The Greek's Ultimate Conquest. KIM LAWRENCE
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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.
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