by Kim Lawrence
‘You couldn’t know,’ he admitted, trying to be fair. Which was the only thing at that moment stopping him coming down on her really hard. ‘But the last time Natalia went to a beauty salon there was an...incident—’
Tess nodded. ‘When the bathroom doors at the place were not wide enough to accommodate her wheelchair?’
‘She told you?’ When he had raised the subject later his sister had said she never wanted to talk about it.
Tess nodded.
‘And yet you...’ He shook his head in an attitude of disbelief, recalling the mortified tears running down Nat’s cheeks when she had relayed the incident. ‘Unbelievable! If you had a shred of imagination or half the empathy you like to pretend...’ Words seemed to fail him. ‘You know what I think?’ he gritted out.
Tess was fed up making excuses for his autocratic attitude, making allowances for his feelings. She shrugged, reminding herself that she didn’t care what Danilo thought of her. ‘Wild guess...you’re going to tell me?’
‘I don’t think you give a damn about Nat. The only thing you care about is being proved right. You just have to meddle! Well, I suggest you get your own life in order before you start interfering in others’.’ She flinched, and for a moment he almost wished the words unsaid—almost.
‘Let me spell out the situation. They come to her.’ Nat had picked out her season’s wardrobe from the comfort of home, she had beauticians, hairdressers and the like on speed dial, and she was not to be fobbed off with a trainee.
‘It’s a trip to the hairdresser’s,’ Tess said in a small but determined voice. She didn’t want to make an issue of this but she would.
He breathed out, the air hissing through his clenched teeth. ‘You would expose Nat to insult just to prove some point?’
‘What point?’ she echoed, bewildered. ‘I’m not trying to prove any point.’
‘You walk in here and...you can’t keep your nose out of anything, can you?’
Tess’s head came up with a jerk. ‘This isn’t about me.’
‘Everything is about you, since you arrived.’ He dragged a frustrated hand through his hair and glared down at her glossy head.
‘I don’t like to see people unhappy, and if I can—’
‘Bring a little light into their lives? Well, I don’t need a damn sunbeam.’
What do you need, Danilo?
Her head spun. He had covered the space between them in a couple of strides and stood there towering over her, but when he spoke his voice was soft and every syllable carried a warning that made her shiver. ‘And for the record, I am not a nice person.’
She heard the warning in each soft syllable but stood her ground, not because she was brave or stupid, but because her feet felt as though they were literally nailed to the ground. Being this close to him felt like standing on the brink of a live volcano. Close enough to feel the heat of his body as he towered over her, Tess could feel the waves of frustrated anger rolling off him.
‘You think that I would not do anything for my sister!’ he rasped out.
‘I think you’d do anything for your sister, including keeping her hidden away in her golden cage, never leaving in case someone looks at her the wrong way.’
The coiled tension in his bunched muscles didn’t lessen, but as she watched the dull colour run up under his olive-toned skin she felt a stab of sympathy push through her own hurt and anger. She worried at the plump, soft flesh of her lower lip with her teeth. Hell, it ought to be easy to dislike him but it wasn’t. Danilo was devoted to his sister and that was the problem. He wanted to protect Nat from everything, and the poor girl, who worshipped him, let him.
‘That is a gross exaggeration,’ he managed finally.
She responded with a shrug. ‘If you say so.’
‘I do,’ Danilo gritted through clenched teeth.
‘You can’t protect her from everything,’ Tess said quietly. ‘Obviously that salon won’t be getting her custom but you underestimate her, you know. She is a fighter. She realises that the thing to do if people are ignorant is not to hide away but to educate them.’
The fact that what Tess said made sense only increased Danilo’s levels of seething frustration and resentment towards her. ‘And is this little lesson intended for me?’
She gave a rueful grimace and accompanied her response with an eloquent shrug of her slender shoulders. ‘Sorry, you can take a teacher out of the classroom but—’
Jaw clenched, he ignored the olive-branch apology. ‘I am not one of your little five-year-olds, Miss Jones, and I am not impressed by homespun fortune-cookie philosophy.’
‘Then it’s just as well I’m not interested in impressing you,’ she snapped back, losing what sympathy she felt in the face of his refusal to relinquish his control over his sister—talk about tunnel vision!
Talking to this man was like banging her head against a stone wall. ‘I realise,’ she continued with acid sweetness, ‘it probably makes you feel big and strong to rush to the rescue of helpless maidens, but we’re not all weak and helpless. Some of us, the ones who don’t feel it necessary to consult the great Danilo Raphael before we decide what side of the bed to get out of in the morning, can actually look after ourselves!’ she finished, breathless and struggling to hold on to her attitude of self-righteous scorn—he looked mad again, extremely mad!
Halfway in she had been regretting her impetuous words, born of sheer frustration, but they had just kept coming and now, as she stood there hands on hips refusing to give him the satisfaction of seeing her take refuge behind one of the large bales of hay, she was really wishing that she had kept to the safe moral high ground instead of sinking to his level.
Danilo allowed his eyelids to flicker downwards, giving himself time to recover from the scene that was playing inside his head. The mental image involved Tess getting out of bed naked. It was a distraction that even his strong mental control was unable to banish, but he was able to use the same control to think past it and ignore the physical responses that he had zero control over.
It was crazy. Tess was attractive, sure, but in no way his type. This was what happened to a man when he ignored basic needs: they came back to bite him! He should have spent the night with Alex even if that had meant closing his eyes and thinking of...
Of their own volition his eyes slid to Tess’s mouth. Did she bi...? He stopped the thought. There were some things about Miss Jones he didn’t need to know.
Who are you kidding, Danilo?
He forcibly dragged his gaze from her mouth and told himself the sooner the better that he did something about the desert his sex life had been of late. If not Alex, there were others who did not contradict him at every turn. It was a matter of carving some time into his hectic schedule or going quietly insane; he needed meaningless sex urgently. At the moment, he could not afford any other sort—not that the situation was proving a hardship for him.
In the past he’d had what could be loosely termed long-term—as in three or four months—relationships, and he knew they required more time and energy than he was prepared at the moment to devote to his sex life. And those sorts of relationships had a habit of spilling over into the other parts of his life, and he appreciated how much more smoothly life ran when you compartmentalised. Sex was necessary as food was necessary, but not while there were more important things to deal with, like filling his father’s shoes, and seeing his sister walk. He had no space left for the inevitable emotional demands of a relationship when it moved on from being simple sex.
‘I do not need women to be weak to feel like a man, and you were not coping so well alone.’ He watched her pale at the below-the-belt hit and immediately felt like a total heel.
‘Well, I walked into that one, didn’t I?’ She gave a crooked smile, a characteristic he had come to recognise was very much her own, and she spread her arms wide, causing the sleeveless blouse she was wearing to ride up and reveal a sliver of tummy.
Half an inch and it sent a flash of h
eat through Danilo’s already overheated body. He reacted with anger.
‘You never walk. You jump, you run, you’d throw yourself off a cliff if it felt like the right thing to do. And while you do the right thing the rest of us... Do you know what I felt like when I saw Nat sitting on the back of that damned horse?’ He dragged a hand across the stubble that had erupted on his jaw since he had shaved that morning and watched her eyes soften with compassion. She just didn’t seem to get that he was not a man who needed compassion, or sympathy, or anything else from her.
Nothing, Danilo?
He ignored the inner voice but couldn’t stop the hungry journey of his eyes as they slid down her body and made the return trip a lot slower.
‘I can see that. I know I should probably have run it by you.’
One dark brow lifted. ‘You think?’
‘But you heard Nat. She wanted to surprise you.’
‘Job well done,’ he said grimly.
‘I thought you were all right with it now?’
‘I am. It’s you I’m not all right with!’ he bellowed then without warning. ‘I’m beginning to dread coming home.’ It wasn’t until he made the claim that Danilo realised that the opposite was true. ‘You realise the position you’ve put me in, don’t you? If I forbid Natalia to do it again I’m the monster. You like to turn me into a monster, don’t you?’
She rolled her eyes, exasperated by his determination to misrepresent everything she said. ‘I don’t think you’re a monster. I think you’re—’ His upheld hand stopped her.
‘Don’t tell me, please. I doubt my ego would survive.’
She arched a sceptical brow but her laugh was strained. His lofty attitude of amused indifference made her want to stamp her foot but that really would have given him something to laugh at.
‘I think your ego is armour plated.’ She had never encountered anyone with arrogance and a sense of superiority so bred into the bone. Beautiful bones. She brought her lashes down in a concealing sweep, ignored the twisting sensation and counted silently to ten before lifting her gaze to the man towering over her.
‘You can’t wrap your sister up in cotton wool. Well, you can, because I suppose you can do pretty much what you like, and it’s true she’ll be safe, but what sort of life will that be for her, Danilo?’
The appeal in her eyes passed Danilo by. He was unable to think past her assumption that he was free to act on impulses. His eyes darkened as his gaze slid to her mouth. If that were true...
‘You think I can do what I like?’ Had she made the accusation a few years ago she’d have been right. Back then he’d done what he liked, he’d lived for the moment. His idea of responsibility had been remembering his mother’s birthday and having Christmas dinner at home. Now he couldn’t remember the last time he’d acted on impulse.
And then he remembered: he’d brought Tess Jones into their lives. His eyes slid to the upturned face of the woman standing there, hands on her slender hips, smiling that infuriating, damned condescending smile of hers. Hell, he’d spent a morning closeted with a bunch of powerful individuals who had treated him with respect and sought his approval and he’d come home to this little slip of a woman who showed him not a jot of respect and had demonstrated on every occasion possible she didn’t give a damn about pleasing him.
‘Well, I don’t see anyone telling you what to do,’ she replied.
‘Except you! You go out of your way to disagree with me, challenge my authority.’
‘Maybe,’ she countered, ‘I don’t recognise your authority. People say what they think you want to hear because they’re scared of you!’ she threw back.
He flinched, the white line etched around his sensual lips growing more defined as he lost the last remnants of his air of amused indifference. ‘Are you suggesting my sister is scared of me?’ he demanded, outraged by the suggestion.
‘Not in that way. She just likes to please you. Just because you’re a benevolent tyrant, it doesn’t mean you’re not a tyrant. It wouldn’t do you any harm once in a while to listen rather than dictate.’
‘Any more words of wisdom you care to bestow?’
Well, why not? Tess thought. If she was going to be shown the door there was no point biting her tongue. She might as well get it all off her chest.
‘You’re not always right, Danilo, and you know it—’
‘The only thing I know is—’ There was a strong element of compulsion in his expression and his action as he raised his hand and touched her cheek.
Totally unprepared for his touch, Tess startled, like one of the highly strung thoroughbreds in the stables, and took a hasty step back. She stood there, her breath coming in a series of tiny uneven pants, her shimmering golden stare trained on his face as she slowly lifted her hand to her cheek. Her skin still tingled from the brief contact and her stomach was quivering violently.
‘Wh-why...did you do that?’
‘I didn’t want to.’ He shook his head, unwilling to admit even to himself that the need that had flared without warning inside him was stronger than sense or reason. His nostrils flared as his burning gaze remained trained on her face.
What he wasn’t saying, what was glowing in his incredible eyes, excited Tess in a way she had never experienced before. She watched as he lifted a hand and dragged it across his hair, making the black strands stand up in sexy spikes.
‘Ever since you arrived here—’
He stopped abruptly, as if he could not force the words past the thickening atmosphere that quivered with tension. It reminded her of that stillness before a storm.
Always overpoweringly conscious of his physical presence, his raw masculinity, she felt that awareness jump, reaching an almost cellular level.
Tess’s pulses did some leaping of their own as she struggled to drag her eyes from the muscle that was clenching and unclenching in his cheek.
His voice was so deep it was barely more than a whisper. The driven expression made her want to run away, but for some reason by the time the message reached her brain it said something different. Her eyes didn’t leave his face as she took a step towards him. As she moved closer his hands closed over her upper arms and he impatiently dragged her into him until their bodies were close enough for her to feel the heat of his body, feel the tension in his muscles, inhale the scent of his skin.
It was an unimaginable situation and yet she had pictured it; the knowledge came with a rush of head-spinning excitement. Somewhere in the back of her mind there lingered a small corner, a fragment of sanity that was telling her this was a bad idea, but she determinedly ignored it.
‘Say my name.’
She swallowed, the emotions swirling inside her making her throat close.
‘I want to hear you say it.’
Her head dropped but even with her eyes squeezed tight shut she could still see his eyes, the burn in the midnight depths that awoke a need in her she had never experienced.
His hand went under her chin. Tess resisted, not the strong fingers drawing her face to him, but the heavy drag of desire low in her belly, the heat that made her shiver and her oversensitised skin tingle. Even as she fought she recognised the futility of the attempt. What was happening, and she had no name for it, was happening at a primal level.
Her head tilted back, her neck suddenly not strong enough to support her but it didn’t need to, because his hand had moved, his fingers providing a supportive cradle at the back of her head. Her heart was drumming so hard with anticipation that it drowned out her husky whisper.
‘Danilo.’
He sighed and smiled a slow smile, made up of equal parts predatory intent and heart-stopping tenderness. The combination killed off any lingering resistance as lust, hot and hungry, cut through the dreamy desire.
As he bent his head she reached up her hands, linking them behind his neck. The slowness felt like torture as he bent his head until his mouth was a bare half-inch from hers. She could feel the warm waft of his breath on her skin before
he brushed his lips over the corners of her mouth, and, holding her gaze, he ran his tongue along the quivering outline.
Tess whimpered, the sound lost inside the warmth of his mouth as it finally captured her own. As the slow, sensuous possession deepened it lost finesse and became rough, hungry and raw. The feelings tearing through her were like nothing she had ever experienced or imagined.
She was not conscious of walking backwards until her back made contact with the stone wall of the building. Still kissing her, he slid his hands down her body, one moving to cup the curve of her bottom. She instinctively arched her back, pushing into him, only pulling back slightly as she felt the imprint of his arousal against the softness of her belly.
He said something, she didn’t know what, and she wound her arms around his neck, letting her head fall back as he trailed hot, damp kisses down her throat.
If anyone saw us now they’d assume we were making... She sucked in a startled breath. And they’d be right, or at least they would be if this didn’t stop now.
Right now, Tess!
Digging deep into her reserves, she placed her hands flat on his chest and pushed back. After a moment he reacted to the pressure and let her go. Her knees felt so weak that if it hadn’t been for the stone wall behind her she’d have slid to the floor.
‘You’re right. Not here, not now,’ Danilo said, thinking more clearly than he had done in days. He could see now that he’d been looking at this problem from the wrong angle. Trying to keep Tess at arm’s length was like trying to put out a forest fire with a watering can.
Lighting more fires seemed counter-intuitive but giving that initial conflagration no place to go was an acknowledged method to quench a wild fire. Let it burn itself out but keep it within boundaries.
This was the point where Tess knew she was meant to say, not anywhere, not ever, but she didn’t. As she stared up at him all the feelings he aroused in her narrowed into one beam of white-hot desire that blasted away the image of a face that had haunted her for half her life. The sense of liberation made her feel light-headed.