Defying the Billionaire's Command

by Michelle Conder

  ‘And you think I’m going to...what?’ He frowned and stepped closer, towering over her. ‘Make him feel worse?’

  Carly shifted her weight to put some distance between them. ‘You were rude enough when you first arrived,’ she pointed out

  ‘Hell.’ He ran a hand through his hair absently, drawing her attention to the way the caramel tresses drifted through his fingers and offset the strong bones of his face. ‘I’m not that cruel. I’m not going to use it against him.’

  He sounded genuine, she thought, and it wasn’t as if she were giving away secrets anymore.

  ‘Honestly I don’t know. If the tumour shrinks enough that they can get it all and his diabetes doesn’t complicate things, the prognosis is good that he’ll survive the operation. After that it’s a bit of a waiting game as to whether or not the cancer has spread. Now, if you’ll—’

  Dare moved to the left as he sensed Carly about to walk past him, but unfortunately she moved in the same direction and before he knew it her body was plastered up against his. Right where he’d wanted her ever since he’d watched her sexy butt swaying in front of him.

  Neither one of them moved for a heartbeat. Two. And then they both took a step back. Her hand went to her hair as if to straighten it and a loose strand caught on the gloss of her lipstick. Dare nearly reached out to fix it himself but shoved his hands into his pockets at the last minute.

  Another blush rose up over her creamy cheekbones and her hand shook when she brought it back down to her side. ‘This has to stop,’ she muttered, frustration etched across her brow. ‘I can’t explain...’

  She stopped abruptly and Dare picked up the thread. ‘This thing between us?’

  She shook her head in denial. ‘There is no thing.’

  Dare’s smile was slow in coming. ‘Oh, there’s definitely a thing.’

  She let out an annoyed breath and her lips pursed. ‘I’m sure it’s entirely normal for you to feel this way about a woman but...’ as if she’d said too much, her blush deepened, ‘I don’t like it.’

  Nor did he. Not one little bit. And she was wrong about him feeling this way with every woman. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d wanted a woman so much his body responded without his brain first giving the go-ahead.

  His gaze dropped to her mouth, soft and pink and glossy. If he had met her under different circumstances and trusted her he might take things further. Take her to dinner. To bed. And while his body liked that idea a great deal, instinct told him that walking away was the sanest option. ‘Then let’s forget it.’

  She blinked up at him.

  ‘Just like that?’ she blurted out, surprise ripe on her face.

  ‘Absolutely.’ Because once Dare made up his mind about something it was done. ‘I’m staying one more night,’ he said. ‘You’re here. Why don’t we go down to dinner, make nice, then we’ll both go to bed—separately, of course—and tomorrow morning I’ll drive off into the sunset and it will be as if we never met.’

  ‘Sunrise,’ she corrected.

  ‘Sunrise.’

  ‘That sounds...’ She squared her shoulders, pulling the silk of her blouse tight across her high breasts. ‘That sounds like an excellent idea.’

  Yes, it was.

  ‘Shall we?’ He directed her to precede him along the hallway. And he’d be fine as long as he didn’t put his hands on her.

  Which was a bit like telling a three-year-old to keep his fingers out of an open cookie jar, Dare thought ruefully two hours later as the dessert plates were cleared.

  For the most part the evening had worked well. Benson was a consummate host and Dare found that he enjoyed hearing about the history of the local village and how it had changed. He especially enjoyed hearing stories about his mother as a child. It surprised him to hear that she had been a rebellious child with a wild streak, but it shouldn’t have. It was that side of her, after all, that had seen her fall in love with his conman of a father, and also the side that had seen her knuckle down and go it alone instead of turning to her father for help.

  Benson had openly admitted that he hadn’t known how to handle either her, or her after their mother had died and for the first time Dare saw some value in revisiting the past.

  But for all his focus on the conversation and enjoyment of the delicious food, nothing could dull his awareness of the slender redhead beside him. Every slide of her leg under the table, every tilt of her wineglass against her lips, every soft laugh as she joined in the conversation ratcheted up his desire to finish what they had started earlier.

  It made a mockery of his confident assertion that he could forget the attraction between them ‘just like that.’

  And now, with all the barriers to them being intimate effectively removed, Dare was having a hard time convincing himself that his promise to disappear from her life hadn’t been just the teensiest bit impetuous.

  And what would be wrong with spending a night or two with her? She was an adult, he was an adult...

  ‘Sorry,’ she murmured as her hand accidentally brushed his.

  ‘No problem.’ He cleared his throat. ‘What were you after? The sugar?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  Again their hands touched and again he felt an electrical current feather across his skin.

  Carly stirred her coffee. Dare shifted in his seat. ‘That’ll keep you up tonight,’ he pointed out softly.

  ‘No, it won’t.’ She gave him a brief smile. ‘You learn pretty quickly as a resident physician to sleep wherever you can, whenever you can, no matter what the circumstances.’

  ‘Sounds hectic.’

  ‘Oh, it is.’ Her smoky green eyes were bright with pleasure. ‘Emergency departments are busy, chaotic, orderly—which I know seems like a contradiction, but it’s not—and really stressful.’ Her smile grew. ‘Coffee became my best friend during those years.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Sure. You don’t put in an all-nighter at a gas station and then race back to campus to sit a three-hour exam after finishing up a paper on the history of economic rationalisation in the Eastern Bloc without a little caffeine hit on the side.’

  Carly’s eyes sparkled into his. ‘Exactly.’ Her smile grew. ‘But you know the best coffee is the first coffee of the day, right? When it’s nice and hot and the acidity just rolls across your tongue.’ Her eyes turned heavenwards. ‘It’s sublime, isn’t it?’

  ‘The law of diminishing marginal returns,’ he said gruffly.

  Her eyebrow cocked. ‘Say that again?’

  Dare laughed. ‘DMR, as I remembered it for the exam. It means that in all productive processes, adding more of one factor of production, while holding all others constant, will at some point yield lower incremental per unit returns.’ He chuckled softly at her blank expression. ‘In the case of coffee it means the more you drink, the less pleasure you get from it.’

  ‘Oh, now I understand.’ She laughed softly and Dare thought in the case of her smiles DMR didn’t apply at all.

  ‘What are you two grinning at?’

  Grinning?

  Dare frowned at his mother’s smiling face. He wasn’t traditionally a ‘grinner.’

  ‘Coffee,’ Carly answered, her face carefully blank. ‘And whether it keeps you up all night.’ She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. ‘And on that note I might go up to bed. I hope you don’t think I’m rude if I call it a night?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Rachel said. ‘All that walking today must have made you tired.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Carly smiled but it didn’t reach her eyes and Dare had no idea what had just happened. One minute they were having a nice time together and the next she was giving him the cold shoulder and brushing him off. Acting as if he didn’t exist.

 
; Tension coiled through him tighter than the screws on his Kawasaki. ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

  ‘Perfectly fine,’ she said briskly.

  Dare gave himself a mental shake. If she wanted to go to bed when the night was only half over it was no skin off his nose. He had no hold on what she did. Certainly he had no cause to be irritated by it.

  ‘Sweet dreams, Red,’ he said, settling more comfortably in his chair. There was no way he was going to bed at ten o’clock. He wasn’t a child.

  He lifted the bottle of wine from the bucket. ‘More wine, Mother? Benson?’

  * * *

  Carly felt infinitely better after brushing her hair and putting on her pyjamas but, good God, if Dare had touched her leg with his one more time she thought she might have attempted heart-removal surgery with her butter knife.

  And not because he had been deliberately awful to her, but because he hadn’t! Up until now she hadn’t experienced a relaxed Dare and it only made it harder to remember how rude and egotistical he could be.

  Her mother had always said that if a man was good to his mother he’d be good to his wife but she didn’t want to think of Dare like that. She’d been obtuse in a relationship with a man once before, ergo she could easily fall into the same trap again.

  Not happening, she told herself.

  Once Dare left in the morning it would be as if they had never met; two strangers who had passed like ships in the night and destined to be nothing more.

  A good thing, since she wasn’t the casual-sex type and by his own admission he didn’t let women get close to him.

  And, yes, jumping into bed with Dare James might be utterly thrilling on one level, but what if he was just another mistake waiting to happen? Another bad judgment call? Hadn’t she made enough of those already? And not just with men...

  Frustrated with the way her thoughts kept veering back to all her failings, she grabbed her computer and placed it on her lap. She logged on and checked her emails. The one from her agency caught her attention and she reopened it.

  The job they were offering her was in Kent where a small clinic needed a temporary doctor to fill in while someone went on maternity leave. Would she do it?

  Carly bit her lip. A small clinic could be interesting but speaking with Dare tonight had reminded her how much she enjoyed working in a large, thriving hospital. And okay, they were often cesspits for gossip, but it wasn’t as if she’d be fool enough to fall for one of the head doctors again.

  The question was whether she wanted to re-enter that life again. And where? Then there was the question of her flat; the one she’d bought with Liv. She really needed to do something about that.

  Oh, Liv, why couldn’t I have saved you?

  A fist felt as if it had just closed around her heart. What good was a medical degree if you couldn’t save people? Anger rose up inside her. Anger at herself. At life. Liv had trusted her and Carly had let her down.

  Feeling the threat of tears clog the back of her throat, Carly fell back against her pillows and took her computer with her. Neither dwelling nor crying had ever brought Liv back to her so Carly didn’t let herself do either now.

  What she did do was click on a well-known job site and start scrolling down the entries under medical doctors. Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill, she told herself.

  Lost in thought as she was, she started when there was a thump on her door. She knew immediately who it would be. The Baron was much too circumspect to bang like that, and Rachel would bruise a knuckle if she knocked that hard.

  Perhaps if she stayed completely still and pretended to be— ‘I didn’t tell you to come in,’ she informed the man now framed in her open doorway. ‘I could have been naked.’

  Probably not the best thing to have said. What was wrong with her?

  ‘You knew I’d come up here,’ he said arrogantly.

  Carly strove to remain calm. ‘And why would I know that?’

  ‘Because one minute you’re all smiling and happy and the next you look like you’d seen a ghost.’

  ‘You’re exaggerating.’

  ‘I don’t think so. What’s wrong?’ he asked, closing the door and moving further into the room.

  No way was Carly going to tell him that she’d just been overwhelmed by his presence. That she’d needed some space because he brought up so many painful memories from a past she’d prefer to forget.

  That he made her want things she’d rather not want. Like a relationship. A connection. A place to call home.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, trying to ignore the thudding of her heart. ‘As you can see, I’m perfectly fine.’

  His eyes drifted over her in response to her unintentional invitation. Carly held herself completely still under his steady gaze, conscious that all she was wearing was a cotton singlet and matching boxer shorts adorned with tiny red hearts.

  ‘Perfectly.’

  Carly smiled politely at his wry tone. ‘Now you can go.’

  She watched warily as, instead of doing as she requested, he stopped at the foot of her bed, his hands on his hips.

  ‘Do you always ignore a woman’s request?’ she asked lightly.

  ‘Was that what it was? It sounded more like an order.’

  Unsure of his mood, Carly knew she was strung too tight to deal with him rationally. ‘What do you want, Dare?’

  His eyes ran over her again. ‘Now there’s a question.’

  Knowing that he was being deliberately provocative, Carly took a deep breath and counted to ten. She had been a resident for three years at one of Liverpool’s busiest hospitals having to face down more insolent men than this one. ‘I thought you had forgotten all about that,’ she challenged.

  ‘Ah, so I did. The only problem is that attraction can be a pesky thing. It doesn’t want to stay forgotten.’

  ‘Try harder.’ Because this would not end well, she knew it as surely as she knew her own name.

  He laughed. ‘Easy, Red. I only came to talk.’

  Feigning a calm she didn’t feel, Carly snatched up her silky robe from the nearby chair and pretended her legs weren’t wobbling as she moved to one of the Queen Anne armchairs beside the fireplace.

  In winter this would no doubt be a cosy place to hole up in with a good book. Or a lover.

  Dare followed her and leant against the mantelpiece.

  ‘I’m curious about something,’ he said.

  Carly rested back in the chair and curled her legs underneath her. ‘Can’t you satisfy it somewhere else?’

  He laughed softly. ‘Unfortunately not. Tell me, why does a highly qualified doctor take a lowly nursing position with an elderly man?’

  Running was her first thought, hiding her second.

  Unsettled by her reflections and the man making her face them, Carly glared up at him.

  ‘First of all,’ Carly began frostily, ‘nurses are not lowly and second of all it’s none of your damned business.’

  She jumped to her feet and paced away from him.

  His brows drew together. ‘I didn’t mean lowly, as in the profession. I meant as in below your professional capabilities. As I understand it there’s a shortage of doctors all over the country.’

  ‘So you’re an expert on the medical profession now. Must be nice viewing the world from your lofty heights.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. You just stand there and pass judgment. It’s what you do best.’

  A muscle flicked in his jaw. ‘I only asked a couple of questions.’

  Carly took a deep breath. ‘I’ve been at the end of some of your questions before and they’re unpleasant to say the least.’

  Dare shifted uncomfortably. ‘Yeah, about that. I might have made a mistake.’

 
‘One?’ She arched a brow, her temper abating at his confession.

  ‘One. Two...’ He gave her a quick smile. ‘What matters is that, yes, I owe you an apology.’

  ‘Let’s have it, then.’

  Dare caught her small, slow grin and his deepened. ‘You’re enjoying yourself.’

  ‘I’m enjoying finally seeing you squirm, yes.’

  He tapped his fingers on his chest as if to say, Who, me? ‘Who said I was squirming? I can admit when I’ve been wrong.’

  ‘Happens often, does it?’

  ‘No.’ Usually he was bang on the money about people. It came from learning from the best shyster around.

  ‘But it did happen this time. And I apologise for jumping to conclusions about your relationship with my grandfather.’

  He watched her throat bob as she swallowed.

  ‘It’s fine. I might even have jumped to the same conclusions myself if our positions had been reversed.’

  Dare gave a mock frown. ‘You mean you would have thought I was sleeping with my grandfather?’

  Carly’s spontaneous burst of laughter made him grin.

  ‘Okay, maybe not,’ she conceded.

  God, he wanted to kiss her. He’d lied when he’d said he’d stopped by only to talk. He’d stopped by because he’d wanted to see her. Needed to see her.

  ‘Is that why you’re really here?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To apologise.’

  Dare let out a slow breath. ‘Maybe you intrigue me, Dr Evans. Maybe I just want to know your story,’ he said softly.

  She moved to stand behind the antique chair and all Dare could think about was shoving the chair aside and throwing her onto the waiting bed behind her.

  ‘My story is boring.’

  ‘Shouldn’t I be the judge of that?’

  That was just it. She didn’t want him to judge her at all.

  ‘If you must know, I had a very normal childhood, with a sister and two parents, and...and I lived in Liverpool up until a year ago.’

  ‘Don’t give away too many details, Red.’ He smiled. ‘What happened a year ago?’

  ‘Why does something have to have happened?’