‘I’M—’
‘With Lucy Cavendish...’ Chloe paused, head tilted in challenge, to let the reminder sink in and had the satisfaction of seeing an expression of shock chase across his handsome face.
‘Lucy...hell, I forgot about her!’ A quick glance located the model, who was deep in conversation with another guest. Nik dragged a hand across his hair-roughened jaw in annoyance; he must have left her standing there looking like... He gritted out a curse. ‘I’m never going to hear the end of this.’
The wrathful, choking gasp of sheer disbelief that escaped Chloe’s lips drew his attention back to her face.
If there had been even the faintest suggestion of guilt in his reaction, she thought it would have gone some way to redeeming him...actually, no, it wouldn’t!
Wanting to make excuses for him made her even angrier—as if there could be any excuse for a man who arrived with one woman and then came on to another with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer!
It made her wonder whose bed he had walked straight into after being in hers.
There had been a time when the thought would have hurt...now it simply made her stomach quiver queasily.
‘It’s so inconsiderate of a woman to expect you to remember that you came with her.’ She produced a saccharine-sweet sympathetic smile, waiting until he frowned slightly in response to her comment before slinging out sarcastically, ‘I suppose she even expects you to be there when she wakes up in the morning.’
The words hung there, every syllable oozing with exactly the sort of subtext Chloe had wanted to avoid. She sounded just like what she hated most: a victim.
Someone to pity.
Her narrow-eyed glare dared him to show it, but, although her comment had surprised a flicker of reaction, it was something else she saw move at the backs of his eyes. Fine, she could deal with something else, actually anything else, but pity.
‘You were asleep.’ This was the reason he avoided one-night stands; there was the potential for the stranger you went to bed with assuming that one night of sex connected you in some deep and meaningful way.
‘I’m not talking about me.’ She lifted her feathery brows in an attitude of mild surprise that he should think otherwise, then, willing herself not to blush, she pronounced bluntly, ‘We had sex but we were not in a relationship. Although it would have been useful if you had woken me as I had somewhere I needed to be.’ She wrinkled her brow, giving the impression she was trying to recall the sequence of events—events that couldn’t have been more indelibly imprinted on her had someone branded them into her soul. ‘I’m pretty sure I was late.’ In her head she clutched the invisible award to her chest as a voice pronounced, And the award for most convincing liar goes to... Chloe Summerville!
The dream had once more become a nightmare before he’d ever reached the moment where he’d made the choice to leave her sleeping, not that waking her had ever really been an option. Good manners versus getting to his dying father’s bedside after receiving the call about his stroke had been a no brainer.
And yes, he’d been relieved not to have to speak to her again.
Relieved to avoid the potential morning-after awkwardness and recriminations. It hadn’t been his first one-night stand, but those other encounters had all been with fellow journalists, and there had been some mutual respect on a professional level between him and the smart, independent women who had shared his bunk. There had been no need to explain the desire he had felt to escape the sights and sounds of war for a few hours and let passion drown it all out. The connections had been brief, pleasurable, but nothing deeper remained.
He wouldn’t have cared if any of them had forgotten his name, or implied that the memory they’d walked away with after sleeping with him was that they’d had somewhere else to be but had overslept! His ego took a few startled seconds to recover from the blow while recognising the irrationality of his reaction. Chloe Summerville’s cool attitude was exactly what he looked for in women he gravitated towards. Women who had a male approach to sex; women who did not expect or even welcome sentiment in their liaisons, but enjoyed sex in an uncluttered and simple way.
‘Sorry, I had someplace I needed to be too...but unlike you I wasn’t too late.’
His father’s prognosis had been grim. The doctors had been all for calling time and letting nature take its inevitable and cruel course, but his mother had insisted they try a third lot of clot-busting drugs. When Nik had walked into the room, his father had been sitting up with nothing but a slight hesitation in his speech to show he’d even had a stroke and people had been talking about miracles.
‘Well, it’s...nice to see you again, lovely to catch up...’ Chloe said absently, adopting the tone you used when you bumped into someone whose name you kept forgetting. ‘But if you’ll excuse me, tonight is about work and I need to circulate.’ Giving her best impression of a woman with her priorities firmly sorted, she flashed him a generic smile and turned back towards where Spiros stood talking to a small group of guests.
Even if he’d taken everything else out of the equation the dismissal would have awoken his interest, if only for the fact that it was new territory for Nik. Women did not usually walk away from him. His curiosity overcame his irritation... So, all right, it was something a lot stronger than irritation, but he didn’t need to waste energy trying to identify it as it morphed seamlessly into the much easier to deal with lust and his eyes became riveted on her long, sinuous curves and the gentle sway of her hips.
If sleeping with her again was the way to finally lay his nightmares to rest, great. If not, the trying was going to be fun. Not trying at all had stopped being a possibility the second he’d set eyes on her.
The frustration raging through his veins made it hard for him to formulate a plan of action, as there had been no plan required in his dreams. On a conservative estimate he’d been making love to Chloe every other night for the past year...except this wasn’t a dream, it—she—was the real deal! And Chloe Summerville was more in every way than the woman he remembered. A halfwit could have worked that out in thirty seconds.
And Nik was accounted to be quite intelligent.
She had been pulled into a group several feet away from where he stood alone, and he watched like a hawk as she lowered her lashes over a smile in response to something Spiros had said. In profile he could see the little quiver of the fine muscles in her throat and along the delicate line of her jaw, and he wondered why he found it so fascinating.
Was he finally losing his mind?
* * *
Chloe’s legs were still shaking but, as there was no longer any imminent possibility they would give out beneath her, she let go of the image of herself lying on the floor and people staring down at her. Sad, they’d say, she used to be able to stand on her own two feet... She suddenly realised a moment too late to avoid awkwardness that the extended silence was one she was meant to fill. Chloe gave an apologetic smile.
‘Sorry. I wasn’t following; I was just trying to remember if I put an aspirin in my bag.’ She delved into the limited depths of her bag, her hair falling in a concealing curtain around her face.
Still she couldn’t quite escape the conversation replaying in her head... When he had asked her how long it had been since they’d met, she’d had a nasty shock. Up to that point she hadn’t known that she knew the answer even to the day and hour, but she clearly did... God, but it was terminally depressing.
What, she asked herself, had she ever seen in him?
Beyond of course the face, the body, the high-voltage charge of raw, scalp-tingling sensuality he had oozed... Beyond that, nothing at all!
Other than the dark brooding aura tinged with danger and a touch of vulnerability.
Well, he wasn’t vulnerable now and she was no longer the romantic little fool she had been, but, considering her reaction to Nik just now, it was lucky that she had decided celibacy was the way to go... Not for ever—just short term. Who knew what the future held?
But one of the advantages of celibacy was that she could stand here now and look at this incredibly...really incredibly sexy man, and remember, in a way that sort of felt as if it had happened to someone else, how it had felt to have his warm, no, hot flesh slide over hers and it wasn’t a problem.
God, you are such a liar, Chloe Summerville.
In fact, if she had truly believed she was cut out for celibacy long term, it would have simplified life in general, she concluded, studiedly ignoring the scornful voice in her head.
‘You have a headache?’ a woman whose name Chloe couldn’t recall, despite being normally good about that sort of thing, asked.
‘It’s not that bad.’
Then Nik touched her arm. She knew it was him without even looking at his long fingers brown against her skin, and suddenly it was extremely bad. The thump, thump in her temples was keeping time with her heartbeat as Chloe felt a primitive thrill run along her nerve endings. Deeply ashamed, she waited for the fluttering inside her to subside and, under cover of looking in her bag again, calmed her breathing.
‘Lost something?’ he asked.
‘Just an aspirin; I’m getting a headache.’ And I’m looking at it. But she wasn’t. She looked everywhere but at the tall dynamic figure towering over her, which was not something that happened often when you were five feet ten.
Eyes she had control over, but not her thoughts that drifted back to the moment she had first seen him, as if she were stuck in some sort of mind-destroying time loop. The last thing she had anticipated when they had crowded into the almost empty bar was that she would leave with a total stranger. She’d never been a person who was led by her hormones and, while she’d had any number of male friends, she’d not had a lover.
She had dated, obviously, but things had usually ended in an it’s me not you sort of way. And she had started to think it was—that she was simply one of those women who weren’t highly sexed.
Until that night.
Whatever had been lying dormant within her had surfaced with a vengeance!
‘Oh, Chloe, have you met Olivia?’ Spiros asked, oblivious to any atmosphere, drawing a striking middle-aged woman into the group.
Chloe shook her head, welcoming the opportunity to turn her back on the biggest mistake of her life to this point.
‘Olivia, this is the young woman I was telling you about. Olivia was very interested when I told her about your project; her husband, who isn’t here tonight, is a plastic surgeon.’
Chloe beamed. ‘That’s why you look familiar!’ she exclaimed. ‘I’ve seen the photo of you that your husband has on his desk at work.’
Listening to her, Nik twisted his lips in a cynical smile. The plastic surgeon must be very good at his job because you really couldn’t tell Chloe had had any work done at all. Whatever it had been, he decided, watching her expressive face as she chatted with animation to the older woman, it hadn’t been Botox.
Though now he thought about it there were changes, though not those he associated with surgical intervention. Some of the youthful softness he remembered in her face had gone, had become more refined, revealing a breathtaking bone structure. As he continued to study her the therapeutic benefits having sex with her might bring to him slid to the back of his mind, leaving having sex with her as soon as possible just because he wanted to very much in the forefront.
‘So sorry,’ he interjected.
This time with the touch of his cool hand on her wrist Chloe couldn’t stop herself turning towards him; the intention was defensive, the result was not!
He was standing very close to her and she stiffened, her chest lifting as she took a deep breath and held it while, inside her ribcage, her heart rate climbed like that of an athlete waiting for the starter’s pistol.
Fighting the impulse to cover her mouth with her hand as his eyes drifted to her lips and stayed there, she waited until he had stepped back far enough for her to escape the heat from his body to release the air trapped in her lungs, but unfortunately his aura of sexuality had a wider radius.
‘You don’t mind if I steal Chloe, do you?’ he asked, taking her elbow. To an observer his attitude as much as his body language was suggestive of a long and intimate relationship with her.
The suggestion might have drawn a smile from her if her facial muscles were not locked in what she sincerely hoped was an expression of indifference. What they had shared had been little more than a collision! Granted, an extremely intimate collision... As a series of freeze-frame images flashed through her head they had an almost out-of-body quality to them.
She had fallen asleep in his arms, and as she’d drifted off she’d found herself thinking that she had never felt more comfortable with anyone in her life.
Comfortable was something she didn’t feel right now as he half dragged her across the room; if she could, she would happily have crawled out of her skin. But pulling away would have made her look even more conspicuous.
He came to a halt in one of the deep window embrasures where the half-drawn curtains gave it an element of privacy that Chloe could have done without.
She immediately pulled away, retreating as far as physically possible. He countered her action by raising one sardonic brow.
Chloe embraced the anger that prickled through her with something approaching relief, while simultaneously ignoring the worrying excitement that popped like champagne bubbles in her bloodstream, making her feel light-headed, which probably made the little head toss with attitude she gave a mistake, but she did it anyway.
‘What the hell do you think you are you doing?’ she muttered under her breath.
The silky fair hair that streamed down her slender back settled into attractive waves around her face. As he watched the process he suddenly remembered it had taken a long time to gather it all up in his hand and each time his fingers had brushed her skin she had shivered.
Good question, Nik. What the hell was he doing?
He said the first thing that came into his head. ‘So you’re a royal of where?’
‘Do you mind? I was having an important conversation back there!’
He shrugged his magnificent shoulders. ‘So have a conversation with me.’ So I can look at you. ‘And if by important you mean you were about to get a donation for whatever charity it is... I’ll double it,’ he said casually.
She expelled a hissing sigh. ‘Am I meant to be impressed by your altruism, seeing as you don’t even know what the money is for?’
‘Does it matter?’
She gritted her teeth and fought the impulse to slap him—anything that would break through his armour of sheer selfishness.
‘Clearly not to you!’ she countered contemptuously.
‘You still haven’t told me...’
‘Told you what?’
‘Royal how?’
She gave a growling sound of aggravation through her clenched teeth. ‘My family,’ she said finally in a bored, reading-the-telephone-directory voice, ‘lives on East Vela; it’s an island.’ Most people didn’t have a clue where it was, though most had watched the recent royal wedding on the television.
Nik proved a little more informed.
‘The Vela that has just been reunified.’
She nodded.
‘So where do you fit in?’
Chloe used her stock reply. ‘I’m the sister who hasn’t married the future King.’
‘Lucky you.’
It was not the usual stock response and Chloe bristled defensively at the slightest suggestion of criticism of her brother-in-law. ‘Lucky me? Most people envy my sister!’
‘Do you?’ The speed with which she had jumped to the man’s defence made him wonder if there wasn’t a personal element to her reaction, and the possibility tugged his lips into a cynical sneer.
The sheer unexpectedness of his response made Chloe blink and shake her head. ‘What sort of question is that?’
He ignored the spiky question and reverted to his original comment. ‘I meant lucky because a queen with any kind of history has to be a nightmare for the PR people-lovers with kiss-and-tell stories coming out of the woodwork,’ he explained, pointing out the obvious.
She was tempted, but only for a moment, to retort that her only lover was more concerned about keeping a low profile than she was, so that was problem solved. But what would he say if he knew that? The question circling in her head jolted her back to her usual common-sense mode.
Unable to adopt a sufficiently shallow socialite tone while she was looking at the outline of his disturbingly sensual mouth, Chloe switched her focus to his hard, stubble-covered jaw. ‘Yeah, it really was a lucky escape for me,’ she began, and then stopped, her eyes darkening as the memories of feeling cheap and used, still fresh and raw, surfaced once again. Why was she pretending to be someone she wasn’t? She didn’t care what he thought of her and her chin lifted a notch in defiance. ‘Oh, why don’t you just call me an easy lay and have done with it?’
His half-closed eyes lifted from the heaving contours of her breasts and collided with her blue shimmering glare. She pulled in a deep breath and, lower lip caught between her white teeth, took a moment to control the quiver in her voice before she drove home her point.
‘Just because you treated me with zero respect, Nik, do not assume that I don’t respect myself!’
She was lecturing him! Nik was too astonished to immediately react to her accusation and too ashamed to admit anywhere but in the privacy of his own thoughts that he probably deserved it.
‘And for the record this is the twenty-first century; nobody expects a prince to marry a virgin bride these days!’
‘Again, that’s lucky or the European royalty would be a doomed species...’ As he spoke the gaps between his words extended as he almost lost track of what he was saying. Her currently outraged attitude meshed with the images and little snatches of memory from that night in his head, flickering faster and faster until he could hear his own thoughts from back then—so deliciously tight, so excitingly shocked... As if everything was new to her, shockingly new! Had she been a virgin?
‘We are a doomed species anyway, I suspect,’ she was saying. ‘They call it evolution, but I suppose royals are a bit like dinosaurs. In the future there will be entire floors of museums displaying our fossilised remains in glass cases.’
‘Evolution is preferable to revolution... How didn’t I treat you with respect?’ he suddenly shot at her, trying to catch her by surprise so she would answer him truthfully.
She said nothing.
‘So you did have a problem with me walking out on you?’
Her eyelids half lowered. ‘It was a first for me, I admit.’
A first? A first of what, exactly? The idea that she could have been a virgin, considering the way she’d approached him that night, was totally crazy, and even if it were true, did he actually want to know? Didn’t he have enough guilt in his life without adding any more? The problem was that now the idea was out there, swimming around in his brain, he had to voice it, even if he did end up looking like a fool.
‘The first time you’d woken up with the pillow beside you empty, or the first time for you full stop?’
She felt a trickle of sweat trace a sticky path down her back and decided to deliberately misunderstand him. ‘First one-night stand? You really haven’t read any of the surveys in the magazines, have you? Everyone’s doing it.’
‘The thing about those surveys is that people lie.’
His intent stare made her feel as though he were looking directly into her head and she could feel the blush she was willing away materialise until she felt as though every inch of her skin were on fire.
‘And I’m not talking about one-night stands,’ he added flatly.
Pushed into a corner, she reacted with cool-eyed hauteur. ‘I really don’t think there’s any need for a post-mortem...but if you’re asking what I think you’re asking, I don’t think I owe you any explanation.’
‘So you were a virgin.’
‘Weren’t we all once...even you?’ Hard as it was to imagine. ‘How old were...?’ Her eyes flew wide. ‘Oh, God, I said that out loud, didn’t I?’
‘I was sixteen and she was...older.’ The glamorous, bored stepmother of one of his friends at boarding school, and he’d been very willing to be seduced. ‘But even at sixteen I would not have thought it the greatest idea in the world to pick up a total stranger in a bar and have sex with them.’
‘It wasn’t exactly planned!’
‘Look, I’m fine with youthful rebellion. I’ve been there and done that, but I sure as hell don’t much like being the unwitting partner of it.’
Chloe felt her embarrassment slip away, incredulous anger rushing in to fill the vacuum; his hypocrisy was staggering. ‘So now you’re the victim and I should apologise? Not that there is a victim, I mean... I just saw you that night and...’ She met his eyes and looked away. ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s not as though you were fighting me off with a stick, is it?’
A laugh was wrenched from Nik’s throat before he closed his eyes and wondered how a man could feel like a defiler of innocence and incredibly turned on at the same time.
‘I guess I crushed a few of your romantic illusions,’ he said heavily.
She sucked in a deep breath. ‘Well, it had to happen sometime so relax; after the therapy I’m totally fine.’ She stopped suddenly, remembering that she was talking to someone who might really have needed therapy for something more than making a poor choice. She’d slept with the wrong man; he’d seen his friend die in his arms. ‘Not that there is anything funny about therapy...in fact, it’s a very useful tool,’ she told him earnestly.
A nerve began to slowly clench and unclench in Nik’s jaw, and it had a mesmeric effect on Chloe.
‘What has my sister been saying to you about me?’
Chloe began to shake her head, thinking his sister’s opinion of him proved that love really was blind... Lust, however, was a completely different proposition... She tilted her chin and refused to acknowledge the shameful ache of arousal she felt just looking at him, but in her own defence this man took the term eye candy to a whole new level! ‘Absolutely nothing...except of course that you are an expert on just about everything. To be totally honest with you, I’d got sick and tired of hearing the sound of your name.’
All the time she had been ripping up at him he’d stood there looking at her in that disturbing way. When she finally stopped talking he placed a finger against her lips just to make sure he was not interrupted. ‘You are really, truly perfect! Hell, I so want to take you to bed right now.’
The raw driven declaration, barely more than a husky whisper, made her catch her breath, the air between them shimmering with suppressed sexual tension. She could only stand there, her eyes wide as he moved his finger down her cheek, the light touch, barely there, making her shiver with delicious sensation.
Her eyes had half closed in drugged pleasure when from somewhere a sliver of sanity shattered the sensual haze.
What the hell are you doing, Chloe?
‘Does that line really work for you?’ She was pretty sure it did, and she’d have been yet another of the women who’d fallen for it if it hadn’t been for that one word...perfect! He still saw her as the woman with the perfect body he remembered from eighteen months ago.
The ugly reality would surely have him running for the hills.
‘It isn’t a line.’ His heavy-lidded eyes moved in a slow approving sweep from the top of her glossy head to her feet in kitten-heeled slingbacks. ‘You look fantastic.’
‘Yes, I know.’ But looks, she reminded herself, were cruelly deceptive. Even if she had been tempted to accept the offer he was making, she knew that it wasn’t about her; it was only the perfect body that he wanted.
The body that no longer existed.
Loss was something she didn’t normally allow herself to feel but it slammed through her now.
‘I’d forgotten how direct you were. It’s really refreshing,’ he said.
The memory of how direct she’d been brought a flush to her face. If she ever regained the sort of confidence she’d once had, then it wouldn’t be with a man like Nik Latsis. It would be with a man who could see beyond her scars, and who would want her for the woman she really was.
‘Ah, well, I’m so glad to have refreshed you, and speaking of which, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to refresh my glass. I’m not interested—is that direct enough for you?’
‘I’d be devastated if I believed you,’ he returned with a level look.
‘Believe me, you are the last man in the world I would be interested in!’ Interested, no, she was fascinated...but equally she recognised it was an unhealthy ‘moth to the flame’ sort of fascination. One that would only lead to her being burnt up, and not in a good way.
‘Never mind, Nik. If I was interested you’d be the first man to know...or maybe the second,’ Lucy Cavendish corrected. ‘My dentist has the loveliest eyes.’ Her smile deepened as she looked at Chloe. ‘So have you.’
Chloe’s face burned with embarrassed heat.
Just how long had the model been standing there listening to them? And yet she didn’t seem even a jot put out by what she’d heard... Maybe because she had heard it all before? Chloe speculated. Maybe she was fine with sharing her man? Or even...? None of my business, she told herself, swiftly closing down this lurid avenue of speculation.
‘Dinner is served and I’m starving,’ Lucy drawled, then, turning to Chloe, she added, ‘I loved your blog, by the way. If you want to know any of the dirty details on this one, I’m the girl to come to.’ She gave her a conspiratorial wink before leading Nik away.