He took a deep breath and, totally focused on the task ahead, smiled slightly. He knew what he had to do; there were no fuzzy lines, no protocol or politics to consider. It was a simple matter of survival; these were factors he felt comfortable working with.
Mathieu braced his knees on the thin ice beside the woman who had given a scared whimper. ‘Let’s do this.’ She had reason to be scared. He probably ought to be, but the adrenaline pumping in his bloodstream sharpened his reactions and dulled his caution.
Do what? Rose thought.
‘Are you ready?’
Roused by the sheer inanity of this comment, Rose lifted her head. ‘No, I’m not ready!’ The indignation died from her face as her full lower lip quivered. ‘I don’t want to die.’ Her voice trailed away as her eyes connected with those of her rescuer.
They were the palest grey, almost silver, slanted upwards in the corners, the heavy lids fringed by long, curling, sooty lashes. Even this close to descending into gibbering fear she registered in some portion of her brain that they were the most excruciatingly beautiful eyes she had ever seen in her life.
The sort of eyes that a doctor might prescribe for someone who had just had a near-death experience to look into: beautiful. The rest of his face was a blur as she concentrated on those beautiful eyes, but she had the impression of sharp angles and intriguing hollows.
There was a fractional pause before he responded calmly and for a moment she imagined she saw something flicker in the silvered enigmatic depths … recognition …? Which made no sense, because if she had ever met a man with those eyes she would not have forgotten!
‘Nobody is going to die. I’m going to lift you out of the water.’
He made it sound so easy. She nodded, thinking again of that seven to ten pounds. ‘What do you want me to—? Oh!’ The breath huffed out of her chest in a noisy gasp as she landed face down on the ice. She lay there and felt the tears leak from her eyes. ‘I’m not going to drown.’
‘Not if you do exactly what I say,’ came the not exactly comforting response. ‘Are you injured? Do you have pain?’
She lifted her head, wiping the water-darkened strands of hair from her cheek … the shore seemed an awful long way away. She shook her head. ‘Just cold and tired. If I could just rest for a minute…’
A hand under her chin jerked her head up. ‘Open your eyes. Now!’
She obeyed the imperative command and saw the man with the beautiful eyes was totally unmoved by the tears that welled up in her own eyes. She blinked; she wasn’t after a sympathy vote.
As her misty vision cleared she registered properly several more details of her rescuer’s appearance beyond his spectacular eyes. The hair that waved smoothly back from a broad brow and fell silky straight to his collar—had he been wearing one—was dark. The sable shade echoed in his dark winged eyebrows was complemented by a clear olive-toned complexion.
His patrician face was long with high, razor-sharp cheekbones and an angular jaw that was lightly dusted with a dark shadow of stubble. His nose was strong and aquiline and his mouth wide and mobile. Rose found the overtly sensual outline of his lips almost cruel.
He was the most incredibly good-looking male she had ever seen or even imagined and yet when she looked at him she found herself almost repelled by his male beauty. Well, what other emotion could be responsible for the uncomfortable, lurching, shivery sensation in her belly when she looked at his saturnine face?
‘You will not fall asleep.’
Rose wanted to ask if he really thought she was that stupid. But she didn’t have the energy and, besides, he probably did think just that. Instead she just nodded and asked, ‘What do I do?’
‘Keep flat, move slowly.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Trying is not good enough if you don’t want to kill us both. I will be behind you, but it is most important that we distribute our weight evenly, stay low and flat.’ he made a sweeping horizontal motion with one hand to indicate how he wanted her to move ‘.commando-style.’
‘Commando?’ Rose repeated, wondering if he did something along those lines for real.
Her glance skimmed the muscle-packed length of him. He had that lean, hard look that made it easy to imagine him being part of some élite group trained for covert operations. And then there was the air of authority. Not many people could give, let alone maintain, that kind of authority when lying belly down on thin ice!
‘You understand?’
She nodded. ‘But the rope … is it such a good idea …?’ She looked from the rope looped around her waist and followed it to his washboard-flat middle. ‘If anything goes wrong we are tied together.’ She didn’t want to be responsible for pulling this good Samaritan into the icy water.
‘Then we shall just have to make very sure that nothing goes wrong, won’t we?’ he inserted with the impatient air of someone not used to having his instructions questioned. ‘You are ready?’
She nodded, thinking there were some things a person was never ready for, but he had made it pretty clear she had very little choice.
The progress they made seemed torturously slow, though she knew it couldn’t have taken as long as it felt. Each time she felt she could go no further because her legs were shaking or she just couldn’t feel them her rescuer was there, encouraging her, though his encouragement at times bordered on coercion.
CHAPTER THREE
FINALLY on solid land, Rose simply lay there for several moments, too euphoric at being safe to even register the cold that every flutter of wind was driving deeper into her bones. Then, pulling her shaking knees up to her chest, she heaved herself into a sitting position, hugging her arms around her body.
The dark stranger was beside her. He had hunkered down to her level and was casually balancing on his heels with the inbred grace of a natural athlete.
‘Thank you so much; you saved my life.’
She found it slightly off-putting that there was not a flicker of expression in the spooky silver-grey eyes trained on her face.
‘I’m Rose, by the way, Mr …?’
Mathieu looked into the incredible amber eyes brimming with gratitude and innocent as a kitten, which could not be more different from the reckless, sexual challenge he recalled last seeing in those same eyes. If she intended to pretend they did not know one another it was nothing to him. He supposed it was just possible that she didn’t—his upper lip curled in fastidious contempt—she had been very drunk that night.
The win had clinched him the champion’s medal for the fourth year running. So for that reason alone the evening of the gala reception at the embassy would have lingered on in his memory, even if he hadn’t returned to his hotel room later that night to find a naked woman in his bed.
A woman who had smooth skin like cream, long hair the colour of pale caramel and golden eyes.
The golden eyes that were looking at him now.
‘Can you walk?’
She blinked at the abruptness of his question and the smile faded from her face. She was philosophical about the hostility in his manner. His life had just been put at risk because of her. He was bound not to look too kindly on the person responsible for his close encounter, although the level of cold disdain in his body language did seem excessive. He was looking at her as though she were something offensive on his shoe!
She attempted to struggle clumsily to her feet. ‘Of course.’
Mathieu, who had realised the moment he had formed the question that she could probably barely feel her limbs, never mind walk, ignored her optimistic assertion and bent to scoop her up. As he gathered her to him he was aware first of softness, then, before he had time to wonder at the heat that exploded inside him—cold, icy cold.
A glance revealed her skin had an unhealthy bluish tinge, which was hardly surprising considering what she had been through. He was well aware of the danger of hypothermia. It was imperative that she warmed up quickly.
‘I … what are you doing?’ Rose stutte
red as she found herself slung unceremoniously over his shoulder.
‘Preventing you getting hypothermia. The Land Rover’s parked just up on the track,’ he explained, mentally assessing the time it would take him to reach it.
He didn’t say anything. Not another word until they reached the vehicle, which did not surprise her. What man could speak with an overweight—and that was dry—blonde over his shoulder? What did surprise her was that he could keep up a brisk running pace the entire way and still not be breathing very hard.
Pulling open the door, Mathieu dumped his shaking burden in the back seat before going around to the driver’s side and switching on the engine, sliding the thermostat on the heater to full.
‘Get the wet things off.’ He barely glanced in her direction before leaving the front of the Land Rover.
He returned a moment later carrying a metallic survival blanket and a heavy cable-knitted sweater, which he flung in the seat beside her. His dark brows drew into a straight line as he assessed her progress.
‘Did you not hear me? I said take those things off,’ he said, sliding into the driver’s seat and turning around.
Heater on full, the cab was hot, but Rose was still shaking. She actually couldn’t imagine ever stopping, ever being warm again. ‘Sorry. My fingers,’ she said, holding out the slim, pale tapering items under discussion apologetically; like the rest of her they were shaking. ‘I can’t f-feel them.’
His dark eyes slid from her face to her fingers. There was a tiny pause before he heaved a sigh that suggested exasperation. ‘Then I suppose I’ll have to do it for you.’
‘Do what?’ The dumb routine was a self-defence mechanism, because she knew if she let herself consider in any serious way what having this man remove her clothes, even in a totally clinical, I’m-saving-your-life sort of way, might feel like, she might do or say something terminally embarrassing.
There was a blast of cold air in response to her question, then another as the passenger door opened and he slid in beside her so close that their thighs touched and slammed the door shut.
The thigh beside her own had all the give of a steel bar. He was an extremely tall, athletically built man and pretty much all of him looked equally hard. He was the sort of man who could make an auditorium seem small!
This was not an auditorium, it was a hot, steamy tin box on wheels, and it wasn’t just his physical presence that made it uncomfortable to share the enclosed space with him, it was the raw sensual energy that cloaked him like a second skin. Though she couldn’t help noticing that his first skin was pretty special.
Embarrassed by the direction of her thoughts, she flicked a sideways glance at his classical profile, her nostrils quivering as she tried not to inhale the subtle male scent of his body. His presence made it impossible to concentrate on anything else but … well, anything but him!
He was totally overpowering and not at all, she reflected, trying to co-ordinate her actions, a comfortable man to be around. When their glances connected, his slightly impatient, she looked away biting her lip because she knew she was acting like some gauche schoolgirl.
For God’s sake, Rose, anyone would think from the way you’re acting that the man is trying to seduce you.
She swallowed and lifted her head determined to match his pragmatic manner as he shifted in his seat so that they were facing one another.
She suddenly laughed.
One dark brow lifted. ‘What is so funny?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’ It was hardly the right moment to inform him that she’d just realised this was the first time she’d been in the back seat of a car with a man.
Rebecca would say her education had been sadly neglected. Rebecca would probably have a point. Some people were simply not born with the reckless, exciting gene and she was one of them. Neither was she particularly highly sexed.
This man probably knew his way around the back seat of a car, she mused, studying his lean, autocratic face through the shield of her lashes, though he had probably moved on from the nursery slopes of fumbling long ago. Nowadays she doubted her imagination stretched to cover the things he could find his way around.
It was some comfort that he definitely didn’t seem as if he wanted to do any of those things with her. She stared at his sinfully sexy mouth. Of course, she didn’t want him to leap on her or anything, but she wouldn’t mind knowing just once what it would feel like to be the sort of woman who made a man’s mind turn to such things.
She could always ask Rebecca, who was such a woman, or maybe lose half a stone.? His terse voice broke into her rambling thoughts.
‘Lift up your arms.’
Rose would have broken contact with those disturbing eyes if she could have but they exerted a strange, almost hypnotic hold.
‘Look, this really won’t be necessary.’ She was dismayed to hear her voice emerge as a breathy whisper without a trace of the amused competence she had intended to inject into it. ‘I’ll change when I get home.’
To her consternation, instead of taking the opportunity to rid himself of her, his body language having made perfectly clear that was what he wanted, he sketched a cynical smile that lifted the corners of his wide mobile mouth.
‘Don’t worry, yineka mou, I’m quite willing to take it as read that you’re incredibly modest.’
Rose was bewildered both by the smile and the distinct undercurrent of scorn in his voice. But the drawled endearment explained the fascinating but faint foreign inflection in his voice she would have puzzled over later when reliving the encounter.
He was Greek, and rude.
Her smile was warmer than it might have been because the latter observation made her feel pretty much an ungrateful wretch—if it hadn’t been for this rude Greek she would most likely now be in a watery grave.
The acknowledgement sent a shiver, stronger than the others that intermittently overcame her, down the length of her spine. She looked at his mouth—it was frankly hard not to—and smiled without as much conviction this time because somehow she found his mouth deeply disturbing, and said, ‘You’re Greek?’
‘Half Greek, half French … did you not read my bio?’
‘Your bio …?’ she parroted, no longer even trying to follow him.
She closed her eyes and leaned back with a weary sigh. Even though she was no longer looking at him she was still very aware of his presence. Considering she had only studied his features briefly, she appeared to have memorised every detail of his extraordinary face. Even with her eyes closed every strong angle and plane was etched into her brain.
‘Most do,’ he observed drily.
And having read all the stuff on the websites, and the reams of nonsense that were printed about him, these women thought they knew him.
He had never fathomed why these women were so drawn to celebrity; something, he reasoned, had to be missing in their own lives that they spent so much of their time fantasising about a total stranger.
‘Sorry, I don’t read as much as I’d like to. If you could just drop me off.’ Her voice trailed off.
Curses sounded like curses in any language and presumably the ones that fell fluently from his lips would have made a less unrestrained Greek blush.
He dragged a hand through his dark hair and regarded her closed eyes with exasperation tinged by concern. ‘You cannot fall asleep!’
‘Sorry … no, of course.’ Her blue-veined eyelids lifted as she gave her head a little shake. ‘I’m really grateful, you know,’ she told him as she tucked her hands under her legs. The circulation was returning to her fingers, and they were throbbing painfully. ‘I think you saved my life,’ she said, rocking forward as the throbbing intensified.
‘What you did was criminally stupid.’
Rose bit her lip, but she supposed that under the circumstances he had earned the right to speak to her as though she were some not too bright child.
‘I’d ask what you were thinking of, but clearly you weren’t thinking.’
‘There was a fox …’ She could only assume that when the ice had cracked it had escaped, or maybe it had never even been stuck.?
‘I saw no fox.’ He dismissed the animal in question with a regal wave of his hand. Clearly he hadn’t seen it, so it couldn’t have been there—not a man who spent a lot of time agonising over self-doubt.
‘Which doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,’ she pointed out.
‘I saw no animal.’ Just a woman determined, it seemed, to end her life. Mathieu relived the moment he had seen her vanish beneath the icy water and his simmering anger surged. ‘What sort of person would walk out onto paper-thin ice to rescue a fox?’
The sort of person who had to switch channels when there was a wildlife programme where the makers did not intervene—and they could have—even though the weak, injured or just unlucky animal was about to meet a slow, lingering or occasionally violent and savage end.
She could have explained this, but she doubted he would be interested. Clearly what he wanted, and given the circumstances deserved, was a grovelling apology along the lines of, ‘I’m insane and you’re incredible.’ Which he was if your taste ran to macho alpha males.
‘If this was some sort of stunt to get my attention again …? It worked.’
‘Stunt?’ she echoed, blinking up at him. ‘Again?’ she added, her voice lifted in confused enquiry.
‘I’m assuming this act is because I hurt your pride?’
‘Pride …?’ She was too confused to do anything more than echo what he said as she met his laserlike stare warily. The man really did have eyes that looked as though they could see into your skull and read your thoughts, which was disturbing because some of the thoughts that popped into her head when she looked at him were not ones she would have felt comfortable sharing.
Least of all with the person they concerned.
Did he inspire lust in all women he met or was she particularly susceptible? Maybe a person could only suppress their libido for so long before it rebelled?
‘When I threw you out,’ he prompted. It was a pity she had not displayed a little of this pride when she had offered herself to him.
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