Are you a doctor?’
‘Are you?’ she had responded with alacrity. ‘And, in actual fact, I have a great deal more training in medicine than you—and I’m telling you that there’s no need to watch over your mother like a hawk. She hasn’t said a word to you about the drinking situation because it was a blip on her horizon, and she’s probably ashamed when she thinks about it now. If you keep following her around, she’s going to begin to suspect that Flora has said something to you and she’ll never live it down. She’s a very proud woman.’
He had glowered but she had stood her ground and eventually he had laughed shortly a
nd shrugged, which she had taken as a sign that he had at least listened to what she’d had to say.
But being with him all the time...was exhausting. She felt as though she couldn’t drop her guard, even though she was beginning to wonder whether he hadn’t lost complete interest in her after his cocky assertion that her defences were there to be knocked down should he so choose.
He might have wanted her to begin with but he wasn’t a man who pursued and, in the end, old habits had died hard. She’d stuck her hands out to ward him away and he’d decided to back off because he couldn’t be bothered to do otherwise.
And what really troubled her was the fact that she cared.
Instead of basking in the relief that she didn’t have to keep swatting him away, she found herself missing that brief window when he had looked at her as though she still mattered to him, at least on a physical level.
She caught herself, on more than one occasion, leaning forward to get something, knowing that one glimpse and he would be able to see down her flimsy, lacy bra to her barely contained breasts.
So now she felt miserable with the start of a cold and she couldn’t have been happier because she needed the time out to try and regroup.
An internal line had been installed in his mother’s room, connecting her to the kitchen and the sitting room, should she ever need to be connected, but in the absence of any such convenience Becky did the next best thing and dialled through to Theo’s mobile.
She looked around her at the beautiful suite of rooms into which she had been put. Marita Rushing couldn’t handle the stairs up, and there was no reason for her to venture up, but every day a housekeeper came and cleaned the house from top to bottom, as well as making sure that food was cooked, if that was necessary.
The housekeeper was a very quiet young girl who barely spoke a word of English and had been mortified, on day one, when Becky had helpfully tried to join her in tidying the bedroom.
At first Becky had wondered whether the girl would report back to Theo’s mother that the loved-up couple slept in separate quarters, but then she very quickly realised that that would never happen.
Snowbound With His Innocent Temptation Page 12