“D id you enjoy yourself, Isabelle?”
As the limo pulled away from the kerb and commenced the return drive to Wentworth Square, Isabelle slipped out of her ill-conceived choice of shoes and pretended interest in massaging the ache from her feet. That gave her time to consider Cristo’s tricky question and an excuse not to consider him. She knew he’d settled on the opposite side of the big car, that he’d loosened his bow tie, that he lounged at apparent ease as he waited on her response.
She had enjoyed the interesting menu and the superb champagne, the music and dancing and surreptitious celebrity-spotting. Although wide-eyed and quietly appalled at the extravagance, she’d enjoyed perusing the jewellery and art, the five-star travel and out-of-this-world experiences offered for auction. She would have enjoyed everything a whole lot more if she’d not been stewing over that kiss.
Why hadn’t she realised that it was part of a carefully orchestrated show? A setup staged for Madeleine Delahunty’s benefit.
On the heels of that stunner had come a second awful realisation. Despite all the self-talk about doing her job and playing a role, somewhere deep inside she had still harboured a kernel of Cinderella-going-to-the-ball hope. She’d believed in the crackling sexual energy when Cristo looked at her a certain way, when he held her hand, when he laughed low and smoky at something she said.
She’d believed in the possibility of a fairy tale, and she’d set herself up for the most crushing of letdowns.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
And the dumbest thing of all? Her reaction. Standing there on the pavement with hot and cold chills of disappointment and mortification churning through her, she’d decided that the only suitable recourse was to play him at his own game. She’d cozied in even closer, she’d possibly even simpered and batted her eyelashes, and she’d thrown herself with uncharacteristic vengeance into the role of besotted can’t-keep-my-hands-off-him lover.
Had she gone too far? Possibly. Probably. But, dammit, she wasn’t going to apologise or back down now they were alone. He’d started it with that kiss. He’d invited her to follow his lead. If he didn’t like how she’d followed—if that was the undercurrent she detected beneath the measured delivery of his question—then tough.
Setting her expression with her best attempt at cool, calm confidence, she turned to face him. “I enjoyed myself well enough, thank you.”
“Perhaps a little too much.”
“Did I overdo it?” she asked disingenuously. “This was my first appearance as a make-believe mistress. I wasn’t sure of the boundaries, so I did as you asked and followed your lead. I’m pretty sure that we established ourselves as a couple. That is what you wanted…?”
“I didn’t know you were such an accomplished actress,” he murmured darkly.
“Why, thank you. My mother would be pleased that all those drama lessons paid off.”
His corner of the car rode in shadowed darkness, and she couldn’t see his face clearly enough to judge his mood, but she sensed she’d surprised him. She wished that didn’t please her quite so much. “So it was all an act?” His voice, too, was a tricky mix of shadow and dark. Hard to judge, hard to pick. “The way you never left my side, the little touches, your hand on my thigh.”
“An act…and payback.”
“For?”
“For putting me in that situation. For not telling me the whole story. For kissing me in front of your friends.”
The car slowed at an intersection, and the fractured streetlight caught his face, revealing his expression for the first time. The slant of his prominent cheekbones, the shadowed planes beneath, the darkening of beard along his jawline. The softened fullness of his mouth hovering close to a smile as he drawled, “Here I was thinking, She’s taken me at my word. She’s trying harder to get under my skin. ”
He was enjoying this. Isabelle couldn’t believe it. Her own jaw tightened with indignation. “I was trying to irritate you!”
He laughed, a rich rumble of sound that coiled around her in sexy loops and pulled tight. “Why does that not surprise me?”
“Does anything surprise you?” she snapped.
Although they had moved on and his expression was again hidden in shadow, Isabelle sensed a shift in mood. She knew the smile was gone. Her heart beat a little harder, a lot quicker.
“You do, Isabelle,” he said, soft, serious. One arm stretched across the backseat, his knuckles grazed the bare skin at her shoulder and suddenly the vast space shrunk, all the air sucked up in that one slice of a second. “Constantly.”
She frowned hard, fighting his insidious charm and the expectant leap of her hormones. With a handful of words and one featherlight touch, he’d managed to turn her outrage inside out. She would not have that. She would not let him get away with such a cheap and obvious distraction. “Is that because I’ve shown such remarkable restraint, going along with every one of your manipulative plans when—”
“Manipulative?” he cut in, still sounding far too unrattled for Isabelle’s liking. “How so?”
Turning in her seat, she fastened him with an incredulous glare. “ Everything in the past week fits under that umbrella. The way you employed me with the sole aim of working the truth about Hugh from me, without any hint of what you were about. The way you used my concern for Chessie and my need of paid employment to coerce me into coming to England and then into playing this role of your lover. I should have known you had an ulterior motive.”
“And if I had told you that my ulterior motive was getting to know you, would you have agreed to continue as my employee? Would you be here with me now?”
Getting to know her? Isabelle’s heartbeat stuttered. No. She’d enjoyed the very fine champagne but not enough to succumb to his smooth talk. Her frown deepened to a borderline scowl. “I was talking about how you used me and our ‘relationship’—” she drew the word out, each syllable served with a heavy dash of sarcasm and a side of fully justified pique “—to deliver a we’re-through message to your last girlfriend.”
“Are you referring to Madeleine?” He sounded surprised, unsure. As if he didn’t know. As if he needed to think it over. As if!
“Unless there were other exes that I missed the pleasure of meeting tonight, then, yes, Madeleine.”
“Is that what she told you? That she is my ex-girlfriend?”
“Not in so many words, but that is the message she delivered.” With every barbed word, with every murderous look. “I felt the daggers in my back. Would you care to check for wounds?”
His breath checked, as if that answer had amused him again. “Later,” he promised. Then, when Isabelle’s glare darkened, “Do not believe everything Madeleine tells you.”
“Are you telling me she’s not an ex?”
“Neither girlfriend nor lover.”
He’d leaned forward to capture her gaze, and despite the deception of the shadows she could not ignore the sincerity in his voice or eyes. Damn him. “Then her possessiveness is…?”
“A misunderstanding.”
Isabelle puffed out a breath full of scepticism. “She misunderstood your interest in her? You’re really ‘just good friends’?”
“Exactly. I’ve known her from the weekend I arrived in England. David and Rani and Madeleine were the first to welcome me. Our parents were the closest of friends. We spent a lot of time together growing up. Our parents jested about us as a couple.” He paused, raked a hand through his hair, and despite the matter-of-fact delivery Isabelle realised that he was uncomfortable with the subject. “My mother has, unfortunately, not given up on the joke.”
“She wants to arrange your marriage?”
“Exactly,” he said darkly. “In spite of her track record, Vivi believes everyone should be married.”
Obviously he didn’t. Isabelle remembered their conversation about Amanda’s engagement and his cynical comments on true love. She also remembered Madeleine’s cutting verbal skills—the woman’s blood might run cold with venom, but her mind was as sharp as her tongue. “Surely Madeleine couldn’t believe that possible, not without some encouragement from you.”
“After her mother died…” He shook his head, expelled a harsh breath. “David took it hard. Madeleine needed a friend.”
And Cristo was that friend, the old family connection. He’d already spoken and demonstrated his desire to do whatever was needed for his extended family. “She got the wrong idea,” Isabelle said slowly, “about your interest.”
“Madeleine has always been headstrong and overindulged.”
Isabelle thought of a few more pertinent adjectives, but she didn’t voice them. Already she had pieced together a picture she understood. Cristo at his kindest would be devastatingly hard to resist. How could she fault Madeleine for wanting him? “She is used to having whatever she wants, and now she wants you.”
“Something like that.”
In the lee of this exchange, Isabelle felt deflated and incredibly vulnerable. She hadn’t needed this extra insight into Cristo’s compassionate side—she was struggling enough with the powerful physical attraction—and now she felt unexpected sympathy for Madeleine and a degree of shame for her actions. This event was named in Rani Delahunty’s honour. The charity raised funds for the cancer that had claimed her life. It would have been a difficult night for Madeleine without having Cristo’s supposed new girlfriend flaunted in her face.
“So you took me along tonight,” she stated tightly, “to show Madeleine what she couldn’t have. Don’t you think it would have been kinder to tell her straight out that you’re just not that into her?”
“I have done so, many times, in many ways, but not tonight. I took you,” he said with the same quiet intensity, “because I wanted to.”
“Not to keep Madeleine at bay?”
“I’ve been keeping her at bay, as you put it, for half of my life. I do not need you for that, Isabelle.”
“But you kissed me because of her,” she persisted, because she had to maintain the fight. She could not start thinking about what he did need from her.
“I kissed you because I’d been wanting to ever since we met.”
“Even though you thought I was pregnant with Hugh Harrington’s baby?”
“I never wanted to believe that. This is what I wanted to believe.” Again he brushed the bare skin at her shoulder, this time as a deliberate demonstration of the man-woman awareness, the lightning streak of sunfire that burned in her nerve endings. “This chemistry, Isabelle, and the honesty I believed in your eyes.”
“Honesty?” She wanted to laugh, to scoff, but her bravado was going up in flames. “How can you believe that anything between us is genuine?”
This time he turned his hand, cupping her shoulder, clouding her resolve with the textured heat of his skin and his voice. “Would you be more inclined to believe if I demonstrated?”
“No,” she said quickly. Too quickly. She drew in a calming breath. “There is nothing to prove.”
“I disagree. You are sceptical of my intent.” He took her hand, twined their fingers, used that leverage to pull her closer. “What if I kissed you again, with no audience and no ulterior motive?”
“Except to prove your point. Madeleine might be—”
“Forget Madeleine.”
“—used to having whatever she wants,” she continued strongly over his interjection, “but you are no better. I think you two have a lot in common. You should reconsider.”
“You are right on one score. I have grown used to having what I want, and I am honest enough to admit that I want you.” He stroked his thumb over the corner of her mouth. “How about you, Isabelle?”
She knew a challenge when it looked her in the eye, and this challenge held her gaze with unflinching boldness. Then he slid his hand from her shoulder to the bare skin of her back. A caress, an encouragement, a gentle pressure that brought her forward to meet his lowering mouth. “One little kiss,” he whispered against her lips, “as proof this chemistry is real.”
One. Little. Kiss.
Oh, no, this was so much more. It started where the last kiss had ended, a sweet, sensual seduction of her lips and her senses, but as soon as she surrendered—as soon as the hands that had come up to ward him off yielded to the temptation to touch—it plunged into so much more. It was a bold and thorough exploration of lips and tongues and skin, a yielding and a taking and a hunger that ripped through Isabelle the instant her mouth opened beneath his. She felt the tremor deep in her body, heard his throaty sound of satisfaction, tasted the satisfaction in a big dizzying gulp of acknowledgement.
This was real, this chemistry, this mutual wanting.
Then his hands took possession, pulling her onto his lap, drawing her tight against the hard heat of his body. It was shockingly raw and primal, his hands on her thighs, thumbs tracing the edge of her invisible knickers as he licked into her mouth. She shifted in his lap, finding a better angle for the kiss and a closer contact with the hard proof of his desire.
Lost in the potency of the moment, she forgot time, place, propriety, the thousand cautions she’d issued herself over the past days. She was greedy for more, for her hands on more than his shirt, more than his throat and his face. She wanted to feel his heat without barriers. She was too close, not close enough. She itched with the craziness of need, and when he swore softly the foreign word, his exasperation, the exhalation of breath hot against her skin, only inflamed her more. She turned in his lap, hands on his shirt buttons, her laugh a husky reflection of her impatience until she realised that he’d gone still and why he’d sworn.
His hands were no longer on her thighs but restraining her hands. The car was stationary, not as part of the slow crawl home through London traffic but because they had arrived at Wentworth Square. And someone was knocking at the car window.
Calmly Cristo shifted her to the seat beside him and straightened her dress, but when he opened the window he took her hand in a reassuring grip. She sucked in a deep breath, the world stopped spinning and the dark figure outside materialised into Crash’s craggy features.
“This had better be good,” Cristo said darkly.
“Hugh called,” the butler replied shortly. “From Farnbo-rough.”
Pressed close against his side, Isabelle felt his muscles tense as his irritation with the interruption turned to instant alertness. “I thought he wasn’t due back until the weekend.”
“Apparently he called Amanda last night, and she mentioned Isabelle.”
“Of course she did.”
“He’s on his way here now. I thought you should know.”
Isabelle hadn’t thought that anything could wipe that kiss so quickly from her mind. This news had managed the impossible. Uncaring about her kissed-clean lips and mussed hair, she leaned forward into view. “Does Chessie know?”
“She was in the room when the call came in. She’s waiting in the library.”
Waiting for Hugh’s arrival was torture. A diplomatic Crash suggested that she might like to “freshen up,” but she shook her head. Nobody cared if her ridiculously expensive dress was slightly crumpled, her feet bare, her hair and makeup ravaged. Chessie hadn’t even noticed, a sure indication that despite her outward signs of preparedness and her assurances that she was more than ready for this meeting, her sister was jangling with nerves.
Isabelle forced her to sit and practice her breathing. “It’s never too early,” she said, taking her sister’s hand and demonstrating with a couple of exaggerated Lamaze-inspired breaths. Chessie laughed and almost relaxed until they heard someone outside the door and her grip turned almost punishing with sudden tension.
But it was only Crash bringing them tea, and a few minutes later Cristo returned from the male version of freshening up, which meant he no longer looked as though he’d been run over by a wildly turned-on woman. He’d changed into jeans and a light sweater. His eyes found Isabelle’s right away, steady, questioning, and she nodded a silent answer. We’re good. And she realised with a warm settling of her own nerves that this wasn’t a platitude, that with the calming strength of his presence they would get through this.
He took a chair opposite and distracted them both by asking Chessie about her visit to the National Gallery and then updating them on his horse Gisele’s improving health. He was so easy to listen to, so easy to watch as he explained the rudiments of polo to Chessie with words and hands and a stray ball he found on the desk. Chessie relaxed enough to ask questions, to laugh at his answers, although every so often her gaze flicked to the window overlooking the street.
When the doorbell rang, she lifted an inch off the sofa. “He’s here.”
Her words were superfluous—who else would be calling after midnight?—and barely audible despite the sudden silence. Cristo stood, his tension marked in the rigid set of his jaw and the flexing of his hands into fists. She wondered if that was merely an easing of tension or a sign of intent, but she could not feel any alarm on Hugh Harrington’s part. He deserved whatever was coming.
In the hallway outside they heard voices, Crash’s and another, but when Isabelle reached for Chessie’s hand, her sister shook her head. “I’m good,” she said. “I can do this.”
When the door opened and Crash stepped back to usher in the new arrival, Isabelle’s eyes remained on Chessie’s face. She saw her sister’s slight recoil, the small shake of her head as she looked from Hugh to Crash to Cristo. He was the first to speak, his voice as hard and dark as the ebony timber that dominated the room.
“Hugh,” he said. “I’m glad you saw fit to return home and face the music.”
“No.” Chessie was still shaking her head as she looked from one man to the other. “What’s going on? This is not Harry.”