Pretending to be cool and sophisticated was fine when it came to acting as if that kiss had been nothing special, merely the sort of thing that adults indulged in when there was nothing better to do. It was certainly salvaging her pride, but, my, was it difficult.
Leaning forward, his untouched glass of wine held loosely between his hands, Sebastian asked, ‘What about your boyfriend?’ and wondered why he had phrased the question so harshly. Why he’d phrased it at all, come to that.
It was none of his business but he’d bet his life on her having a string of them. Despite her ingenuous big blue eyes, the aura of vulnerability that had previously made his under-used protective genes work overtime, she was no novice when it came to sex. She’d been well and truly turned on a short while ago, more than willing.
He could have taken her just like that!
‘I don’t have a boyfriend.’ Rosie lowered her eyes.
His were glittering at her, as if she’d done something wrong.
But he was only trying to make conversation and being nice about her having visitors. So why was she feeling so jumpy and on edge when it was patently obvious by now that he was being a gentleman and wasn’t going to shame her by mentioning the way she’d kissed him as if she were a sex-mad trollop’?
Meaning she was between men? Sebastian’s mouth tightened.
He wouldn’t ask. It wasn’t of the slightest importance. She was blushing again, he noted, her long thick lashes veiling her eyes, her full lips slightly parted. Kissable.
‘You mean you haven’t a man in your life at the moment?’ He heard the words slip out and despaired of himself. Why couldn’t he leave the subject alone? He was behaving totally out of character and didn’t know why.
Rosie drained the last of her wine in sheer desperation. Why the inquisition? He was looking incredibly macho and domineering right now, his powerfully virile body really tense.
And why didn’t he just keep quiet and so give her the opportunity to say goodnight, thanks for the wine, and take herself off to her room?
He couldn’t be interested in the state of her love life. Could he?
No, of course not.
If this was a soppy romantic film he would be asking because he wanted to know if the coast was clear for him to start up a relationship with her. But real life wasn’t like that and she wasn’t daft enough to think it was. Wealthy, handsome, hard-headed businessmen didn’t have relationships with nobodies.
Metaphorically planting her feet firmly back on the ground, she told herself that as he was standing in for her absent employer he would naturally want to vet her thoroughly.
A horrible thought struck her and made her feel physically ill.
He had doubtlessly decided that, after her lustful earlier display, she made a habit of inviting all and sundry into her bed and he might have to face the distasteful experience of finding a string of rampaging males queuing up outside!
The ridiculous scenario made her feel hysterical. She pulled in a steadying breath. She could at least put his mind at rest on that score!
‘I have never had a boyfriend.’ Red flags of embarrassment flamed over her face. Girls at school had teased her mercilessly because, unlike them, she’d never had loads of boyfriends and experimented with sex. Her mother had vetoed out of school friendships with the rough crowd who lived on their estate.
Besides, she hadn’t been interested. She had the first-hand knowledge of what a casual fling had done to her mother.
Angry regret at that sorry fact tightened her voice as she scrambled to her feet and informed him, ‘I left school to look after my mother. She was ill. Dying. Inoperable cancer. Towards the end she could have gone to a hospice, but she didn’t want that. Neither did I. I nursed her. It didn’t leave any time for socialising. So don’t worry.’ She huffed out a bitterly angry breath and put him straight. ‘I’m not about to hang a red light outside Sir Marcus’s front door!’
Placing her empty glass on the tray beside the half empty bottle with an angry little click, she bade Sebastian a cool goodnight and headed off up the stairs. She had never felt quite this assertive before in her entire life, or so cross. She placed her feet firmly on the treads and lifted her chin in the air. Right at this moment, she almost hated the gorgeous Sebastian Garcia!
In fact, when she really thought about it, she was damn sure she did!
Dismissed and firmly put in his place! Sebastian’s mouth slanted wryly. Just like that! A totally new experience and he rather liked the challenge it presented. Always provided he wanted to take it up, of course.
Which he didn’t. His eyes narrowed, he watched Rosie Lambert mount the broad staircase.
Never had a boyfriend? Did he really believe that? Initially, he’d been struck by her aura of naivety, his instinct to protect. He’d have believed anything she chose to tell him. But her shattering response when his lips had brushed hers, the immediate arousal of her body, had told him she’d been down that road many times before.
Not that he’d seen it that way, not to begin with. He’d been fuddled by lust himself and had felt a real heel for getting so close and intimate in the first place. Only when his mind had cleared had he recognised the signals she’d been sending out.
He could have taken her there and then and she would have encouraged him.
A dewy-eyed innocent? With instinctive male appreciation he watched the sway of her seductively rounded bottom as she neared the top of the stairs, and thought not.
Definitely not.
A girl that lovely would have had males swarming round her since she reached puberty.
He drank his wine and did his best to relax back on the sofa.
Lying, or not, what did it matter? He’d be back in Spain in a couple of weeks and Rosie would be out of his life. Not that she was actually in it, he reminded himself forcibly. She was simply a temporary member of staff. Different from the women he normally mixed with and therefore intriguing in an odd sort of way. And sexy with it.
Shooting to his feet, he gave himself a refill and shrugged out of his suit jacket, removed his tie and opened the top two buttons of his shirt. He felt strangely overheated.
He had to concentrate on what was really important, put Rosie Lambert right out of his mind. Opening Marcus’s eyes to the type of woman Terrina really was before he brought her back to England as his future wife was his immediate priority. Once the greedy little gold-digger was here at Troone Manor, with her feet under the table, so to speak, and an engagement ring on her finger, there would be no getting rid of her. It was up to him to see that things didn’t get that far.
Turning back to the sofa, wine glass in hand, he glimpsed a corner of the book Rosie must have stuffed underneath the cushion and swore softly. Just as he was getting her out of his head she had jumped right back in there again!
In her rush to pull him down a peg she had forgotten her bedtime reading matter. His brows peaking again at her strange choice, he came to a snap decision. He would take it up to her. She’d only been gone a few minutes, not long enough to already be in bed. It would give him the opportunity to hand it over with some polite pleasantry, letting her know there were no feelings—hard or otherwise—over the happenings of this evening and thereby close the chapter completely.
Rosie had had the quickest shower on record. She felt all churned up as she pattered barefooted back to her bedroom, tying the sash of her old cotton robe around her overheated body. Her clothes were still in an untidy heap on the floor, just as she’d left them. She and Sharon had been expressly instructed to take their daily washing down to the laundry room every evening, where Mrs Partridge would deal with them first thing in the morning and avoid a backlog.
Rosie kicked them under the bed. She was venturing nowhere.
She couldn’t run the risk of bumping into Sebastian again. Not this evening. Not ever, if she could somehow avoid it.
Her hands trembling, she lifted the pendant from where she’d left it on the old-fashioned
washstand that served as a dressing table. She had worn it, for safe-keeping, ever since her mother had given it to her. Now the idea of fastening it back on again after her shower and having it next to her skin was repellent to her.
It glittered at her, an uncomfortable reminder of how close she’d come to copying her mother’s mistake, of making love with an unattainable man, going down a road that led to misery.
Grabbing a handful of tissues, she wrapped it and thrust it to the back of a drawer, then leant against the top of the chest, her heart pounding.
It would have been so easy. If Sebastian had wanted to make love to her she wouldn’t have been able to stop him. She wouldn’t have wanted to. And, despite knowing she was being utterly stupid, her body still clamoured for him, her breasts swollen and sensitised, an insistent sweet and burning ache between her thighs.
Just reliving those fleeting minutes when his tongue had plundered her eagerly parted lips, his mouth as hot as sin, the long hands that had caressed, shaped and moulded her aching breasts, made her knees go weak and the blood in her veins turn to liquid fire.
Clamping her soft lips together, Rosie pushed herself upright.
She had to stop fantasising, pull herself together. It had only been a kiss, for heaven’s sake! It had meant absolutely nothing to him. In fact, she was at pains to point out to herself, when she’d responded the way she had, far from turning him on, he’d backed off in double quick time!
So why had a simple kiss made her lose the sense she’d been born with?
Because she was twenty years old and had never had a boyfriend and her hormones were telling her it was time for her to find a mate?
But that didn’t gel with what had happened when she’d had her first real kiss, did it? Dwayne Evans had been the acknowledged school stud. All the girls had drooled over him.
Blonde, clean cut and hunky, he had fallen in beside her as she’d walked home on a dark December afternoon in what had turned out to be her final year at school.
She hadn’t minded chatting, but when he’d grabbed her and kissed her hard and furiously she’d felt nothing but outrage, when she’d known darn well that all the girls in her class would have been swooning.
He had towered over her, but even so the ferocity of her fists flailing into his stomach had knocked him off balance, and the way she’d disgustedly wiped the back of her hand over her mouth as she’d tried to get rid of the taste of him had been more than enough for him to tell his mates that Rosie Lambert was a frigid bitch and put her on the receiving end of horrible lewd comments.
So what was the difference? She’d had hormones back then, hadn’t she? The way Sebastian Garcia made her feel was an enigma.
She had come to find out what she could about her father, but had discovered something else instead. The unwelcome knowledge that, like her poor mother, she could fall victim to lust.
Disgusted with herself, she turned to the mirror, grabbed the hairbrush and dragged it with vicious swipes through her hair.
She was blinking back tears when she heard a brisk tapping on her bedroom door.
It would be Sharon, back before lock-out time, wanting to chew over the evening she’d spent with her boyfriend. Perhaps listening to the other girl’s racy chatter would take her mind off her own dreadful evening.
Pinning a smile on a mouth that was reluctant to do anything but droop, Rosie opened the door and the smile trembled and vanished.
Sebastian. Her eyes widened and her lips parted. She knew she shouldn’t be staring at him but she couldn’t stop. His soft dark hair was rumpled, as if he’d been running his fingers through it; it made him look rakish and tormentingly dangerous. His suit jacket had gone and the fine white fabric of his shirt clung to wide rangy shoulders and his muscular torso and tucked into the narrow waistband of those perfectly cut trousers.
And he was holding that wretched book!
Saying nothing.
The silence was electric. His eyes slid down to her quivering mouth then back up to hold her gaze with a shimmering silver intensity.
She heard him drag in a breath, saw his broad chest expand, and the brush dropped from her nerveless fingers. She couldn’t have retrieved it if her life had depended on it; she was glued to the spot. Her heartbeats had gone crazy, suffocating her.
‘You forgot your book,’ he intoned, his voice roughened. He stepped closer. Dio! Did she have any idea of what she was doing to him? That skimpy cotton robe did nothing to disguise the fact that she was naked beneath it. The sash was tightly cinched around her tiny waist, but there the modesty ended.
Her eager breasts were thrusting against the thin fabric, the opening revealing the fine dew of perspiration that beaded the enticing valley between. He imagined himself lapping the moisture away and tried to blank out the wicked mind picture, and didn’t come near to succeeding.
This woman could arouse and tempt him as no other woman had done before, just by being there. She had no need of the calculated feminine wiles that he had become cynically immune to.
She just had to be there.
He should have left the book where he’d found it. He should have had more sense than to come to her room.
Time to get the hell out of it.
His heart racing, he gritted his teeth and wordlessly handed the book to her.
She stepped forward, reached for it, and he heard the whisper of fabric against her skin as their fingers touched. A shock wave of electric sensation coursed clear through him and the book fell to the floor.
A tiny moment of intensely sizzling silence, then they both bent for it at the same time. Both pulling in lung-searing breaths to shatter that spiked silence. Both reaching.
Her hair tumbled over her face, pale blonde tendrils curving round her slender throat, the edges of her robe parting.
Mesmerised, his body hardening out of control, he gazed at the revealed curve of smooth thigh and reached out, long fingers clamping round her narrow wrist.
Pulling her upright, he hauled her against his fevered body, drinking in the clean soapy scent of her, the heat of her flesh through the flimsy robe. And dipped his head to kiss her.
Rosie felt as if she were burning alive. Her legs had no substance. She melted against him, the evidence of his arousal blowing her mind. Her helpless response was way beyond her ability to control, and as his tongue slid between her eagerly parted lips she no longer cared. If this was all she would ever know of total bliss, she would take it with both greedy hands and leave regrets for the cold light of dawn.
CHAPTER FOUR
Rosie woke from a troubled sleep long before dawn. Gingerly, holding her breath until her lungs ached, she edged herself away from the tantalisingly sexy warmth of Sebastian’s naked, lean and muscular length.
Her body ached in all sorts of previously unconsidered areas and every inch of her skin still burned fierily from his ravaging kisses, but that was as nothing beside the hurt in her heart.
Torrid images of his tormentingly erotic exploration of her far-too-eager body, his lips and hands sending her wild, her response shatteringly immediate and shamelessly wanton until, driven almost out of her mind with desperate excitement, she’d pleaded with near sobbing impatience, ‘Love me—please love me!’ now filled her tortured mind with gut-wrenching shame.
His body had curved over her, slick and hot, his voice ragged as he’d groaned, ‘I want you—how I want you!’ and angled himself into her with driven need. His sudden pause as she’d given a small but sharp cry of pain had made her move frantically against him, inviting him deeper, urging him on with moans of pleasure because he mustn’t stop, not for anything. It was too late and the ecstasy she hadn’t known was possible was so tantalisingly close.
Too late for him, too. His hands sliding beneath her buttocks, his breathing ragged, he’d plunged deeper, erotically and exquisitely gentle, and Rosie had been swept away by transcending pleasure, oblivious to everything but the beautiful perfection of his loving, until her bod
y had exploded with cataclysmic peaks of ecstasy that matched his shattering climax.
He had held her, she remembered, her throat tightening as she tried to find the courage to wake him and remind him that he should go back to his own room before anyone else woke.
Nothing had been said in that dizzying aftermath. He had simply held her, stroking her hair in the heavily charged darkness until she had drifted into sleep. An uneasy, restless sleep.
What on earth must he think of her? It was too awful to contemplate. She hardly knew him and yet she had welcomed him into her bed, behaved like a real slut!
She had begged him to love her, she remembered, but love hadn’t come into it, of course it hadn’t. He’d had sex with her because she must have unknowingly sent out all the right signals. Saying she was ready, wantonly eager and more than willing!
Which had been all too true, hadn’t it? she thought in an agony of squirming regret. So she couldn’t blame him, could she? Any red-blooded male would take what was handed to him on a plate.
She was more like her poor mother than she’d realised. Molly Lambert had made love with an unattainable man and had never stopped to consider the consequences, living only for the next time she could be with her secret lover. So perhaps her father hadn’t been as much to blame for what had happened, after all. Maybe he just hadn’t been strong enough to walk away from something so blatantly offered.
She shuddered, absorbing the terrible shock of that shaming revelation, and Sebastian said, making all her nerves jump, sounding fully awake when she’d imagined him in a deep and sated sleep, ‘Cold, cara? Come, lie with me and I will warm you.’
Her face flaming with deep humiliation, Rosie pushed out tightly, I don’t think so,’ fighting hard against the tide of melting willingness that so recklessly flooded through her body.
She wanted a repeat performance more than anything else in the world and she didn’t know what had got into her, she thought wretchedly, feeling a huge sob build up, threatening to escape and display all her rampaging emotions to a man whose only possible interest in her was her perceived sexual promiscuity.
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