by Penny Jordan
‘The factory...it is very far away, a whole day...’
‘A whole day.’ Beth frowned.
‘You can say everything you have to say to me,’ the gypsy started to assure her, but Beth shook her head.
She suspected that the woman, in giving her the price, was allowing a very generous margin for herself. Common sense told Beth that had the glass been as expensive as she was quoting then it would have been sold via one of the expensive outlets she had seen on the city’s main shopping streets.
As though she had guessed what she was thinking, the gypsy suddenly pulled hard on Beth’s sleeve and leaned closer to her, whispering, ‘The factory, it is not owned by the Czechs. It belongs to...others... You can visit it if you wish, but...’ She gave a small shrug.
‘I do wish,’ Beth told her firmly.
‘Very well, then I will arrange it for you. But first you have to make a show of good faith,’ the woman told her.
Make a show of good faith? For a moment Beth was nonplussed, and then she realised that the woman was asking her for money. All she had on her was a small amount of currency, and parting with it under such circumstances went against everything she personally believed in, but she had, nevertheless, to do so.
With one last lingering inspection of the glassware, Beth made arrangements to meet with the gypsy again.
‘Why not tomorrow?’ she asked her, knowing that she was going to have to extend the length of her original visit if she did as the other woman wished.
‘No. No, that is not possible. Arrangements have to be made,’ the woman told Beth.
‘Very well, then...’ Beth wondered if she should offer to provide her own transport for the journey, but she was loath to involve Alex in what she was doing. After all, he was not going to be very pleased to discover that she was giving her business to someone else when he plainly wanted her to give it to his cousins.
However, before she could say anything, the gypsy was telling her, ‘I will meet you here a week from now at seven o’clock in the morning. We will drive all day. You will see the factory and then we will drive back. You will bring with you some money...’
Some money. Beth looked at her in alarm.
It had been her intention to pay for any goods she ordered via her bank, but, rather than discuss this with the gypsy, she decided that she would leave the financial side of things until after she had reached the factory. She wasn’t one hundred per cent sure she totally trusted the gypsy, and the truth was that if the glass she had shown her hadn’t been so spectacularly beautiful and so very covetable Beth suspected she would not have entertained the idea of doing business via her.
In fact, Beth decided, as she walked back towards the hotel a little later, Prague was having the most decidedly odd effect—not just on her behaviour but also on the way she viewed herself.
Lust, the kind of healthy, energetic, empowering lust that other women were so cheerfully and self-confidently able to admit to, had never been an emotion Beth had expected herself to feel. She had always thought that emotionally she simply wasn’t robust and self-motivated enough, that she simply didn’t possess the energy or the confidence to say ‘I want’ about anything or anyone, and yet here she was, after less than a week here in Prague, being forced to admit to herself that not only did she want, but she wanted very powerfully and lustfully indeed. And she didn’t just mean the beautiful glass.
Such knowledge was enough to stop her momentarily in mid-stride. Cautiously she dared to examine this admission a little more closely. Was her yearning to touch and explore the male beauty of Alex’s body as powerful and compelling as the urge she had experienced to hold and caress the beautiful glass?
The heat that flooded her body gave her its own answer. In her hands the glass had felt cool and smooth, heavy and solidly curved, the raised rim of gilding sensuously rough against her fingertips in contrast to the smooth contours of the glass itself.
Would Alex’s body feel the same? Heat exploded inside her, showering her, turning her veins heavy with liquid excitement. The sensuality of her own thoughts, so completely contradictory to anything she had experienced before, totally bemused Beth, teasing and tormenting her, enticing her to explore them further.
It was growing dark. She ought to get back to the hotel, she warned herself shakily.
As she walked past the reception desk the young man on duty called her name.
‘Mr Andrews has been asking for you,’ he told Beth as she approached the desk. ‘He has left you a message.’
Reluctantly Beth took the sealed note he was handing her, but she didn’t open it until she was in her room.
I had hoped to invite you to join my cousins and myself for dinner this evening, but unfortunately I could not make contact with you. I shall pick you up at the hotel in the morning at ten o’clock unless I hear from you to the contrary. If you wish to telephone me the number is...
Just for a moment Beth was tempted to dial the number and tell him triumphantly that she had found the glass she wanted, and without his help, but common sense warned her that this would not be a good idea. Especially since it seemed obvious that he had still not given up hope of persuading her to buy from his family, if his statement about intending to ask her to have dinner with them was anything to go by.
Had he taken someone else to meet them instead...that elegant older woman, perhaps? Determinedly Beth pushed him out of her thoughts. There were things she had to do. She was still bubbling over with excitement about what she had seen and longing to share the excitement with someone. It was too late now to ring Kelly, but she would do so tomorrow. She would have to ring her bank as well, but that could wait until after she had visited the factory. Beth wasn’t sure how she was going to be able to wait.
Squeezing her eyes tightly closed, she tried to visualise the glass she had seen, but, infuriatingly, the image that formed behind her closed eyelids wasn’t that of the beautiful glassware but of Alex Andrews’ strong, masculine features, his compellingly unusual steel-grey eyes smouldering with a mercurial heat that made her heart flip excitedly against her chest wall and her stomach muscles contract with sensual urgency.
CHAPTER SIX
BETH WOKE UP, her body tensing as she recognised from the strength of the light filtering through her hotel bedroom curtains that she had slept beyond her normal waking-up time.
And then she started to relax as she remembered that this morning she did not have to get up early, since today she was not planning to visit any factories.
The decision she had made late last night to leave a message for Alex Andrews on his answer-machine, thanking him for his help but stating quite firmly that she now no longer needed his services and asking him to leave her a bill, had, rather oddly, not given her quite as much satisfaction as she had anticipated.
Beth frowned as she climbed out of bed and walked naked into her bathroom.
The weight she had lost in the trauma following the break-up of her relationship with Julian had now been replaced, banishing the hollow-eyed gauntness which had not suited her small curvy frame.
Prague had brought the sheen back to her hair and the glow back to her skin.
Quickly she showered and put on clean undies, then blow-dried her hair. She had just finished highlighting her naturally delicate and pale skin with blusher and applying her lipstick when she heard the room service waiter knocking.
Quickly she reached for her robe and, wrapping it tightly around her body, she went to let him in.
‘Thank you, that’s...’ she began, and then stopped as she realised that the man pushing the trolley wasn’t her normal room service waiter but Alex Andrews. Her eyes widened even further as she saw that the table wasn’t set up just for one but for two.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded in angry confusion, instinctively pulling th
e robe even more tightly around her body. But as Alex set up the table Beth was treacherously aware of how glad she was that he hadn’t arrived before she had had time to wash her hair and do her face; after all, why should she mind whether or not Alex saw her at her best or her worst?
She was simply reacting in a totally normal female way, she defended herself mentally. There was nothing personal in her reaction; she would have felt the same no matter who had arrived with the tray.
Would she?
Beth fought to suppress the knowledge that only yesterday, when the room service waiter had arrived, it hadn’t concerned her in the least that she had had to let him in with her hair uncombed and her face still pale from sleep.
‘I thought we could discuss what we are going to do today over breakfast,’ Alex replied cheerfully as he pulled up a chair for her with a very professional flourish and waved her into it.
Too caught off guard to refuse, Beth automatically sat down.
‘We are not going to do anything,’ she informed him firmly. ‘Didn’t you get my message?’
‘You don’t intend to visit any more factories. Yes, I know,’ Alex agreed. ‘However, there is far, far more to Prague and the Republic than glass factories.’
‘I’m sure there is, and I’m looking forward to discovering it and them—on my own,’ Beth told him pointedly.
‘I thought we’d start with a walk round the city,’ Alex continued, expertly pouring Beth’s coffee and then sitting down opposite her and offering her a piece of toast.
‘You have no right to do this, nor to be here,’ Beth told him furiously. ‘I could report you to the hotel manager...’
She could, but Beth knew that she wouldn’t. Someone, whether her official waiter or someone else, must have known what Alex was doing, and to report them might be to get them into trouble. Beth was far too soft-hearted to do that, and she suspected that Alex knew it.
‘Why don’t you want to visit any more factories?’ Alex was asking her, ignoring her patently weak threat.
‘Because I don’t need to,’ Beth told him promptly, adding, ‘Not that it’s any of your business...’ But instead of looking suitably chastised Alex was actually looking quite stern.
‘Beth, you aren’t still thinking of following up that contact you made in the Square, are you? Because if you are...’
‘If I am, then it’s my business and no one else’s,’ Beth told him furiously. How dared he try to tell her what she could and could not do, and, even worse, how dared he try to make her feel as though she was a gullible little fool, incapable of making a rational or informed business decision?
‘And despite what you seem to think I actually do know my own business and my own customers,’ she continued hotly. ‘I know what will and won’t sell in my shop, and at what price, and if you think—’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry,’ Alex apologised remorsefully. ‘I wasn’t trying to imply that you don’t know your own business, Beth, or your own market, but buying goods here in the Republic isn’t quite like going on a buying trip at home. The Czech people themselves couldn’t be more honest, but there are other forces at work here, other...problems...which have to be taken into account.
‘If you really feel that this gypsy contact you’ve made is genuine, then at least allow me to come with you when you go to visit the factory...’
‘Why? So that you can get the opportunity to undercut their prices and point me in the direction of your cousins’ factory instead?’ Beth demanded sharply, adding scornfully, ‘You see, Alex, I’m not quite so naive as you seem to think. I’m perfectly well aware of what you’re trying to do. No doubt the reason you’re here today is really to try to persuade me to visit your precious cousins’ business...’
Beth saw from the look on his face that her guess was right, but instead of feeling triumphant she discovered that the tiny needle-sharp sensation knowing she was right gave her actually physically hurt.
‘I had intended to suggest that it might be worthwhile your visiting the factory, yes,’ Alex agreed, his voice suddenly unfamiliarly harsh. ‘But not for the less than altruistic reasons you’re trying to suggest. If you must have the truth, the glass my cousins—’ He stopped.
‘What is it about you, Beth? Why is it you’re so determined to suspect my motives?’
Beth pushed away her toast uneaten.
‘You’re a man,’ she told him acidly, ‘and my experience of men is that...’
There was a small, tight silence, and then Alex said harshly, ‘Do go on. Your experience of men is what?’
Beth looked away from him. Something about the tight white line around his mouth was hurting her. Without knowing how it had happened she had strayed onto some very treacherous and uncertain ground indeed. What on earth had possessed her to raise a subject both so intimately personal and so volatilely dangerous?
‘So, I’m to be condemned without a hearing, is that it? Sentenced for a crime I haven’t even committed simply because I’m a man... Who was he, Beth?’ he asked her grimly. ‘A friend? A lover?’
Beth discovered that she was finding it hard to swallow. Completely unexpectedly and totally unwontedly she found that her eyes had filled with tears.
‘Actually he was neither,’ she told Alex shakily, and then, before she could stop herself, she was adding emotionally, ‘If you must know he was the man who told me he loved me but didn’t—the man who betrayed me and...’
Frantically she got up, her eyes flooding with tears, knocking over her chair in her desperate attempt to avoid crying in front of Alex and completely humiliating herself. But as she tried to run to the sanctuary of the bathroom the length of her bathrobe hampered her, and she had only taken a few steps before Alex caught up with her, bodily grabbed hold of her and swung her round to face him, his own face taut with emotion.
‘Oh, Beth. Beth, please don’t cry,’ she heard him groan as he wrapped her in his arms. ‘I’m so sorry...I didn’t mean to upset you. I never...’
‘I’m not upset,’ Beth denied. ‘I didn’t love him anyway,’ she told Alex truthfully, and then added less honestly, ‘Men aren’t worth loving...’
‘No?’ Alex asked her huskily.
‘No,’ Beth repeated firmly, but somehow or other her denial had lost a good deal of its potency. Was that perhaps because of the way Alex was cupping her face, his mouth gently caressing hers, his lips teasing the stubbornly tight line of hers, coaxing it to soften and part on a soft sigh that should have been a sharp rejection of what he was doing but somehow had become something softer and more accommodating?
As Alex continued to kiss her the most dizzying sweet sensation filled Beth.
She had the most overpowering urge to cling blissfully to Alex and melt into his arms like an old-fashioned Victorian maiden. Behind her closed eyelids she could have sworn there danced sunlit images of tulle and confetti scented with the lilies of a bridal bouquet, and the sound of a triumphant ‘Wedding March’ swelled and boomed and gold sunbeams formed a circle around her.
Dreamily Beth sighed, and then smiled beneath Alex’s kiss, her own lips parting in happy acquiescence to the explorative thrust of his tongue.
Alex was dressed casually, in jeans and a soft shirt. Beneath her fingertips Beth could feel the fabric of that shirt, soft and warm, but the body that lay beneath it felt deliciously firm...hard, masculine, an unfamiliar and even forbidden territory that her fingers were suddenly dangerously eager to explore.
Alex made a small sound of approving pleasure as Beth’s fingers rebelliously slipped between the buttons of his shirt. Her borrowed hotel robe, a ‘one size fits all’ garment of extremely generous proportions, was starting to slide off her shoulder, and the sensation of Alex’s fingertips just brushing her bare skin sent a violent frisson of breathtaking pleasure zigzagging all down her body.
; Beth wasn’t used to such an explosive physical reaction to a man’s touch. It made her catch her breath, her mouth rounding and her teeth accidentally closing on the fullness of Alex’s bottom lip and dragging gently against it.
Alex gave a thickly audible responsive groan that shivered through her own body right down to her toes, making her curl them into the carpet. The sensual heat they were both generating was combining to melt away all Beth’s inhibitions, her mouth opening eagerly to the demanding thrust of Alex’s tongue.
Her robe had started to open when she had trodden on the hem during her earlier attempt to escape from the humiliation of her own tears, but Beth was totally unaware of just how much of her body it had actually exposed until she felt the warmth of Alex’s hand against her breast, firmly cupping its soft weight against his palm as he slowly caressed its rounded shape with a slow, sensuous deliberation that made Beth tremble and then shudder, the rash of goosebumps raised on her skin betraying just how immediately and intensely sensitive she was to the erotic sensation of his caress.
Over Alex’s shoulder she could see their entwined images in her bedroom mirror. His hand, tanned and brown, lean and muscular, in direct contrast to the pale, sheer fabric-covered globe of her breast, soft, full, rounded, compliant to his touch. Male to female, man to woman, hard against soft.
Alex was still kissing her, plundering her mouth, his free hand burrowing beneath her robe to rest just below her waist on her naked back, his fingers stroking, kneading her sensitive flesh into such a frenzy of responsiveness that she was pressing herself frantically against him, mindlessly grinding her hips into his body, desperately searching for even closer contact with his aroused hardness.
The hand caressing her breast started to stroke it rhythmically, Alex’s fingertips teasing her nipple to a stiff point beneath her gauzy bra, playing with it, flicking it with a tormenting gentleness that made Beth tremble from head to foot with hungry need.
In the mirror now their bodies were so closely entwined, so sensuously entwined, that they might almost already have been lovers. Beth moaned longingly, reaching out to cover Alex’s hand with her own, wanting to urge him to remove the barrier of her bra. She was acting on instinct alone now, driven by a female urge programmed into her by nature itself, and, in obeying it, she had as little choice as a lemming following its preordained life path.