Passionate Playboys: The Demetrios Bridal Bargain / The Magnate's Indecent Proposal / Hot Nights with a Playboy. Элли Блейк
Читать онлайн книгу.
take those things off,’ he said, sliding into the driver’s seat and turning around.
Heater on full, the cab was hot, but Rose was still shaking. She actually couldn’t imagine ever stopping, ever being warm again. ‘Sorry. My fingers,’ she said, holding out the slim, pale tapering items under discussion apologetically; like the rest of her they were shaking. ‘I can’t f-feel them.’
His dark eyes slid from her face to her fingers. There was a tiny pause before he heaved a sigh that suggested exasperation. ‘Then I suppose I’ll have to do it for you.’
‘Do what?’ The dumb routine was a self-defence mechanism, because she knew if she let herself consider in any serious way what having this man remove her clothes, even in a totally clinical, I’m-saving-your-life sort of way, might feel like, she might do or say something terminally embarrassing.
There was a blast of cold air in response to her question, then another as the passenger door opened and he slid in beside her so close that their thighs touched and slammed the door shut.
The thigh beside her own had all the give of a steel bar. He was an extremely tall, athletically built man and pretty much all of him looked equally hard. He was the sort of man who could make an auditorium seem small!
This was not an auditorium, it was a hot, steamy tin box on wheels, and it wasn’t just his physical presence that made it uncomfortable to share the enclosed space with him, it was the raw sensual energy that cloaked him like a second skin. Though she couldn’t help noticing that his first skin was pretty special.
Embarrassed by the direction of her thoughts, she flicked a sideways glance at his classical profile, her nostrils quivering as she tried not to inhale the subtle male scent of his body. His presence made it impossible to concentrate on anything else but … well, anything but him!
He was totally overpowering and not at all, she reflected, trying to co-ordinate her actions, a comfortable man to be around. When their glances connected, his slightly impatient, she looked away biting her lip because she knew she was acting like some gauche schoolgirl.
For God’s sake, Rose, anyone would think from the way you’re acting that the man is trying to seduce you.
She swallowed and lifted her head determined to match his pragmatic manner as he shifted in his seat so that they were facing one another.
She suddenly laughed.
One dark brow lifted. ‘What is so funny?’
She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’ It was hardly the right moment to inform him that she’d just realised this was the first time she’d been in the back seat of a car with a man.
Rebecca would say her education had been sadly neglected. Rebecca would probably have a point. Some people were simply not born with the reckless, exciting gene and she was one of them. Neither was she particularly highly sexed.
This man probably knew his way around the back seat of a car, she mused, studying his lean, autocratic face through the shield of her lashes, though he had probably moved on from the nursery slopes of fumbling long ago. Nowadays she doubted her imagination stretched to cover the things he could find his way around.
It was some comfort that he definitely didn’t seem as if he wanted to do any of those things with her. She stared at his sinfully sexy mouth. Of course, she didn’t want him to leap on her or anything, but she wouldn’t mind knowing just once what it would feel like to be the sort of woman who made a man’s mind turn to such things.
She could always ask Rebecca, who was such a woman, or maybe lose half a stone.? His terse voice broke into her rambling thoughts.
‘Lift up your arms.’
Rose would have broken contact with those disturbing eyes if she could have but they exerted a strange, almost hypnotic hold.
‘Look, this really won’t be necessary.’ She was dismayed to hear her voice emerge as a breathy whisper without a trace of the amused competence she had intended to inject into it. ‘I’ll change when I get home.’
To her consternation, instead of taking the opportunity to rid himself of her, his body language having made perfectly clear that was what he wanted, he sketched a cynical smile that lifted the corners of his wide mobile mouth.
‘Don’t worry, yineka mou, I’m quite willing to take it as read that you’re incredibly modest.’
Rose was bewildered both by the smile and the distinct undercurrent of scorn in his voice. But the drawled endearment explained the fascinating but faint foreign inflection in his voice she would have puzzled over later when reliving the encounter.
He was Greek, and rude.
Her smile was warmer than it might have been because the latter observation made her feel pretty much an ungrateful wretch—if it hadn’t been for this rude Greek she would most likely now be in a watery grave.
The acknowledgement sent a shiver, stronger than the others that intermittently overcame her, down the length of her spine. She looked at his mouth—it was frankly hard not to—and smiled without as much conviction this time because somehow she found his mouth deeply disturbing, and said, ‘You’re Greek?’
‘Half Greek, half French … did you not read my bio?’
‘Your bio …?’ she parroted, no longer even trying to follow him.
She closed her eyes and leaned back with a weary sigh. Even though she was no longer looking at him she was still very aware of his presence. Considering she had only studied his features briefly, she appeared to have memorised every detail of his extraordinary face. Even with her eyes closed every strong angle and plane was etched into her brain.
‘Most do,’ he observed drily.
And having read all the stuff on the websites, and the reams of nonsense that were printed about him, these women thought they knew him.
He had never fathomed why these women were so drawn to celebrity; something, he reasoned, had to be missing in their own lives that they spent so much of their time fantasising about a total stranger.
‘Sorry, I don’t read as much as I’d like to. If you could just drop me off …’ Her voice trailed off.
Curses sounded like curses in any language and presumably the ones that fell fluently from his lips would have made a less unrestrained Greek blush.
He dragged a hand through his dark hair and regarded her closed eyes with exasperation tinged by concern. ‘You cannot fall asleep!’
‘Sorry … no, of course.’ Her blue-veined eyelids lifted as she gave her head a little shake. ‘I’m really grateful, you know,’ she told him as she tucked her hands under her legs. The circulation was returning to her fingers, and they were throbbing painfully.
‘I think you saved my life,’ she said, rocking forward as the throbbing intensified.
‘What you did was criminally stupid.’
Rose bit her lip, but she supposed that under the circumstances he had earned the right to speak to her as though she were some not too bright child.
‘I’d ask what you were thinking of, but clearly you weren’t thinking.’
‘There was a fox …’ She could only assume that when the ice had cracked it had escaped, or maybe it had never even been stuck …?
‘I saw no fox.’ He dismissed the animal in question with a regal wave of his hand. Clearly he hadn’t seen it, so it couldn’t have been there—not a man who spent a lot of time agonising over self-doubt.
‘Which doesn’t mean it wasn’t there,’ she pointed out.
‘I saw no animal.’ Just a woman determined, it seemed, to end her life. Mathieu relived the moment he had seen her vanish beneath the icy water and his simmering anger surged. ‘What sort of person would walk out onto paper-thin ice to rescue a fox?’