by Julia James
She knew its name. Had always known its name.
But now—now she felt its power. Power that she had never known.
Till now.
Her hands at her coffee cup stilled. She saw his hand move across the damask surface of the tablecloth. Saw, as if in slow motion, his hand reach for hers.
And touch. Touch with those long, sensitive fingers that she had watched cradle the golden flute of champagne. Now they were devastatingly cradling her fingers, turning her hand over so that her fingers were resting on his square, strong palm.
She felt a thousand feathering sensations in every millimetre that he touched.
His eyes held hers.
For an endless moment he did not speak. The whole world was this moment, this sensation.
Then, in a low, husky voice, he said what she had both longed to hear him say—and dreaded.
‘I want you very much. Will you stay with me tonight?’
He had said it. Beneath the low murmur of his voice, emotions surged like a flood-tide in him.
All evening he had felt the tide running. Running strong and silent and so powerful that its strength all but overwhelmed him. Where had it come from, this overpowering tide that was sweeping through him? Sweeping away things he must not let it sweep away.
He tried to drag those things back, because he must not let them be lost, but the tide was running stronger and stronger still.
He knew its name. Had felt its power before. But never like this.
He tried to fight it. But it was like swimming against a current so strong that he could make no headway. Nor did he want to fight it. That was the worst—that knowledge, that grim recognition deep inside him, that what he was doing now was not what he had planned to do.
It should not have come to this. He should have stopped it, halted it in its tracks, forced it by main strength back down into the subterranean depths of his being where it belonged.
But he couldn’t—and now, unstoppable, incurable, it had taken the ascendant. Brought him to this moment.
His eyes held hers, his hand had taken hers, and now nothing else mattered.
Except one thing.
The answer to his question.
He saw her eyes flare. Her lips part.
And then, like a long, slow exhalation, he heard her speak.
‘I can’t …’
For a moment he was still—quite still. Then, his eyes never leaving hers, never letting hers go for an instant, a second, he spoke, too.
‘Why not?’
His fingers, without conscious volition on his part, had tightened around hers.
Her eyes were huge, haunted. Haunting.
‘I can’t,’ she said again. Her voice was a thread of breath. ‘I have …’ She swallowed, and for a moment her face was stark and bleak. ‘Commitments.’
‘There is someone else?’ He spoke sharply, like a knife cutting.
The moment of truth now. Truth on so many points. All of them impaling him.
Slowly, she nodded. ‘Yes. Someone very important to me.’
He let go her hand. Forsaking it as if suddenly it were a poisonous snake. His jaw tightened.
‘And yet,’ he said, clipping out each word, harsh and hard, ‘you chose to dine with me tonight?’
She bit her lip. He could see it, and it sent a punishing flare through him to see the whiteness of her teeth indent into the soft curve of tender flesh.
‘I … I had to.’ She was forcing the words out, he could see, her eyes still wide and huge. ‘I told you—’
His eyes narrowed. Something in her face was pinched suddenly.
‘Ah, yes, your charming employers—threatening you with—what is that clumsy English expression? Ah, yes—threatening you with the sack if you did not accept my invitation to dinner.’
She’d slipped her hand from the table.
‘Yes,’ she said in a small voice. Her eyes would not meet his.
He got to his feet. It was an abrupt, sudden movement.
‘I regret, then, mademoiselle, that I have so mistaken the situation. Permit me, if you will, to offer you my apologies for having done so. And now allow me to place my car at your disposal. Feel free to be driven either to your place of employment or to your home, and, of course, to your “very important someone”.’
He gave a curt nod of his head and walked away.
Fury blasted through him. Blind, explosive fury. A white rage behind his eyes, obliterating everything.
It was irrational, deranged, insane.
He knew it was—knew it and didn’t care. Didn’t care as he strode out of the restaurant and across the marbled foyer to the bank of lifts. He punched the button savagely.
He wanted out.
Damn her. Damn her to hell for what she’d done. Letting him get sucked, deeper and deeper, into that running tide. Gazing at him like that all evening, sending her message to him as loud and clear as if she were using a PA system. Sitting there looking so extraordinarily beautiful that it had taken all his strength, all evening, not to reach out for her.
And then, when he had, she’d turned him down.
The fury blitzed in him again. She’d turned him down. Said no.
No.
A single word.
Denying him what he wanted.
Her.
Because that was what he wanted—he wanted her. He wanted her now—right now—tonight. He wanted her to be here, her hand enclosed in his, waiting to step inside the lift, the lift that would be closed and private. And he would turn her to him, and slide his hands around that slender, pliant waist, and slant his mouth down over her soft, sensuous lips and taste, taste the sweetness she would offer.
He would mould her body to his, feel the ripe mound of the breasts that he’d been seeing all evening, and would have the exquisite sensation of their pressure against his hard, muscled torso. His hands would shape her spine, fingers splaying out, reaching to the delicate, sensitive nape of her neck, while his mouth played sensuously, arousingly, with hers.
He felt his body tightening, felt the tide that had been running stronger and stronger all evening reach that point non plus that was unbearable to endure—all courtesy of one, single word.
No.
The lift doors sliced open as the lift arrived, and he stepped forward.
And halted.
He frowned, struck by a memory.
‘No’ had not been the word she had used. She had used a quite different word.
Slowly his hand came up to halt the doors closing again, forcing them back with unnoticed strength so that they juddered apart. Then he stepped back onto the marble floor.
Lissa Stephens hadn’t said no to him. She had said, ‘I can’t.’
He stilled. Slowly, the white rage of frustration and denial and the fury born of something he knew he had to push aside drained from him.
All logic, all reason had left him—swept away on that tide. He took a harsh, heavy breath, standing immobile by the lift. That tide which had swept away everything else except the single, overriding imperative of the evening.
But that hadn’t been the purpose of this evening. This evening had been about something quite different.
Emotion drained from him to be replaced by bleak, belated recognition. In his head sounded yet again the low, strained sound of her voice.
‘I can’t …’
And she had said exactly why that was so. Because of the existence of ‘someone very important to me.’
Like a squad of booted soldiers the words marched back inside his head from which that swirling, overpowering tide had swept them. But they were back now, with their heavy, booted tread that trampled on anything and everything in their way.
Logic, reason, sense.
With bleak, controlled acquiescence he let them in.
Lissa Stephens had turned him down. Turned him down because she had commitments elsewhere to someone ‘very important’ to her. And that someone was Armand. And that she had turned
him, Xavier, down tonight meant only one thing—Lissa Stephens’s loyalty was to his brother.
Did she love Armand? Was her commitment to him out of love, or because a rich man was offering her marriage? Offering her an escape from the casino, from that squalid place she lived, from the poverty of her life?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t know.
For all that he had found out about her, for all the time he had spent with her, talked with her, she was still a mystery—a contradiction. A woman possessed of rare beauty, as well as—so his conversation with her this evening had amply demonstrated—clear intelligence. And yet she chose to work where she did. Was prepared to make herself look like a tart night after night, and yet had walked out of her job when she was required to do anything more than look like one. A woman who accepted an invitation to dine with him, a wealthy man—and yet who refused to let him buy her a dress to go with the invitation. A woman who gazed deep into his eyes as if she were prepared to drown herself in them—and yet who said ‘I can’t’ when it came to anything more.
Well, he thought, with a bitter, bleak weariness, it was his turn to say I can’t.
He could do no more. He accepted it. He had done everything in his power to discover the true worth, or lack thereof, of the woman his brother said he wanted to marry.
A hollowing, savage humour stabbed through him. But it had no humour in it—only a bleak, bitter irony that cut to the very quick of him. In the end he had discovered only one thing about her that he knew to be true. And it was a knowledge that mocked him.
Cursed him.
As it would curse any man who shared his fate, a fate he would wish on no man, but which had fallen upon himself.
Because the one, overwhelming truth that he knew about Lissa Stephens was that he desired her. Wanted her.
For himself.
The woman his brother wanted to marry.
Forbidden desire.
A curse from hell itself.
CHAPTER SIX
LISSA sat at the table, very still. The champagne, the wine, all the magic of the evening had drained out of her, emptying out of her like water down a well.
She hadn’t thought it would be like this. So brutal.
But then—she gave a twist to her mouth—she hadn’t thought at all, had she?
She’d sat here, floating on air, entranced by the magic of the evening, and had never thought of how it must end.
Because she hadn’t wanted it to end. She knew that this was all there could be, and she hadn’t wanted it to end, had wanted it to go on for ever and ever.
But it hadn’t. Of course it hadn’t. This had been a time out, that was all, a brief, magical time out. A gift that would at the stroke of midnight dissolve, leaving nothing behind but memories.
She felt her throat tighten. She had known the evening would end, but not like this.
She heard again, felt again, the savage civility of his voice, felt his absolute repudiation of her, dropping her hand as if it were rotting meat.
Did he have to be so brutal?
She felt tears prick in the back of her eyes and blinked, angry with herself.
Oh, come on. Wise up. Why the Little Miss Sensitive act suddenly? she berated herself. He’d said ‘dinner’, but obviously he’d had more in mind than that, and he hadn’t liked being turned down. Men never liked being turned down—and a man like him probably never had been. That was why he’d stormed off like that. She’d caught him in the most delicate part of male anatomy: his ego.
Her face puckered. But he wasn’t like that. He hadn’t been all evening. He had been wonderful. Attentive, charming, engaging, with that dry, ironic humour that brought a glint to his eye and a smile to her mouth. He had been the perfect dinner companion, and as for everything else—well, that had just been magic, the only word for it.
Until that brutal departure. Her throat tightened again, and she took a jerky sip of cooling coffee, forcing it down to try and open her throat.
It had been so out of place, that flare of icy anger. She took a painful breath. Surely a man as sophisticated, as obviously experienced with women as he was, could have managed the scene more gracefully? Even if he’d smarted at her rebuff, he need not have shown it—he could have extricated himself with élan, with a smooth word, affecting regret, with sophistication and charm. But he hadn’t. Obviously when it came to bedtime, Xavier Lauran, for all his cool sophistication, all the seductive magic of his eyes, his voice, was just another man who thought the price of a meal included a woman for the night.
He’d promised her ‘just dinner’ and like a fool she’d believed him.
She slid out from her seat. Presumably the waiting staff would take care of petty concerns like the bill, and although there was someone instantly there to help pull the table back sufficiently and bid her good-night, she knew it was pretty obvious that her escort had stormed out on her. Well. She gave a silent, heavy sigh. What was that to her? Nothing. Just as it was nothing that Xavier Lauran had proved, after all, to be a man who for all his expensive packaging still operated on the same sordid, commercial premise that any of the punters at the casino did when they thought they could indulge in some ‘private hire’ with the hostesses.
The only difference was, they were more honest about it.
She walked out of the restaurant, head held high.
She needed to change. Her own clothes had been put in another bag from the shop, and she’d checked it in to the Ladies’ Cloakroom. They would be damp still, she knew, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was getting out of here. If the boutique was closed, she’d simply put the dress, stockings and shoes neatly folded inside the original bags, and leave them with the concierge to be given to Xavier Lauran. What he did with them she didn’t care. Hand them on to the next stupid female he wanted to have for dinner … and breakfast.
Not, of course, that breakfast was necessarily on the menu. Who knew? Maybe he just chucked them out after he’d had sex with them and sent them home in his damn chauffeur-driven car. Maybe they were OK with that sort of treatment. Maybe Xavier Lauran deliberately picked up girls like he’d clearly thought her to be, cheap hostesses in cheap casinos, because he knew they’d be so impressed by him, by his flash car and his offer of dinner cooked by a French chef, and the free run of a five-star hotel boutique. Maybe Xavier Lauran deliberately—
‘Lissa—’
She stalled, head whipping around. He was heading towards her, walking from the bank of lifts. His stride was rapid, intent on intercepting her. She started forward again, her pace increasing urgently. She had to get to the Ladies. It would be sanctuary. Safety. Safe from Xavier Lauran, who’d smiled so devastatingly into her eyes and who’d only wanted a night of sex with her.
She made it to the Ladies, hurling herself inside and then standing there trembling. She dived into a stall and plonked herself down on the closed unit. She stared at the locked door.
Her mouth pressed together.
Truth pressed down on her.
Oh, God, what a hypocrite she was. She could rant away all she liked about men thinking that dinner meant bed-and-breakfast, as well, and get on her high horse that Xavier Lauran was no better than any of them. But she knew, as she swallowed through the tight, stricken cords in her throat, that, berate him all she might, the truth was that she was a hypocrite. A one hundred per cent, fully paid-up hypocrite.
She made herself say the words. Say them clearly and plainly in her head.
I would have said yes.
If she could have, she would have said yes.
She closed her eyes, sinking down her head. She would have done it. She would have let him take her by the hand, lead her upstairs, let him take her into his arms, slide his mouth across hers to take the possession of it the way she had wanted right from the very first moment she saw him, let him take possession of her body.
For however long he wanted. For a single hour, a single night—however long he wanted her.
That wa
s his power. That was the power she had felt flowing into her, through her, unstoppable, unavoidable. The power of an emotion that she had never felt before, but which she now felt more intensely, more overwhelmingly than she knew she would ever feel about any man again.
The power of desire.
Her eyes shadowed, and she lifted her face from her hands.
Desire she could never fulfil.
Because it was impossible, just impossible. Nothing in her life made it possible for her to say what she had longed to be able to say, that simple, sighing yes.
She stiffened her spine. Well, it was just as well she hadn’t, wasn’t it? Just as well she’d said, ‘I can’t.’ Because that had unleashed a side of Xavier Lauran he’d hidden from her all evening, ever since he’d denied buying her time for what the casino had sold it to him for.
Anger spurted through her. She was glad of it. Grateful. It helped to scour out the stupid, naïve mush that was making her hide herself away like this. It was as well she’d got the measure of the man, so she could see the ‘magic’ for what it was. For him nothing more than a ritual to be gone through before moving on to the main event of the evening. And when he was denied it he’d turned nasty.
With a heavy, hard heart, she got to her feet. She had to get out of here. She had to get changed and go home, back to her real life. She went out into the washroom area, collecting her bag of clothes from the cloakroom, then retired back into the cubicle to change. The jeans were still damp, but tough. Her jacket would keep her warm enough, and it was still early enough to travel by Tube, which would be warmer. She’d go straight home, not back to work. She couldn’t face it—not tonight. Would Xavier Lauran complain about her to the casino manager? Consider himself short-changed because she hadn’t come across for him, even after all the soft soaping he’d given her? Well, too bad. She’d assumed she was out of a job when she’d left the casino this evening—so if she was, she was.
Leaving a tip for the attendant she could ill afford, she headed out of the Ladies. The beautiful silk dress was folded back into its tissue paper, the shoes nestling in the base of the bag, stockings neatly wrapped. No one would want to wear them, obviously, but they belonged to Xavier Lauran. He’d paid for them, and he would get them back, along with the rest of what he’d dolled her up in.