‘Something like that.’ Art shrugged. He was sharp enough to realise that there was no way he would ever get her onside if he came across as the sort of unliberated dinosaur she would clearly despise.
‘No cooking together...no watching telly entwined on a sofa...’
‘I definitely do the entwined bit,’ Art joked. Rose failed to return his smile.
‘You don’t want to encourage any woman to think you’re going to be in it for the long haul because you’re a commitment-phobe.’
‘I could lie and tell you that you’re way off target there,’ Art drawled, holding her stare, ‘but I won’t do you the disservice.’
‘I like that,’ Rose said slowly, not taking her eyes off him.
‘Which bit?’
‘The honesty bit. In my line of work, I see a lot of scumbags who are happy to lie through their teeth to get what they want. It’s laudable that you’re at least honest when it comes to saying what you think.’
‘You’re giving me more credit than I’m due.’ Art stopped what he was doing and let his eyes rove over her. Her skin was satiny smooth and make-up-free. ‘I like the way you look,’ he murmured. ‘I like the fact that you’re completely natural. No warpaint. No pressing need to clone yourself on the lines of a certain doll. Really works.’
* * *
Rose glanced at him and looked away hurriedly. Those dark eyes, she thought, could open a lot of boxes and kick-start a whole host of chain reactions and she might not know how to deal with them.
Rose wasn’t ready for a relationship with anyone and she certainly wasn’t up for grabs when it came to any man who was a commitment-phobe. Thanks, but no thanks. Enjoying this man’s company was a wonderful distraction but anything more than that was not going to be on the table.
She had to shake herself mentally and laugh inwardly at her fanciful thoughts; it wasn’t as though she was in danger of any advances from this passing stranger, who had been nothing but open and polite with her!
And even if he had made any suggestive remarks then she would, of course, knock him back regardless of whether he was a drop of excitement in her otherwise pleasantly predictable life.
She was careful. When it came to men, she didn’t dive head first into the water because you never knew what was lurking under the surface.
With the electrifying feel of those dark eyes broodingly watching her, Rose breathed in deep and remembered all the life lessons from her past. Remembered her mother, who had gone off the rails when Rose’s father had died. She’d lost her love and she had worked her way through her grief with catastrophic consequences, flinging herself headlong into a series of doomed relationships. Rose had been a child at the time but she could remember the carousel of inappropriate men and the apprehension she had felt every time that doorbell had sounded.
Then Alison Tremain had fallen in love—head over heels in love—with a rich, louche member of the landed gentry who had promised her everything she’d been desperate to hear. God only knew what she’d been thinking. She’d been hired to clean the exquisite Cotswold cottage owned by his parents, where he and twelve other fast-living friends had been staying for a long weekend. Had her mother really thought that it was love? But he’d swept her off her feet and maybe, Rose had later thought, when she had looked back at events through adult eyes, his heart had been in the right place.
The two had hurtled towards one another for all the wrong reasons. Rose’s mother because she’d wanted an anchor in her life. She’d been swimming against the tide and had been on the verge of drowning and he had given her something to hold onto and she hadn’t looked further than the wild promises he’d made.
And he...he’d wanted to rebel against restrictive parents and Alison Tremain had been his passport to asserting authority over a life that had been dictated from birth. Their disapproval would underline his independence, would prove that he could choose someone outside the box and damn the consequences. Brimming over with left-wing principles, he would be able to ditch the upper-crust background into which he had been born.
It had been a recipe for disaster from the word go and, for Rose, the personal disaster had started when her mother had dumped her with their neighbour: ‘Just for a bit...just until I’m sorted...and then I’ll come to fetch you, that’s a promise.’
Everyone had rallied around as she had found herself suddenly displaced—the benefit of a small community—but there had been many times when she had entered a room unexpectedly to be greeted by hushed whispers and covert, pitying looks.
Rose knew that things could have been a lot worse. She could have ended up in care. As it was, she spent nearly two years with the neighbours, whose daughter went to the same school as her.
Her mother had written and Rose had waited patiently but by the time a much-chastened Alison had returned to the village Rose had grown into a cautious young girl, conscious of the perils of letting her emotions rule her life.
She’d witnessed her mother going off the rails because of a broken heart and had lived through her disappearing and getting lost in a world, she later learned, of soft drugs and alcohol because Spencer Kurtis had been unable to cope with the daily demands of a life without money on tap. So much for his rebellion. He had eventually crawled back to the family pile and Alison Tremain had returned to village life, where it had taken her a further year to recover before she was properly back to the person she had once been.
Rose knew better than to ever allow her behaviour to be guided by emotion. Sensible choices resulted in a settled life. Her sensible choices when it came to men, all two of them, might not have worked out but that didn’t mean that she was going to rethink her ground plan.
She also knew better than to trust any man with money and time had only served to consolidate that opinion.
Her mother had been strung along by a rich man and in the end he hadn’t been able to tear himself away from his wealthy background. But, beyond the story of one insignificant person, Rose had seen how, time and again, the wealthy took what they wanted without any thought at all for the people they trampled over.
The community that had rallied around her was, over the years, being invaded because developers couldn’t keep their hands away from the temptation to take what was there and turn it into money-making projects. Their little oasis in the Cotswolds was achingly pretty and was also close enough to Oxford to save it from being too unremittingly rural.
In a very real sense, Rose felt that she owed a duty to the small community that had embraced her when her mother had started acting erratically and that included saving it from the whims of rich developers.
She was, for the first time in her life, sorely tempted to explain all of this to the ridiculously good-looking guy who, she noted wryly, had completely abandoned all attempts at vegetable preparation and was now pushing himself away from the counter to hunt down whatever wine was in the fridge.
‘I never know what’s there,’ Rose said, half turning. ‘The fridge has ended up being fairly communal property. Once a week someone has a go at tossing out whatever has gone past its sell-by date and everyone more or less tries to replace what’s been taken so that we never find ourselves short of essentials like milk.’
‘Doesn’t that bug you?’
‘No. Why should it?’
‘Maybe because this is your house and a man’s house should be his castle? What’s the point of a castle if you let down the ramparts every two seconds to welcome in invaders? Who go through your belongings like gannets? Is this wine common property? Who does it belong to?’ He held up a cheap bottle of plonk, which was better than nothing.
‘That’s mine and on the subject of one’s house being one’s castle, I can’t afford that luxury.’ Rose wasn’t looking at him as she delivered this observation. In the companionable peace of the kitchen it felt comfortable to chat and she realised that, yes, quite often she longed for the pleasure of having the house to herself. ‘I’m just lucky that I have this place. It w
as given to my mum by...er...by a friend and when she died it was passed onto me...’
Arturo looked at her carefully, but his voice was casual enough when he next spoke.
‘Generous gift,’ he murmured. ‘Boyfriend? Lover? That kind of friend?’
‘Something like that.’ Rose swivelled, took the wine from him and, having bunged all the vegetables and seasoning into a pan with some sauce, she edged towards the kitchen table, absently sweeping some of the papers away and stacking half-finished cardboard placards into a pile on the ground. ‘You’re doing it again.’
‘Doing what?’ Arturo sipped some wine and looked at her over the rim of the glass.
‘Prying,’ she said drily. ‘Is that a habit of yours? No, don’t answer that.’ She raised her eyebrows and shot him a shrewd assessing look. ‘You pry. I gathered that the second you started opening doors to rooms when you first arrived, wanting to find out what was going on where. Must be your nature.’
‘Expertly summed up... I like to find things out. How else can anyone have an informed opinion unless they’re in possession of all the facts?’
‘You’re very arrogant, aren’t you?’ But she laughed, seeing that as commendable in someone who felt passionate about what was happening in the world around him. Too many people were content to sit on the fence rather than take a stand. Digging deep and arriving at an informed opinion was what separated the doer from the thinker. ‘I mean that if you don’t encourage domesticity and you don’t do much talking to women then it’s unlikely you ask them many questions about what they think. So why,’ she added, ‘are you being so inquisitive with me?’
‘Maybe because I’ve never met anyone like you before.’
‘Is that a good thing?’ Rose detected the breathless note in her voice with a shiver of alarm. She was mesmerised by the lazy smile that lightened the harsh beauty of his face.
‘For me, it’s...strangely exciting.’
Her eyelids fluttered and her breathing hitched and her whole body suddenly tingled as though she had been caressed.
Arturo looked at her with leisurely, assessing eyes. He was clearly used to having what he wanted when it came to women. She sensed it included immediate gratification.
‘I... Look... I didn’t ask you to stay here...because...because...’ She cleared her throat and subsided into awkward silence.
‘Of course not, but I’m not the only one feeling this thing, am I?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘No? We’ll run with that for the time being, shall we? Tell me about the house.’
Rose blinked. Somewhere along the line she’d stopped being the feisty lawyer with the social conscience and had morphed into...a gawky adolescent with a teenage crush on the cute new boy in class. The chemistry between them was overwhelming. It slammed into her like a fist and the fact that he felt it as well, felt something at any rate, only made the situation worse. She’d spent a lifetime protecting herself from her emotions getting the better of her, had approached men with wariness because she knew the sort of scars that could be inflicted when bad choices went horribly wrong. On no level could this man be described as anything but a bad choice. So why was she perspiring with nerves and frantically trying to shut down the slide show of what could happen if she gave in...?
‘The house?’ she parroted, a little dazed.
‘You were telling me that you inherited the house...that your mother was given it...’
‘Right.’
And how had that come about? she wondered. When she was the last person who made a habit of blabbing about her personal life?
Disoriented at the chaos of her thoughts, she set to finishing the meal—anything to tear her gaze away from his darkly compelling face—but her hand was shaking slightly as she began draining pasta and warming the sauce.
‘My mother had a fling with a guy,’ she said in a halting voice, breathing more evenly now that she wasn’t gawping at him like a rabbit caught in the headlights.
‘Happens...’
‘Yes, it does.’ She swung around to look him squarely in the eyes. ‘Especially when you’re in mourning for the man you thought you’d be sitting next to in your old age, watching telly and going misty-eyed over the great-grandchildren...’
‘What do you mean?’
Rose sighed. ‘Nothing.’
* * *
‘Tell me more.’ Art hadn’t eaten home-cooked food in any kitchen with any woman for a very, very long time. He dug into the bowl of pasta with gusto, realising that he was a lot hungrier than he’d thought.
He was eating here, just a stranger passing through instead of a billionaire to be feared, feted and courted by everyone with whom he came into contact. This was what normality felt like. He could scarcely remember the feeling. He wondered whether this was why he was intensely curious about her because she, like this whole experience, represented something out of the ordinary. Or maybe, he decided, it just stemmed from the fact that no information he could glean from her would be put to waste, not when he had a job to do. This was all just part of the game and what else was life but an elaborate game? In which there would inevitably be winners and losers and when it came to winning Art was the leader of the pack.
Far more comfortable with that pragmatic explanation, Art shot her an encouraging look.
‘It’s no big deal.’ Rose shrugged and twirled some spaghetti around her fork, not looking at him. ‘My father died when I was quite young and for a while my mum went off the rails. Got involved with...well...it was—’ she grimaced and blushed ‘—an interesting time all round. One of the guys she became involved with was a rich young minor aristocrat whose parents owned a massive property about ten miles away from here. It ended in tears but years later, out of the blue, she received this house in his will, much to everyone’s surprise. He’d been handed swathes of properties on his twenty-fifth birthday and he left this house to Mum, never thinking he’d die in a motorbike accident when he was still quite young.’
‘A tragedy with a fortunate outcome.’ Art considered the parallels between their respective parents and felt a tug of admiration that she had clearly successfully navigated a troubled background. He had too, naturally, but he was as cold as ice and just as malleable. He had been an observant, together teenager and a controlled, utterly cool-headed adult. He’d also had the advantage of money, which had always been there whatever the efforts of his father’s grasping ex-wives to deprive him of as much of it as they possibly could.
She, it would seem, was cut from the same cloth. When he thought of the sob stories some of his girlfriends had bored him with, he knew he’d somehow ended up summing up the fairer sex as hopeless when it came to dealing with anything that wasn’t sunshine and roses.
‘Guilty conscience,’ Rose responded wryly. ‘He really led my mother off the straight and narrow, and then dumped her for reasons that are just too long-winded to go into. Put it this way—’ she neatly closed her knife and fork and propped her chin in the palm of her hand ‘—he introduced her to the wonderful world of drugs and drink and then ditched her because, in the end, he needed the family money a lot more than he needed her. He also loved the family money more than he could ever have loved her.’
‘Charming,’ Art murmured, his keen dark eyes pinned to the stubborn set of her wide mouth.
‘Rich.’
‘Come again?’
‘He was rich so he figured he could do as he pleased and he did, not that it didn’t work out just fine in the end. Mum...came home and picked up the pieces and she was a darn sight better off without that guy in her life.’
‘Came home...? Picked up the pieces...?’
Rose flushed. ‘She disappeared for a while,’ she muttered, rising to clear the table.
‘How long a while?’
‘What does any of this have to do with the protest?’
‘Like I told you, I’m a keen observer of human nature. I enjoy knowing what makes people tic
k...what makes them who they are.’
‘I’m not a specimen on a petri dish,’ she said with more of her usual spirit, and Art burst out laughing.
‘You’re not,’ he concurred, ‘which doesn’t mean that I’m any the less curious. So talk to me. I don’t do domestic and I don’t do personal conversations but I’m sorely tempted to invite you to be the exception to my rule. My one-off, so to speak...’
CHAPTER FOUR
TELL ME MORE...
Art bided his time. Curiosity battled with common sense. For some reason, over the next three days he kept wanting to return to the story of her past. His appetite to hear more had been whetted and it was all he could do to stamp down the urge to corner her and pry.
But that wasn’t going to do.
He hadn’t pursued the subject three days previously when his curiosity had been piqued because he had known that playing the waiting game was going to be a better bet.
He’d already gleaned one very important piece of information. She needed money. And while she might carry the banner of money can’t buy you happiness and the good things in life are free, Art knew that reality had very sharp teeth.
The house was falling down around her and whilst she did get some money from the tenants, enough to cover the essentials, from what she had told him in dribs and drabs she simply didn’t earn enough to keep things going.
And houses in this part of the world weren’t cheap. He knew because he’d strolled through the village, taking in all the great little details that made it such a perfect place for an upmarket housing development.
He wondered whether he could offer her something tantalising to call off the protest. He might have to dump the fellow protestor guise and reveal his true identity or he could simply contrive to act as a middleman to broker a deal. At any rate, he played with the idea of contributing something towards the community, something close to her heart that would make her think twice about continuing a line of action that was never going to pay dividends. Harold had been right when he’d painted his doomsday picture of a close-knit, hostile community determined to fend off the rich intruders with their giant four-wheel drive wagons and their sense of entitlement. They’d be wrong but since when did right and wrong enter into the picture when emotions were running high?
The Tycoon’s Ultimate Conquest Page 5