London's Eligible Bachelors
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He remembered the way she had straddled him, her pale, naked thighs on either side of his waist, and he felt the first uncomfortable stirrings of desire—until he reminded himself that that was not why he was here.
Sabrina pushed the door open and thought how chilly Guy’s grey eyes looked, and how unsmiling his mouth. She told herself that this would be one short evening to get through and then she need never see him again. He had lied to her, she told herself bitterly.
‘Where would you like to go?’ she questioned.
‘You live here.’ He shrugged. ‘How the hell should I know?’
‘I meant do you just want coffee—or a drink?’
He remembered that night in Venice and the lack of interest with which he’d greeted the wine. Yet tonight he could have willingly sunk a bucketful of liquor. ‘A drink,’ he said abruptly.
Me, too, she thought as she led the way across a cobbled courtyard to one of the city’s oldest pubs.
Inside, a log fire blazed at each end of the bar and the warmth hit her like a blanket.
‘Go and find a seat,’ he instructed tersely. ‘What do you want to drink?’
‘B-brandy.’ She shivered violently, despite the heat of the room.
She found a table far away from the others. She suspected that their conversation wouldn’t be for general consumption. Then she slipped her coat off and sat there waiting for him, her knees glued primly together—like a girl who had just been to deportment lessons.
He brought two large brandies over to the table and sat down opposite her, aware of the way that she shrank back when their knees brushed.
‘Oh? So shy, Sabrina? Don’t like me touching you?’ He held his glass up in a mocking toast. ‘Isn’t that a little like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted? You weren’t so shy in my bed, were you, my beauty?’
She gulped down some brandy, the liquid burning welcome fire down her throat, and her cheeks flushed with indignant heat. ‘Did you bring me here just so you could insult me?’ she demanded. ‘Is that what you’d like, Guy?’
He shook his dark head and sipped his own drink more sparingly, surveying her over the rim of his glass with eyes which gave nothing away. ‘Not at all.’ But he bit back the unexpectedly explicit comment about what he would like.
She put the glass down, feeling slightly dizzy with the impact of the burning liquor on an empty stomach. ‘What, then?’
He dipped his hand deep into his trouser pocket, aware that her eyes instinctively followed the movement. Aware, too, that she certainly wasn’t immune to him either. He watched with fascination as her eyes darkened and he could sense that she was resisting the desire to run her tongue over her lips.
‘Recognise this?’ he asked casually, as he withdrew the thin gold chain with the pretty little ring and dropped it on the polished surface of the table in front of her.
Sabrina’s heart pounded with guilt and shame. ‘Don’t insult me even more by asking me questions like that!’ she said bitterly. ‘Of course I recognise it! It’s mine—you know it’s mine! I left it in your bedroom!’
It lay like an omen before them.
‘Then why hide it from me?’
She opened her mouth to deny it, but could not. He knew. He was an intelligent man. She was cornered, and she reacted in the same way that all trapped creatures reacted. She attacked. ‘You lied to me, too!’ she accused.
His eyes narrowed. ‘When?’
‘You implied that you were employed by the company—you didn’t tell me you owned it!’
He nodded and his eyes took on a hard, bright glitter. ‘Yes, I heard about your discussion with Prince Raschid’s emissary.’
‘She insulted me!’
‘So I believe.’ His lips flattened into a forbidding line.
‘She was jealous,’ said Sabrina slowly, as she recognised now the emotion which had made the woman’s voice so brittle. ‘Jealous that I was in your bedroom.’
‘Yes.’ His gaze didn’t waver.
‘Have you slept with her, too?’
‘That’s none of your business!’ he snapped, but something about the dark horror written in her eyes made him relent. ‘Of course I haven’t slept with her! She’s a business acquaintance I’ve met on barely half a dozen occasions!’
‘And you met me once,’ said Sabrina hollowly.
‘That’s different!’ But he didn’t pause to ask himself why.
‘So why did you lie to me about owning the company?’
He paused deliberately and met her eyes with a bitter challenge. ‘I wanted to be sure that it was me you were turned on by, and not all the trappings.’
‘As though I’m some kind of cheap little gold-digger, you mean?’ Sabrina glared at him. ‘And you lied to me about when you were leaving Venice, too!’ she accused.
He raised a dark, arrogant eyebrow. ‘Did I?’
‘You know you did! You told me you were staying for a few days, yet the airport said you had a flight booked out that afternoon!’
He gave her a look of barely concealed impatience. ‘Oh, that!’ he said dismissively. ‘So what? Flights can usually be changed.’
‘And if they can’t?’ she challenged.
‘Then you buy another ticket.’ His eyes glittered. ‘A small price to pay under the circumstances.’
The cool, arrogant statement told her in no uncertain terms his true opinion of her, and Sabrina stared at him with hurt and anger in her eyes. ‘These particular circumstances being sex with a stranger, you mean?’
He smiled. He certainly preferred her fighting and spitting to that lost look of despair she’d worn when they’d first walked in here. ‘You were there, too, Sabrina. That’s what we did—had sex.’
‘Yes,’ she said bitterly, thinking that he didn’t even respect her enough to dress up what had happened by calling it lovemaking.
‘And you still haven’t answered my question,’ he observed coolly. ‘About the ring.’
Shakily, she grabbed her glass from the table and drank from it.
He wondered whether she was aware that her tiny breasts moved with such sweetness beneath the fine sweater she wore. A pulse began to beat insistently at his temple and he jabbed an angry finger at the chain. ‘So why hide it from me, Sabrina?’
She stared down into the trickle of brandy left in her glass and started to feel nervous. ‘Can I have another drink, please?’
‘No, you bloody well can’t!’ He didn’t take his gaze from her downcast head. ‘Sabrina? I’ll ask you again. Why hide it from me?’
‘I d-don’t know.’
‘Oh, yes, you do.’ He sucked in a deep, painful breath. ‘Is it an engagement ring?’
Well, now he would know what type of woman she really was. ‘Yes. Yes, it is. You know it is!’
He nodded, unprepared for the jerking pain of jealousy. And a bright, burning anger—as fierce as anything he had ever experienced. It pierced like an arrow through his heart. He tried to stay calm, but it took every shred of self-restraint he possessed. ‘I see.’
There was something so wounding about the way he said those two empty words that Sabrina looked at him with a question in her eyes.
‘Now I understand,’ Guy said heavily. He pushed the chain across the table towards her and gave a hollow, humourless laugh. ‘You must have had a lot of explaining to do.’
She stared back at him in genuine confusion. ‘Explaining?’
He leaned back in his chair a little, as if close proximity to her might taint him. Or tempt him. ‘Well, yes. Hell, I know you’re a liberal woman, Sabrina—you certainly proved that—but surely your fiancé would be a little jealous if he found out about your little lapse?’ His mouth curved. ‘Though maybe not. Maybe you’re the kind of couple who play away.’ He lowered his voice into a sexy, insulting whisper. ‘Then get turned on by telling each other all about it. There are couples like that, or so I believe.’
The blood left Sabrina’s face and she stared at him in horror, scarcely able to make any sense of his words. She would have risen to her feet and walked out there and then, except that her legs felt so unsteady she didn’t think she would be able to stand properly. ‘How d-dare you insult me?’ she whispered.
‘You’re honestly asking how I dare?’ His eyebrows disappeared into the still damp strands of his ebony hair. But now it was his turn to look outraged as he leaned forward, his voice little more than a harsh, accusing whisper. ‘Quite easily, actually. When you meet a woman and she does what you did to me that night, it’s kind of disappointing to discover that she’s got some poor sucker of a fiancé waiting on the sidelines.’
His mouth twisted as his anger drove him on remorselessly. ‘Maybe you were bored with him, huh? Or were on the lookout for someone a little more…loaded.’
He deliberately gave the taunt two meanings, and his dark gaze flickered insultingly in the direction of his lap, seeing her flinch as her eyes followed his. And then he shifted in his seat, angry and uncomfortable, realising that he was starting to get turned on. What the hell did she do to him? ‘Was that it?’ he snarled. ‘Were you looking for someone with a little more to offer than your home-spun boy?’
Sabrina felt sick and she shook her head, unable to speak. But he didn’t seem to be expecting an answer because he ploughed on, a hard, clipped edge of rage to his voice.
‘So what did you tell him? Did you describe in full and graphic detail the things I did to you? The things you did to me? Just what did you tell him, Sabrina?’
The unwitting inappropriateness of his question brought her a new kind of strength, and she wanted to reach out and to wound him, just as he had wounded her.
‘Nothing!’ she choked out. ‘I didn’t tell him anything! I couldn’t, could I? Because he’s dead, you see, Guy! Dead, dead, dead!’
And the spots which danced before her eyes dissolved into rainbows, and then, thankfully, into darkness.
CHAPTER SIX
GUY knew that Sabrina was going to faint even before the great heavy weight of her eyelids flickered to slump over her eyes. The colour blanched right out of her face and she swayed, slender and blonde as a blade of wheat.
He caught her just before she slid to the ground, pushing her head down to her knees while with his other hand he reached round to undo the top button of her shirt. He felt her wriggle beneath his fingers.
She groaned. ‘Guy—’
‘Don’t try to say anything.’ His words were controlled and clipped as he rubbed the back of her neck, while inside his mind raced. A dead fiancé. His eyes narrowed. Why the hell hadn’t she told him that right at the beginning?
Sabrina felt dizzy, dazedly aware that the other customers must be staring at her and knowing that the last thing she wanted was to attract more attention to herself. She needed to get out of here. And fast. But Guy’s fingers were distracting her so. She tried ineffectually to shrug off the fingertips which massaged so soothingly at the nape of her neck.
He felt her flinch beneath his touch and his mouth hardened. ‘Don’t worry,’ he ground out agitatedly. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
How could he hurt her any more than she had been hurt already? As if his words had not wounded her and left her smarting. She felt the salty trickle of a tear as it meandered its way down her cheek and she sucked in a choked kind of sob. As if she were listening through a cotton-wool cloud which had dulled all her senses, she heard Guy talking to someone else. And then he was easing her head back and dabbing at her damp temples with some deliciously cool cloth.
She opened her eyes with difficulty, startled by the flickering gleam of concern which had briefly softened the hard eyes. ‘I’m OK.’
‘You are not OK,’ he contradicted her, crouching down so that his face was on a level with hers. ‘Do you want me to take you home?’
In this state? Why, her mother would start fretting about her—and hadn’t she had enough to worry about over the last few months? ‘Can we wait here for a little bit?’ she asked weakly.
Guy made a slow, glittering appraisal of all the curious faces that were turned in their direction and frowned. ‘Or somewhere less public? There are rooms upstairs. Why don’t I see if we can use one—at least until you recover.’
Sabrina stared at him in undisguised horror. Surely he didn’t imagine for a moment that…that…
‘Oh, I see.’ Guy gave a low, hollow laugh. ‘Is that what you think of me, Sabrina?’ he questioned. ‘So governed by my libido that I’d take any opportunity to pounce on the nearest woman, even though she’s only half-conscious?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘No, you didn’t have to,’ he said grimly. ‘The accusation was written all over your face. But don’t worry, princess—that’s not really my thing.’
Sabrina let her head fall back against the rest. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’
‘You don’t have to. Come on, let’s go upstairs,’ he said, and his arm was strong at the small of her back as he helped her to her feet.
The temptation to just lean back and lose herself in the warm haven of his arms was overwhelming, but Sabrina feebly pushed his guiding hand away from her. Touching him in any way at all was too much like trouble.
‘I can do it myself,’ she said stubbornly.
He looked as if he didn’t believe her, but didn’t argue the point, just walked right behind her in case she stumbled and fell.
Gripping the bannister with a grim kind of determination, she was glad when they reached the top and he pushed open the door of one of the rooms.
It was as different from his suite in Venice as it could have been—clean and middle-of-the-road, with a mass of chintz and swagged fabrics—and Sabrina heaved a small sigh of relief. She certainly didn’t need reminders in the way of vast, luxuriously appointed beds or priceless paintings.
She flopped down onto the flower-sprigged duvet and heaved a sigh of relief.
Guy stood beside the bed, looking down at her, his face impenetrable as a disturbing thought nagged at his conscience. ‘So why the hell did you faint?’
Reproach sparked from her eyes. ‘Why do you think I fainted, Guy? Don’t you imagine that the things you accused me of would make most women feel ill?’
But he shook his head. ‘Harsh words are not normally enough to make a healthy young woman pass out.’ His eyes threw her a cold, challenging glitter. ‘You’re not pregnant by any chance, are you?’
She supposed that he had every right to ask her, but that didn’t make answering any easier. Especially not when the look of abject horror on his face told her exactly what he would think of that particular development.
‘No, I’m not.’ She lifted her head. ‘And please don’t imply that that was something in my game plan. We took precautions, remember?’
He wished she hadn’t reminded him, though maybe he only had himself to blame—he had been the one who had brought the subject up. But her defiant words only painted the most gloriously explicit picture of the way she had made the putting on of those damned condoms into some of the single most erotic moments of his life.
He forced himself to express the harsh truth. ‘And precautions fail. Everyone knows that.’
Sabrina stared at him as life and energy began to warm their way around her veins once more. And anger. ‘Then you should have given more thought to that before we made love, shouldn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said bitterly. ‘Maybe I should—only I wasn’t thinking too straight at the time.’
‘And just how would you be coping now if I told you that, yes, I was pregnant?’
He glittered her a chilly look. ‘I’m in the fortunate position of being able to support a child—’
‘Financially, you mean?’ she challenged. ‘Certainly not emotionally, by the sound of it.’
‘Anyway, you’re not pregnant, are you, Sabrina?’ he snapped. ‘So it’s academic!’
But the nagging and worrying thought was that she could have allowed herself to get pregnant, and then never seen him again. Because Guy was right. Precautions did fail. Yet falling pregnant had been the very last thing on her mind. ‘Maybe we both acted like the world’s two biggest fools!’
He didn’t agree with her blurted declaration, just continued to subject her to a cool, steady scrutiny. ‘So, if pregnancy is not the reason for you fainting, what else could it be? Have you been eating properly?’
‘I…yes…no,’ she admitted eventually. ‘Not really.’
‘For how long?’ he clipped out.
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Since Michael died, I guess.’
Guy felt the flicker of a muscle at his cheek, unprepared for the sharp kick of unreasonable jealousy. So the fiancé had had a name, had he? ‘And how long ago was that?’
There was no way to answer other than truthfully, but mentally Sabrina prepared herself for his disapproval. ‘Four months,’ she told him baldly.
There was silence. ‘Four months?’ he said heavily, as though he must have misheard her.
She didn’t look away. ‘That’s right. I expect I’ve shocked you,’ she said. ‘Haven’t I?’
He gave a bitter laugh. ‘One way and another, I’ve done a pretty good job of shocking myself lately.’ Four months? His mouth hardened. It threw what had happened into a completely different perspective. He had wondered about her spectacular and uninhibited response in his arms.
So had he just been a substitute for the man who had died? A warm, living body filling her and reminding her of what life should be?
‘You didn’t waste much time, did you?’ he said flatly.
‘And here comes the condemnation,’ she said in a low voice.
‘It was an observation.’ He walked over to study an unimaginative little hunting print and resisted the temptation to punch his fist against the flowered wallpaper. When he turned around to face her, Sabrina could see the fire and the fury that sparked from his eyes. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me about it before?’
She bit her lip, willing her eyes not to fill with tears. ‘Why do you think?’ she said tremulously, before she had had time to think it through.
Guy stilled, his eyes narrowing perceptively. ‘Because I wouldn’t have made love to you,’ he said slowly. ‘Because even if it had killed me—’ and he suspected that it might have gone some way towards doing that ‘—there is no way that I would have taken a vulnerable woman to bed and seduced her over and over again! But you wanted me badly, didn’t you, Sabrina?’ he concluded arrogantly. ‘So much that you weren’t prepared to risk not getting what you wanted! That’s why you didn’t tell me!’
Sabrina shook her head, and it felt as though it were filled with lead. ‘You wanted it, too.’ She bit her lip guiltily. ‘You make me sound passive—and I wasn’t. We both know that. We both wanted it…’
‘Badly,’ he put in softly, seeing the answering colour which flooded her cheeks. ‘Very, very badly. Yes, we did.’ He shook his head in a gesture which was the closest he had ever come to confusion. ‘The question is why we both wanted it—so much that it drove reason and sane behaviour clean away.’
‘We were sexually attracted,’ she said shakily. But it had been much more than that. She forced herself to forget the warm glow of recognition she had experienced the very first time she had set eyes on him. As if she had known him all her life. Or longer. She stared at his handsome face and tried to sound coolly logical. ‘I’m sure that kind of thing happens to you all the time, Guy.’
He shook his head in anger. ‘But that’s just the point, dammit—it doesn’t! Oh…’ He shrugged as he saw her disbelieving face. ‘Women come on to me all the time, sure…’
Sabrina’s smile turned into a grimace, wondering if he had any idea how much he had just insulted her.
‘But usually it leaves me cold,’ he reflected thoughtfully. ‘I haven’t had casual sex since I was a teenager.’ And never like that, he thought achingly. Never like that.
Sabrina flinched. ‘I don’t remember coming on to you,’ she objected, but more out of a sense of pride than conviction. ‘I thought it was you coming on to me!’
He threw her a look of mocking query. ‘It was pretty mutual, Sabrina. You’re not going to deny that, are you?’
No, she wasn’t going to deny it. She looked down at her lap, as if the knotted fingers lying there would provide some kind of inspiration.
‘I’m still waiting for an answer, princess.’
The resolve which had deepened his voice made Sabrina frown at him in alarm. ‘That sounded like a threat!’
He shook his head. ‘Of course it isn’t a threat,’ he said patiently. ‘But surely you aren’t deluding yourself that we don’t need to talk about what happened.’
She bit her trembling lip. ‘C-can’t we just call it history, and forget it ever happened?’ she croaked.
‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘Of course we can’t. I think you owe me some sort of explanation, Sabrina.’
‘I owe you nothing!’
He wanted to know. He needed to. ‘Why did you run away the next morning?’
‘Why do you think?’ She shuddered as she remembered waking up all warm and replete in his bed. ‘Because I realised what I had done! And it was never going to be any more than a one-night stand, was it, Guy? Besides, you lied to me—so how could I trust you?’
‘And wouldn’t it have been more sensible to have thought all this through before it actually happened?’ he demanded. ‘I didn’t drag you back there with me! You weren’t drunk!’
His condemnation was like a slap in the face and Sabrina flinched beneath his accusing stare.
‘So what was I?’ he demanded. ‘A substitute? Did you close your eyes and pretend it was Michael?’ He ignored her look of pain, remorselessly grinding the words out. ‘Any man would have done for you, wouldn’t he, Sabrina? I just happened to come along and press the right buttons.’
She met the dark, accusing fire in his eyes. ‘You honestly think that?’
‘I don’t know what to think. It’s not a situation I’ve ever found myself in before. Thank God.’ His gaze narrowed into a piercing grey laser, and then he saw her white, bewildered face and felt a sudden slap of conscience. ‘You look terrible,’ he said bluntly.
‘Thanks.’ She sat up a bit and sucked in a breath. ‘I’m feeling a bit better, actually.’
‘Well, you don’t look it. ‘I’m going to ring down for some soup for you. You can’t go home in that state.’
‘Guy, no—’
‘Guy, yes,’ he countered, reaching out to pick up the phone, completely overriding her objections.
Soup and sandwiches arrived with the kind of speed which suggested to Sabrina that he might have already ordered them. Had that been the muffled conversation with the landlord she had overheard?
She told herself that she felt too weak to face food, but the stern look on his dark face warned her that if she refused to eat, he didn’t look averse to picking up the spoon and actually feeding her!
Guy sat and watched her. The thick broth sent steam over her pale features, but gradually, as the bowl emptied, some of the roses began to creep back into her cheeks. He saw her half-heartedly bite into a sandwich and then look at it with something approaching awakening—as if she had only just learnt how good food could taste when you were hungry.
Sabrina wiped at her lips with a napkin and sighed, aware of the glittering grey eyes which were following her movements with a steely kind of fascination. He hadn’t, she realised, eaten a single thing—he’d just sat there and watched her like a hawk.
She flicked him a questioning look. ‘You’re not hungry?’
‘No, I’m not hungry,’ he said flatly. ‘And I think it’s time I got you home.’
She shook her head. He was too potent a presence, who had demonstrated the depth of his contempt for her. She didn’t want him invading any more of her space. She didn’t need any more aching reminders of just how devastating he really was.
She had blown it with Guy Masters by being too greedy. She should have given him her telephone number and gone back to her own hotel that night.
But nothing could change the fact that she had been desperate for him, driven on by an unrecognisable hunger she’d been unable to control.
Well, it was too late now. What man wouldn’t be filled with contempt at what she had allowed to happen, and so soon?