Keeping Her Close: In Christofides' Keeping / The Call of the Desert / The Legend of de Marco. ABBY GREEN
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had some savings to tide them over for a couple of weeks. ‘I’m sorry, Tom, I have no choice.’
Her boss stood back after a long moment and gestured with his arm. ‘Then I’m sorry too, Gypsy, because you’re leaving me no choice.’
She couldn’t say anything. Her throat was too tight. She gathered up her things and left through the back kitchen door, stepping out into the dark and dank alleyway behind the exclusive restaurant.
Later that night Rico stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of his central London penthouse apartment, hands dug deep into his pockets. His pulse was still racing, and it had nothing to do with the beautiful woman he’d said a curt and sterile goodnight to—much to her obvious disgust—and everything to do with a pretty waitress who had confounded him by doing a disappearing act.
She’d done a disappearing act the first time round, but he only had himself to blame for that. He grimaced; if he hadn’t panicked…It still rankled with him that he’d let her get under his guard so easily. He could remember watching her sleeping, sprawled across the bed, feeling seriously stunned at the depth of his desire, still, and the depth of his response to her.
It was that and the overwhelming feeling of possessiveness which had driven him from the room as if hounds were snapping at this heels. He never felt possessive of women. But this evening, the minute he’d recognised her, it had surged upwards again, as fresh as if no time had passed. And she’d run. And he had no idea why.
He pulled out a small piece of paper from his pocket. He’d got her name from the manager of the restaurant, and his men had made short work of tracking her down. He now had Gypsy Butler’s address—for apparently that was her name. He smiled grimly. He would soon find out what exactly he found so compelling about a woman he’d slept with for just one night, and why on earth she’d felt the need to run from him.
The following morning, as Gypsy walked home in drizzly rain from the local budget supermarket, pushing a sleeping Lola in her battered buggy, she was still reeling at what had happened the previous evening.
She’d seen Rico Christofides and she’d lost her job.
The two things she’d been most terrified of happening had happened in quick succession. She defended herself again: she’d had no choice but to leave last night—she’d have been in no fit state to work or deal with Rico Christofides. Her legs felt momentarily weak when she recalled how he’d looked, and how instantaneous his effect on her had been.
He’d been tall and strong and devastatingly powerful. And still as bone-meltingly gorgeous as the first time she’d seen him across that crowded nightclub two years ago.
The night she’d met Rico had been a moment out of time—and most definitely a moment out of character. He’d caught her on the cusp of her new life, when she’d been letting go of a lot of pain. She’d been vulnerable and easy prey to the practised charm of someone like Rico Christofides. But she’d had no clue then just exactly who he was. A world-renowned tycoon and playboy.
Seeing him had made everything she’d ever known pale into insignificance. She knew if he’d been dressed like the other men in the club—in a natty shirt and blazer, pressed chinos—it would have been easy to dismiss him as being like all the rest. But he hadn’t been dressed like that. He’d been dressed in a T-shirt and faded denims which had fit lean hips and powerful legs so lovingly that it had been almost indecent. An air of dangerous sexuality had clung to his devastatingly dark good-looks in a way that had left everyone around him looking anaemic—and awestruck.
But that in itself would have just made him a spectacularly handsome guy; it had been more than that. It had been in the intensity of his gaze across that heaving chaotic club—on her. Dark and mesmerising, stopping Gypsy right where she’d been dancing alone on the dance floor.
The impulse to get out of her tangled head and engage in something physical had called to her as she’d passed the club doors and heard the heavy bass beat just a short while before. It was a primal celebration of the fact that she was finally free of her late father and his corrupt and controlling legacy. When he’d died six months previously she’d felt more emptiness than grief for the man who had never shown her an ounce of genuine affection.
But when the gorgeous stranger had started to come towards her in the club, with singular intent, all tangled thoughts and memories had fled. He’d cleared an effortless path through the thronged crowd—and sanity had returned to Gypsy in a rush of panic. He was too handsome, too dark, too sexy…too much for someone like her. And the way he’d looked at her as he grew ever closer had scared the life out of her.
But, as if rooted to the spot by a magic spell, she hadn’t been able to move, and had just watched, dry-mouthed, as he came to stop right in front of her. Tall and forbidding. No easy sexy smile to make it easier. It was almost as if something elemental had passed between them and this man was claiming her as his. Which had been a ridiculous thing to feel on a banal Friday night in a club in central London.
‘Why have you stopped dancing?’ he’d asked innocuously, his deep voice pitched to carry across the deafening beat, but even so she’d heard the unmistakably subtle accent.
He was foreign. As if his dark looks wouldn’t have told her that anyway. A frisson of awareness had made her tremble all over when she’d noted his steely grey eyes, their colour stark against his olive skin. She’d shaken her head, as if to clear it of this madness, but just then someone had jostled her, heaving her forward and straight into the man’s arms, into hands which held her protectively against his hard body.
Instantaneous heat had exploded throughout Gypsy’s body at the sheer physicality of him. She’d looked up, utterly perplexed, and had sensed real fear…Not fear for her safety, but an irrational fear for her sanity. On a rising wave of panic she’d used her hands to push against his chest and stepped back, answering tightly, ‘I was just leaving, actually…’
His big hands had tightened on her arms—bare because she was wearing a sleeveless vest. Her light jacket was tied about her waist, her bag slung across her chest. ‘You just got here.’
He’d been watching her from the moment she’d arrived. Gypsy had felt weakness pervade her limbs to think of how she’d been dancing: as if no one was watching.
And then he’d said, ‘If you insist on leaving, then I’m coming with you.’
Gypsy had gasped at his cool and arrogant nerve. ‘But you can’t—you don’t even know me.’
His jaw had been hard and implacable. Stern. ‘Then dance with me and I’ll let you go…’ The fact that he hadn’t been cajoling, hadn’t been drunkenly flirting, had imbued his words with something too compelling to resist.
Gypsy’s focus came back to grim and grey reality as she was forced to stop by the traffic lights. She didn’t need to recall the pitifully pathetic attempt she’d put up to resist before agreeing—ostensibly to make him let her go.
But it had had completely the opposite effect. After dancing with her so closely that her body had been dewed with sweat and heat and lust, he’d bent low to whisper against her ear. ‘Do you still want to leave alone?’ To her ongoing shame and mortification, she’d shaken her head, slowly and fatefully, her eyes glued to his in some kind of sick fascination. She’d wanted him with a hunger the like of which she’d never experienced in her life.
She’d let him take her by the hand and lead her out of the club, seeing him as somehow symbolic of the cataclysmic events of the day that had just passed, during which she’d finally let go of everything that had bound her to her father.
She’d allowed herself to be seduced…and then summarily dumped like a piece of trash the following morning. She remembered seeing the curt note he’d left, and how cheap she’d felt—as if all that was missing was a bundle of cash on the dresser.
With an inarticulate sound of disgust at herself to be thinking of this now, the fact that