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He glanced up the drive to where the elegant white three-storey building sat amidst carefully manicured lawns. But instead of commenting on the house Geraint paused to look at Lola instead, his hard-boned face a series of shifting shadows cast by the pale moon and the even paler light from the stars.
‘You do realise that we’ve met before?’ he said suddenly.
Lola found that she couldn’t stop herself from smiling, ridiculously pleased that he had remembered. Of course, bearing in mind his no doubt colossal ego, she really ought to feign ignorance of him, but she dismissed the idea immediately. She wasn’t a good liar at the best of times and for some reason she baulked at the thought of Geraint finding her out in a lie!
She nodded, her glossy hair full of moonlight. ‘Yes, I do. It was on a flight out of London to Paris, wasn’t it?’
‘Ah! So you do remember.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Lola calmly.
‘But you didn’t mention it.’
Lola fixed him with a direct look. ‘Neither did you’
‘Maybe I thought that you wouldn’t remember a mere passenger—you must see thousands of men every working week.’
‘Not remember you?’ Lola gave a pale imitation of a smile. ‘Oh, come on, Mr Howell-Williams—please don’t indulge in false modesty on my account! You happen to be a very memorable man, as I’m sure countless women have told you. I remember you very well, as it happens. You kept requesting tomato juice.’
‘Heavens!’ he mocked. ‘You really do have a good memory, don’t you?’ He lifted his dark brows questioningly. ‘So why did you keep glaring at me whenever I asked you for another drink?’
Lola shifted in embarrassment. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Oh, but it does.’ In the darkness his grey eyes were as cold and as glittering as the finest marble and Lola recognised that he was the kind of man who would chip away until he’d obtained all the answers he wanted.
She decided to give in without a struggle. ‘If you must know, I suspected your motives.’
He stilled. ‘My motives?’ he asked, in an odd, quiet sort of voice. ‘Just what do you mean by that?’
Lola shook her head. ‘Really—it isn’t important.’
‘Oh, but it is,’ he contradicted her, in a voice suddenly soft with menace. ‘Tell me.’
Lola gave him a steady look, realising that the atmosphere between them had suddenly changed to a big freeze, and wondering why.
She shrugged. ‘OK. I’ll tell you if you insist. We keep the tomato juice on the bottom shelf of the trolley because it is one of our least popular drinks. Some of the male passengers seem to have cottoned on to this, and they keep asking for it so that...that...’ Her voice trailed off in embarrassment as she saw the contempt hardening his lips. Oh, why hadn’t she kept her big mouth shut?
‘So that you have to bend right down to get it?’ he finished for her acidly.
Lola blushed again. Hateful, perceptive man! ‘Well, yes,’ she admitted, the look on his face making her wish that a hole could open up in front of her and swallow her up.
‘Do you really think,’ he said witheringly, ‘that I would be reduced to resorting to such juvenile ploys? And if I did want to see your knickers I would hardly need to make myself sick through drinking excessive amounts of tomato juice. After all, those abbreviated outfits that you wear for work leave very little to the imagination!’
‘Why, you—’ Maddened beyond thinking, Lola swung her hand out to slap his face, but his reactions were much too speedy for her, and he caught her wrist easily, pulling her right up against his chest and looking down at her, his wolfish smile making his shadowed face look both intimidating and delectably kissable.
‘You what?’ he mocked. ‘Beast? Brute? Bastard? Some or all of those? Want to think badly of me, do you, Lola Hennessy? Well, why not have some thing to really focus your anger on?’
And he did what she had been wanting him to do all evening. He gathered her into his arms and crushed his mouth down on hers in a kiss which sent all her senses into overdrive.
She was aware of the sweetness, of the intimacy as their tongues locked, of the desperate need to hold onto him as tightly as possible and never let him go.
She heard the low moan he made in the back of his throat as he sought to pull her even closer against him and Lola clung onto those wide, strong shoulders, massaging them like a woman possessed, the rocky bulge of his muscles steel-hard against her fingertips.
She could feel the leanness of his abdomen against her rounded belly, and she could sense the tension in him as he shifted his weight, moving his hips in a distracted circle, which made her acutely aware of just how easily he could be turned on too.
The realisation that things were spiralling out of control was what cleared Lola’s mind from the constricting mists of desire, and the facts began to seep coldly into her brain as she forced herself to remember how he had insulted her.
And yet here she was allowing herself to be meekly compromised by necking in a bush with him!
Angrily, she pushed him away. I don’t know what you think you‘re—’
‘Oh, spare me the hysterics, do,’ he interrupted calmly, and then he actually yawned—although Lola was convinced that it was deliberate! ‘When will you women realise that it really doesn’t count if you declare your unwillingness after the event? Particularly,’ he drawled insultingly, ‘when your willingness to participate was overwhelming at the time.’
His grey eyes glinted with remembered pleasure. ‘That was some kiss,’ he murmured softly, his eyes narrowing as he looked down at her, seeming taken aback by the dazed look on her face. And some of the abrasiveness had left his voice when he said, ‘Come on—I’ll walk you to the door.’
For about ten seconds Lola was completely speechless and then she made up for it. ‘Do you really think that I would let you anywhere near my house after that?’ she spluttered indignantly.
‘Why ever not?’ He looked perplexed.
‘Because I’m not used to being man-handled by jumped-up Lotharios who think that caveman tactics will have a woman swooning in their arms every time!’
‘And you are claiming not to have enjoyed my so-called caveman tactics?’ he drawled, his eyes glittering as he recalled that Lola had done exactly that. ‘I rest my case,’ he added insultingly as her hot, guilty cheeks added fuel to his argument.
‘Perhaps you’d better go,’ she suggested from between gritted teeth. Before she said something she might regret, she added silently.
‘Go? Sure.’ He gave her an unsettling smile and turned away with a lazy assurance which filled Lola with an inexplicable kind of fear. He did not look like a man who was going too far.
‘Goodnight, Lola.’
‘Wh-where are you going?’
‘Home.’ He raised his dark brows at her in sultry question. ‘Unless that was an oblique invitation for me to stay?’
‘Wh-where do you live?’ she demanded nervously. ‘On the estate?’
He smiled. ‘I’m afraid so. Although only temporarily, you understand. I’m staying at Dominic Dashwood’s house.’
‘B-but that’s next door!’ Lola spluttered. ‘To me!’
‘Exactly. So we’ll be neighbours.’ His eyes glinted with a wickedness that excited her, and with something else, too—something which unsettled her, unnerved her. Something she couldn’t define.
A chill, nebulous dread settled on her skin like a fog as she tried to imagine Geraint Howell-Williams living next door.
’N-neighbours?’ she stumbled.
‘Mmm. Now won’t that be fun, Lola?’
CHAPTER TWO
THE trolley rattled like a brass band as Lola struggled to push it up the last few yards of the aisle with something approaching dignity.
Perhaps Geraint Howell-Williams was right, she reflected as she tugged the tiny skirt down over her bottom. The yellow minis, edged with blue piping, left very little to the imagination. Or was it just something to do with her own rather curvy figure, which made the already inadequate skirt seem to ride even higher up her thighs?
And what the hell are you doing even thinking about Geraint Howell-Williams, anyway? she asked herself crossly. He is just a man you met for about an hour last night. A rude, arrogant, egotistical man who kissed you without asking permission first and let things rapidly get out of control. That’s how much you mean to him. That’s how much he respects you.
And you hate him! she told herself fiercely.
The only trouble was that saying the same thing over and over again did not necessarily make you believe it. She had already spent an almost sleepless night alternatively fretting and fuming, punching the pillow with a violence which alarmed her, and then feverishly burying her head in it as if it were Geraint’s face, like a woman possessed.
Consequently, she had drifted off just before the alarm clock rang, and she had staggered out of bed feeling like death—dreading the thought of having to face a flight to Rome, and then a stopover there.
By the time Lola pushed the trolley into the gallery, her best friend Mamie was waiting for her, pinching olives from the left-over hors d’oeuvres and shoving them into her mouth like a hamster.
Lola loved flying, but it was even better when you were working with someone you knew. And she and Mamie had started working at Atalanta Airlines together on the very same day, almost seven years ago.
‘You look terrible,’ observed Mamie, offering Lola an olive.
Lola waved her hand in refusal. ‘Thanks very much,’ she said waspishly.
‘Didn’t you sleep?’
Lola sighed. ‘You could say that.’
‘Any particular reason?’
Lola shook her head. It would not do her already pitiful reputation with men any good if she admitted to losing sleep over someone who was little more than a passing acquaintance!
‘Never mind.’ Marnie thoughtfully removed a piece of pimento from her fingernail. ‘I know just the thing to cheer you up. Or rather just the man! Have you noticed him yet?’
Lola began unloading the trays and wrinkled her nose. How she wished that people would not stub their cigarettes out in the sherry trifle! ‘Who?’ she asked absently. ‘Don’t tell me the captain has emerged from the cockpit and is strolling about smiling graciously and being pleasant to all the passengers?’
‘No, no, no!’ said Mamie. ‘Nothing as farfetched as that! No, I mean the guy two rows from the front in First Class.’
‘But I’m not working in First Class,’ Lola pointed out patiently. ‘Am I?’
‘That hasn’t stopped every other stewardess on the flight making it their business to go and look at him. Or should I say ogle him?’
‘I never look at passengers in that way,’ said Lola haughtily. ‘It’s unprofessional!’
Marnie had now started picking prawns off tiny triangles of brown bread and was curling them into her mouth with a long scarlet talon. ‘No, you don’t look at passengers—but you somehow get one of them to leave you a whacking great mansion worth almost a million pounds! Nice work, Lola!’
Lola opened her mouth to protest, as she seemed to have been protesting ever since the totally unexpected legacy had come her way, then shut it again. She had all but given up trying to explain away her unexpected stroke of fortune.
Even if she painted the facts as baldly as possible—that a passenger she had met through her job and her charity work with the airline had taken a shine to her and left her a whacking great housewell, people still put two and two together and came out with a rather grubby five.
Sex, sex, sex. That was all anybody seemed to think about these days! And even if the giver of the house had been over sixty and the recipient a mere twenty-five all but the very nicest people tended to think that Lola had had a red-hot affair with him.
When the truth was that she had never had a red-hot affair with anyone!
‘How’s your mother?’ asked Mamie. ‘Has she seen the mighty inheritance yet?’
Lola shook her head, so that the jaunty blue and yellow cap which all the cabin crew absolutely loathed looked in danger of toppling from her high-piled curls. ‘Nope,’ she answered gloomily. ‘Doesn’t want to know anything about it. I’ve tried telling her that everything associated with the wretched house is above board, but I don’t think she believes me.’
‘Oh, she’ll come around,’ said Mamie comfortingly. ‘And it isn’t as though she was always visiting you when you lived in the flat, is it?’
‘No,’ answered Lola reflectively. ‘She’s a very solitary sort of person, I guess. Doesn’t mix much.’
‘Unlike you,’ smiled Mamie.
Lola shrugged. ‘I don’t seem to have been mixing much recently—the house takes up every bit of my spare time, it’s so big!’
‘My heart bleeds for you!’ mocked Marnie.
‘Then come and live there too!’ offered Lola impulsively. “There’s plenty of room.’
Mamie shook her head. She was engaged to be married and she didn’t want to share Rob with anyone, not even Lola. ‘Just because you want a tame member of staff?’ she quizzed jokingly. ‘No way!’
Lola looked down to find that someone had smeared most of a vegetarian rissole all over the side of their tray. She tutted. Passengers could be absolutely infuriating sometimes.
‘Lola?’
Lola turned around at the gentle tap on her shoulder.
It was Stuart, the purser, the flight attendant in charge of all the cabin crew. ‘I’d like one of you two girls to come up and help out in First Class, please,’ he said. ‘We’re run off our feet up there:
Mamie winked meaningfully at Lola. ‘With pleasure,’ she purred. ‘I’ll be right along, Stuart.’
The purser shook his head. ‘I’ll take Lola, if you don’t mind, Mamie. She’s the only female on board who seems to have any common sense to speak of.’
‘Why, thank you, Stuart!’ Lola beamed. ‘Recognition at long last! Does that mean promotion is about to wing its way to me?’
‘It means,’ growled Stuart, ‘that you seem to be the only woman on board this flight who hasn’t fluttered up to that man in First Class on some pathetic pretext or other, that was so patently transparent he must have been laughing all over his face. I really don’t know what they all see in him!’
‘You just wait!’ mouthed Mamie to Lola.
‘He’s bound to have an ego the size of Wembley Stadium!’ commented Lola, pulling a face. ‘I had an awful night, Stuart, with hardly any sleep to speak of—must I really go and pander to some pretty little rich boy with an over-inflated sense of his own importance?’
Stuart laughed. ‘Go on with you! I want someone up there who won’t come over all silly when she sets eyes on him! Just go and tidy yourself up a bit first, would you, Lola?’
‘Cheek!’ Lola retorted, but she checked her hair and slicked on a bit of lipstick and scraped a particularly stubborn curl back into her tortoiseshell hair-clip, before making her way to First Class, her eyes automatically straying to two rows from the front on the right-hand side, where Mamie had said that...that...
Lola broke out into a cold sweat, shaking her head in a desperate kind of denial. She took a deep breath, shut her eyes very briefly, then looked again.
It was him.
Definitely him.
Geraint Howell-Williams was on her flight, and if she didn’t get out of the way very quickly he would see her, and she would have to serve him, and—
‘Excuse me, stewardess,’ came a deep, mocking voice, and Lola saw, to her absolute horror, that the dark head had turned around and that she was very firmly fixed in the gaze of a pair of stormy grey eyes.
For one mad moment she thought of pretending that she had not heard him, of turning tail and running back up to the other end of the aeroplane, but of course she couldn’t do that. She had a fantastic work record at Atalanta Airlines and she was damned if she was going to let Geraint Howell-Williams interfere with that!
Unconsciously smoothing down her skirt, she glided over to him in her most professional manner, and gave him a frosty smile which she hoped no one but him would recognise as being supercilious.
‘Yes, sir? What can I get you?’
‘You could try getting rid of that superior expression on your face,’ he answered softly.
She kept the saccharine smile fixed firmly to her lips. ‘If I look superior, sir, then perhaps it’s because I am superior.’
He stared up at her innocently. ‘Are you trying to offend me, Lola?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so.’
A suspicion leapt to the forefront of her mind.
Geraint Howell-Williams had now travelled with Atalanta Airlines twice in the past few weeks and before that she had never noticed him. And she would definitely have noticed him. ‘Are you following me?’ she quizzed.
There was an infinitesimal pause. A briefly guarded look hardened the devastating face before the grey eyes cleared and looked up at her with studied amusement. ‘Is that an occupational hazard, then, being followed? Perhaps it happens to you a lot, Lola?’ he suggested sardonically.
‘Oh, ha, ha, ha!’ she retorted crossly.
‘And I have to say that much as I admire your riotous curls and bright blue eyes and luscious curves—’ his eyes glinted—do you really think I’d go to all the trouble of taking flights around all the major capital cities in Europe just so that I could catch a glimpse of them?’
When he put it like that, her question sounded absolutely ludicrous. ‘I suppose not,’ she answered, and forced herself to wait for his order without squirming.
It was strange, really, that in all her years of flying she had never had a problem about being in a servile position with passengers. Until now.
For the first time ever she found herself resenting having to stand with a polite smile glued to her mouth, when, if the truth be known, she would have liked to stomp off down the aircraft and as far away from Geraint Howell-Williams as possible!
He stretched his legs out lazily in front of him, and Lola’s eyes were reluctantly drawn to the muscular shafts of his thighs.
Reclining, he seemed even taller, if that were possible. The seats in First Class were specifically designed to give the passengers more leg-room—but, even so, Geraint’s legs only just fitted comfortably.
An incomprehensible light lit the stormy grey eyes as he glanced up to find her gaze riveted to the lower half of his body. ‘Does looking at my legs give you pleasure, Lola?’
That was just the trouble—it did! She had been having all kinds of impure thoughts about them, and the most disturbing thing was that she was discovering that with Mr Geraint Howell-Williams she could very definitely respond to him on two levels.
On a social level she would have liked to march him down the aircraft and boot him into the hold with all the suitcases—as a kind of punishment for his outrageous cheek and determination to embarrass her. Whereas on a physical level...
She somehow managed to keep her blush at bay and gave him a calm, empty sort of look. ‘I haven’t really given them a lot of thought, to be honest, sir.’
‘No?’ he queried softly.
‘No,’ she answered repressively.
‘Liar!’ he taunted.
‘Mr Howell-Williams—’
‘Oh, Geraint, please; we’re a little too—um—familiar to stand on ceremony, wouldn’t you say?’
She carried on speaking as if he had not interrupted her with that timely little reminder of how she had swooned in his arms last night. ‘I am not paid to be insulted by passengers, no matter what section of the aircraft they are sitting in. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, miss,’ he answered meekly.
Lola glared, but it took an effort. A huge effort. How extraordinarily annoying it was that she wanted to just curl up at his feet and melt with pleasure at that little-boy-lost look he was subjecting her to at the moment.
‘What would you like?’ she asked, indicating the drinks list in front of him. ‘Champagne?’
‘Not particularly.’ He shrugged. ‘Champagne is essentially a drink of celebration and there isn’t really a lot to celebrate with me sitting down here and you standing there, dressed in that ridiculous uniform—’
‘It is not a ridiculous uniform! It’s just...’
As if controlled by an outside force, their eyes were simultaneously drawn to the saffron-coloured jacket and matching short, short skirt she wore, all piped in a rather hideous shade of cornflower-blue.
Never in her life had Lola been quite so aware of the amount of thigh on view—and rather chubby thigh, come to that, because she certainly wasn’t built on the same scale as some of the skeletal beauties who worked alongside her.
‘A little on the short side?’ he supplied helpfully, and his gaze roved with undisguised interest up the entire length of her legs. “Though I have to say that from where I’m sitting...’
‘You sexist pig!’
He shrugged. ‘What’s sexist about admiring your legs? You were admiring mine—’
‘I was not!’ declared Lola heatedly.
‘Is anything the matter, sir?’
Stuart had glided silently up to Geraint’s seat and he shot Lola a questioning look as her heart sank.
Wait for it, she thought. He’s going to say goodness only knows what about me, and I won’t have a leg to stand on! The passenger in front must have heard me calling Geraint a sexist pig, and we are taught never, never, never—no matter what the provocation—to insult the passenger!
She sighed resignedly as she saw Geraint open his mouth to speak and blanked from her mind the inevitable scene as she imagined him relating her rudeness to the purser.
Thank heavens for my inheritance, she thought, with a fleeting flash of humour. At least I’ll be able to sell the house and live off the interest until I decide what I want to do with the rest of my life...
‘How lovely!’ Stuart was beaming at her, his face wreathed with unfamiliar smiles.
‘L-lovely?’ stumbled Lola in confusion. ‘What’s lovely?’
‘That you’re having dinner with Mr Howell-Williams tonight.’
Lola narrowed her eyes and was challenged by a spectacular grey gaze. ‘I am having dinner with Mr Howell-Williams?’ she repeated incredulously. ‘Tonight?’
Stuart looked slightly bewildered. ‘Well, that’s what he said—’
‘Oh, Lola likes to play hard to get,’ came a voice of silky amusement with an underlying hint of steel. ‘Don’t you, sweetheart?’
Stuart nearly dropped his bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon at the easy familiarity conjured up by the word ‘sweetheart’. ‘So you two know each other?’ he quizzed eagerly.
‘We’re neighbours,’ Geraint revealed.
‘Oh.’ Stuart seemed fascinated by this. ‘You live at St Fiacre’s too, do you?’
Geraint smiled. ‘Only for the time being, until I find a place I like enough to want to buy. I’m renting my friend Dominic Dashwood’s house—he’s gone away for the winter.’
Barbados, probably, thought Lola, or somewhere equally exotic. Dominic Dashwood was the neighbour she hardly ever saw, and he made other rich men look like paupers. His wealth was legendary—but not nearly as legendary as his reputation and appetite for beautiful women.
Stuart beamed at Lola,. ‘You should have said that you knew each other! Mind you,’ he confided to Geraint, ‘our Lola always gets on exceptionally well with the passengers! Gets more invitations to dinner than anyone else on the craft—and the occasional surprise present from a passenger!’ He winked at Lola, and moved away down the aisle.
‘Oh, does she?’ asked Geraint tonelessly, scarcely seeming to notice that Stuart had left, and for a moment Lola was aware of an odd look in his narrowed grey eyes. A fierce, intent kind of look. Just for a moment there Geraint Howell-Williams had looked almost... almost... bitter...
‘There’s no rule against accepting gifts from passengers!’ Lola stated, extremely irritated by that critical look on his face, which made her sound much more flippant than she usually did. And which, she realised, had the unfortunate effect of making herself sound like some kind of second-rate gold-digger!