скачать книгу бесплатно
Giselle knew it was ridiculous of her to feel humiliated by Emma’s remarks—somehow less of a woman. After all, Giselle herself had always made it plain that she wasn’t interested in flirting with or attracting men, cold-shouldering their advances and retreating into herself whenever they showed any interest in her. The last thing she wanted was a man pursuing her—any man—and especially a man like Saul Parenti. Why especially him? Because she was afraid that she might be vulnerable to him? Because she was afraid that she might actually want him?
Giselle stood up, panicked by her own thoughts, and then subsided back into her chair. Of course not. It was nothing to do with anything like that. She knew that she was perfectly safe from desiring Saul Parenti, and even if by some foolish misjudgement she did, she also knew that it was impossible for anything to come of that desire. Because, as Emma had made clear, Saul Parenti would never find her desirable? No! Because she did not want him to desire her—just as she did not want any man to desire her.
She had taken refuge in angry disdain, demanding of Emma, ‘Does everything have to come down to sex?’
Emma had laughed and told her, ‘For most of us—yes.’ Before adding, ‘Men can’t help being men, and they are predatory by instinct. It’s in their genes. But in your case…Well, what I’m trying to say, Giselle, is that…’
‘That a man like Saul Parenti wouldn’t find me desirable enough to want to go to the trouble of trying to seduce me?’ Giselle had supplied for her colleague.
‘Well, you do send a keep-your-distance vibe to men, you must admit, and men like Saul Parenti have plenty of women all too ready to give them what they want to be bothered with a woman who freezes them off. I haven’t hurt your feelings, have I?’ Emma had asked anxiously.
Giselle had shaken her head.
‘No, of course not.’ Giselle had assured her. And that was the truth. Of course she wasn’t hurt because Emma had spoken the truth and said that Saul wouldn’t be interested in her. She didn’t want him to be. She didn’t want any man to be interested in her. She couldn’t afford to allow any man to become interested in her because she knew that she could not and must not become interested in them. She could never have in her life the relationships that others took for granted. She could not fall in love. She could not commit to anyone, and most of all she could not within that commitment help to create a child. She must never have a child. Never.
Anyway, how she looked and whether Saul Parenti did or did not see her as attractive were not subjects she should be paying any mind to. Instead she must focus on the reason she was here and on what she was being paid to do.
The office provided for her was well planned out and perfect for her duties, with its large windows flooding the room with natural light. It contained all the equipment she might need, including a good-sized table in the middle of the floor on which she was able to spread out paper copies of architectural drawings and plans—just as she had done earlier, with the new drawings and costings that had been sent over.
Uncertainly Giselle looked back at them. She had been worrying about them for so long, going back to check and then recheck them just in case she had made a mistake, that she hadn’t realised how late it was. Scanning the office, she saw nearly everyone else had gone home. Moira had gone too, no doubt, without Giselle having taken the opportunity to speak with her and seek her advice.
The anomaly was definitely there. The non-frostproof terracotta tiles for the summerhouse and the area surrounding it, leading to the first of the staggered-level swimming pools, had been changed as Saul had instructed. But the tiles used in substitution were considerably more expensive, and from a supplier whose name Giselle could not remember having seen on their approved lists. As a precaution she had e-mailed a couple of approved suppliers, and they had both come back with costings far lower than the one quoted—which meant that either by accident or design the person responsible for the changed plans and materials was recommending a purchase that would cost far far more than it needed to. To make matters worse, the tiles recommended had a non-standard raised pattern, which meant that in future, should any one of them need replacing, they would have to be specially produced at a very high cost. And, worst of all by far, the person responsible for the recommendation and costing was her male colleague and adversary Bill Jeffries.
She’d e-mailed him to check discreetly with him that there hadn’t been an error but it appeared that he was on leave for a week, and with Saul due back from his overseas trip in the morning there was no way Giselle could hold the plans and costings back from him until Bill Jeffries returned to the office.
She needed someone else’s input and advice, she decided, making up her mind. Through the plate glass that fronted all the mezzanine offices she was delighted to spot Moira, putting on her suit jacket and preparing to leave. It had been a warm day for mid-April, with the sun streaming in through the windows, and Giselle had removed her own jacket to work more easily. She looked hesitantly at it, and then, seeing Moira heading for the door, scooped up the papers from the desk instead and hurried to intercept her.
‘From what you’ve told me, I rather think this is something you need to discuss with Saul,’ Moira judged firmly, once Giselle had reached the end of her story.
‘I know he isn’t due back until tomorrow, and I expect he’ll have a full diary. Perhaps you…?’ Giselle began, only to have Moira shake her head.
‘He’s actually just arrived and he’s in his office,’ she told her. ‘Why don’t you go and have a word with him now?’
Giselle’s heart sank. This wasn’t what she had expected or wanted to hear.
Witnessing her hesitation and reluctance, Saul’s PA insisted, ‘I really do think you should, Giselle. This sounds like a potentially serious matter to me, and Saul won’t thank you for delaying informing him about it.’ Moira looked at her watch. ‘I’m sorry—I must run. I’ve promised to take the notes for a committee meeting of our Gardening Club this evening, and I mustn’t be late. But I know Saul’s planning to work late, and I can assure you that he will want to know what you’ve just told me. That’s why you’re here after all.’
It was too late now to wish that she’d kept quiet and not sought Moira’s advice. Taking a deep breath, Giselle headed towards Saul’s office.
Like the other offices on the mezzanine floor, Saul’s was fronted by plate glass ‘walls’. It might be larger than the other offices, and it might have a private inner sanctum, but that apart it was no more prestigiously furnished than her own office, Giselle noted, and it was equipped as a practical working office. Apparently for business meetings Saul used the hospitality suite on the top floor of the building.
Since Saul operated an ‘open door’ working policy, Giselle only knocked briefly on the glass door, which was in any event half open, before stepping into Saul’s office. The brilliance of the late-afternoon sun shone into the room, momentarily blinding her, so that she didn’t realise until her vision cleared that Saul wasn’t there—despite the fact that his laptop was open on his desk and his suit jacket was hanging from the back of his chair. Why was it that only a certain type of very male European man seemed able to wear that particular shade of light tan successfully, whilst looking as though they could have stepped out of an Armani ad? Giselle found herself wondering distractedly. She tried very hard not to picture Saul in just that role—only to be betrayed by her traitorous imagination which suddenly, out of nowhere, managed to create an all too realistic image of Saul standing in for one of the designer’s male underwear models.
Battling with her own imagination, Giselle almost dropped the papers she was hugging to her when the door connecting Saul’s inner office with the outer one suddenly opened, and Saul himself stepped through it.
His easy words—‘Moira, if you could manage to rustle up some coffee and a sandwich whilst I have a shower I’ll be eternally grateful to you…’—changed to an abrupt and far less welcoming, ‘Oh, it’s you,’ when he realised that it was Giselle who was standing in his office and not his PA.
It wasn’t his abrupt manner that was driving hot, self-conscious colour up under her skin, though. Giselle knew that as she struggled to retain her equilibrium under the increased pounding of her heart when she realised that when he had initially come into the room Saul had been starting to unfasten his shirt. The cuffs were already loose, revealing the sinewy dark-hair-covered flesh of one arm as he reached up to push his hand into his hair in a gesture of irritation. His tie was missing and the top buttons of his shirt were unfastened, so that she could see the fine criss-crossing of the beginnings of his body hair. The rush of female awareness that flooded through her almost knocked her off balance with an alien, almost frightening power. She wasn’t used to feeling like this, and the fact that she was doing so affronted and angered her, causing her to clutch the papers even more tightly to her body.
The crackle they made focused Saul’s attention on her. She was breathing too fast, her lips parted, her hands trembling slightly as she gripped some papers in front of her. Her pose was almost that of an ancient civilisation virgin slave, facing the master who had bought her for his pleasure—and with it her own.
The direction his thoughts were taking didn’t please Saul one little bit. He’d spent the last ten days engaged in hard negotiation to secure the prime Chinese sites he wanted for his expanding hotel chain—hard negotiation and also what had seemed at the time easy refusal of sexual favours from the socialites his hosts had introduced him to. Perhaps his body hadn’t been as on-message with that refusal as he had believed, he decided grimly as he attempted to banish the images his mind was now busy conjuring up—images of a green-eyed, blonde-haired beauty wearing next to nothing, offering him the welcome and the pleasure battle-scarred warriors like his own ancestors had expected to receive as a matter of course. He, on the other hand, whilst returning triumphant from his own battle, couldn’t get so much as a drink and a sandwich, and was being confronted by the abrasive secondee he had no wish to have in his life.
Giselle’s voice cut across his thoughts. ‘I can come back tomorrow if you’re too busy to see me now.’
‘I’m leaving for New York tomorrow. If it’s urgent enough for you to come and see me now, then you’d better tell me whatever it is that’s brought you here. Sit down,’ he commanded, before speaking into the intercom. ‘Charlie, would you mind getting me a double espresso and a sandwich from across the road? Put it on my tab. I’ll be in my office.’
Charlie was the doorman, as Giselle knew.
‘Right,’ he said to Giselle when he had finished. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘I’m a bit concerned about a costing on one of the new plans,’ Giselle answered. ‘I’ve got the paperwork here.’
Saul made an exasperated sound.
‘I can’t see it whilst you’re clutching it like that, can I? Bring it here and put it on the desk.’
A shaft of sunlight penetrating the shadows around his desk gave the cheap white tee shirt she was wearing an opacity that drew Saul’s gaze automatically to her breasts as she dropped the papers on his desk. Her actions dragged the thin fabric against her body, so that her nipples were outlined in erotically sharp relief. His gaze lingered where the shaft of light was probing the cheap fabric, as though it possessed a male need to strip back the covering from her flesh and explore the sensuality beneath.
She must focus on why she was here and forget about the way her proximity to Saul Parenti was making her feel, Giselle told herself. But how could she when she could almost feel Saul’s critical gaze, underlining Emma’s comments about her?
The arrival of the doorman with Saul’s coffee and sandwich was a welcome relief, allowing her to straighten the papers and then step back from the desk whilst Saul thanked Charlie, rewarding him with a warm smile and a few words of male banter about the doorman’s favourite football team. So there was a human side to Saul Parenti—even if she was never likely to see much of it. Giselle had no idea why that should bring her such a sense of loss and exclusion. She didn’t want him to be nice to her. Not one little bit.
‘So what exactly is the problem?’ Saul demanded, sitting back in his chair and drinking his coffee.
‘It’s this reworked plan, here,’ Giselle told him. She had to lean across the desk to point out the part of the plan in question, too intent on getting the ordeal of what she had to say over and done with to be aware of the way in which her pose had brought her breasts in line with Saul’s gaze.
Saul was, though. And so was his body. And it was reacting very specifically indeed to those soft teardrop-shaped curves with their tip-tilted nipples. He eased his chair closer to the desk, to conceal the giveaway tightening of his trousers as his erection swelled demandingly against the fabric. His hunger for the sandwich the doorman had brought him had suddenly been replaced by a very different and even more insistent kind of hunger.
‘And your conclusion?’ Saul interrupted Giselle curtly. He needed to get her out of his office and get his body back under control—and the sooner the better.
Giselle’s face burned. It was obvious that Saul didn’t want to listen to her and thought that she was wasting his time.
‘There are three possibilities,’ she answered crisply, straightening up and stepping back from the desk. ‘One: the person who drew up the plan and its costing made an error. Two: they knew what they were doing and this is a deliberate attempt to defraud your company…’
‘And three?’ Saul queried, recognising now that she had moved back from him that she had spotted something that could be very serious indeed. He was in no mood to thank her, though. Not whilst his body’s reaction to her was so intense and unwanted.
‘Three: you are deliberately testing me by setting up an error to see what I will do.’
Saul stared at her, anger driving out his desire to get rid of her.
‘Let me get this straight. Are you actually suggesting that I would stoop to that kind of game-playing?’
Giselle lifted her head
‘Why not? You had my car moved.’
Saul came out from behind his desk and walked towards her. Immediately Giselle took a step back from him. She could smell the hot male scent of him and it was making her dizzy, weak, igniting a low, dull, pulsing ache that was taking over her whole body.
‘That was nothing more than an indication of my irritation on the day,’ Saul told her flatly,
Giselle defended her suspicions. ‘You don’t want me here.’
‘No,’ Saul agreed, ‘I don’t.’
And then he did what he had sworn he would not do, cursing himself beneath his breath as he reached for her, pulling her fiercely into his arms and kissing her with all the pent-up fury she had aroused in him from the moment he had first seen her.
Giselle tried to resist him. She certainly wanted to resist him. But the hand she raised to push him away had developed a will of its own and was sliding along his bare arm beneath the sleeve of his shirt, and the body that should have been arching away from him was instead melting into him.
She was all fire, nectar and ambrosia, heated by her desire to run intoxicatingly through his senses, until he was filled by his need for the scent, the feel, the taste and the sound of her as he coupled her desire to his own. His hand reached for her breast, pushing away the fabric that came between her flesh and his touch with all the urgency and impatience of a young untried youth. The dying sunlight embraced her pale flesh, firing it with its caress, and the ruby darkness of her nipple was a hard thrust of flesh that mirrored in its own way his own taut arousal.
Beneath the pressure of his kiss he could feel and taste her gasp of undeniable response to him. He wanted to devour her, consume her, take her and drive them both until they were equally satiated—even whilst the anger within him that she should make him feel that way roared and burned its resentment of his need.
She was helpless, Giselle recognised, totally unable to withstand the storm lashing at her, able only to cling to the man who was the cause of it and pray that she would survive whilst her body opened all its gateways and let down its barriers to admit the rolling, roiling ferocity that was now possessing her.
This was what she had feared, what she had denied herself for so long, and she had been right to do so, because to suffer what she was suffering now would surely destroy her.
Somewhere else in the building a door banged. The sound exploded into the sensual tension that had enclosed them, driving them apart. Saul’s chest was rising and falling as he fought for control; Giselle’s whole body was trembling.
Without a word she turned and ran, fleeing as though she was being pursued by the devil himself, not stopping until she had reached her own office, where she quickly gathered up her jacket and her bag, not daring to look behind her as she fled the building.
Saul watched her in silence. He wanted her to go. He wanted what had happened not to have happened. He wanted—
Saul closed his eyes as his body told him exactly what it wanted—no matter what he might think about its desire and no matter how much he might want to reject it. Rolling up the papers Giselle had left behind, Saul slammed them down on the desk as anger against his unwanted physical ache for her savaged his self-control.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_a0c84ce3-0bb6-5720-910c-43b07f2f2221)
GISELLE could see from the illuminated face of her small bedside clock that it was almost half past two in the morning, but sleep was impossible. How could she possibly sleep after what had happened? She had no idea why Saul had kissed her. She could only presume it had been his way of punishing her. He had been so angry when she had dared to suggest that he might have tried to trick her.
What had he expected her to do? He had made it plain that he didn’t want her seconded to him. He had even said that he would be waiting for her to prove herself not up to the job so that he could demand a replacement for her. Under such circumstances surely anyone would need to be suspicious in order to protect themselves.
In fact for all she knew her suspicions were correct, and his anger could have been because she had not fallen into the trap he had set for her. Had he kissed her as a way of trying to force her to leave? If only she could do just that. If only she could ask, even beg her employers to send someone else to Saul in her place.
She’d picked up a newspaper on her way home, in the desperate hope that by some miracle she might find a job advertised in it that would offer her a means of escape. She had even gone online to check out some job search websites, but the reality was that nobody was hiring in the current climate—and, much as she hated to admit it, the increased salary Saul Parenti was paying her meant that it would be impossible for her to find another job in London that would pay her as much.
As much as she loathed the blow her pride would suffer every day she had to step across the threshold of the Parenti Organisation, and despite her suspicions that Saul was doing everything he could to manipulate her into leaving, the debt she owed her great-aunt was such that she would just have to bear it. Without her great-aunt…Giselle dreaded to think what would have happened to her if her elderly relative had not stepped in and offered her a home, a safe haven. She had been so kind to her—shielding her, protecting her—but Giselle had caught the small fragments of adult conversations that had dropped to whispers, and then shaken heads and knowing looks when those adults had realised that she was there. She had known they were talking about her, known too of their suspicions about her. As a child she’d had nightmares, dreaming of ghostly voices reaching out to accuse her, and ghostly hands reaching out to drag her down into the darkness.
It had never been discussed between them, but Giselle knew that her great-aunt knew about the secret that could never be spoken. How could she not know when it had been the direct cause of her mother and baby brother’s deaths and the indirect cause of her father’s? She didn’t know the exact details, though—that Giselle had deliberately disobeyed her mother, that she had let go of the pram, pulling back onto the pavement and then watching as the pram’s momentum had carried it and her baby brother, and then her mother, who had clutched desperately at the pram’s handle, straight under the front wheels of a lorry.
She would never sleep now. She was too afraid of the memories that would surface if she did. She must not go down that dark and tormenting road. She already knew where it led, and the horrors that waited for her at its end.
If only her life could be different. If only right here, right now, there were comforting, loving male arms waiting to enfold her—a strong male chest for her to lean on, and the protection of a man who understood and forgave all that there was to understand and forgive and still went on loving her.
If only there was a man in her life—a lover—whose desire for her and hers for him could prevent her from suffering the sharp pangs of aching sexual need she had felt earlier in Saul’s arms, when her body had been on fire with the intensity of what he had aroused within her.
But there wasn’t. There never would be; there never could be. The kind of man she wanted to love, the kind of lover she wanted to share such intimacy with, would be the kind of man who carried in his genes a need for the traditional things in life: a relationship, commitment, children.
Children! A shudder galvanised her body. She could not, must not ever have a child. And equally she could not and must not ever put a man she might love in a position where loving her back would mean that he would be deprived of his own right to be a parent.
The wilder shores of sexual promiscuity and the supposed ‘fun’ they afforded were not for her. Even if her own nature had not inclined her against them, Giselle suspected that her upbringing by her great-aunt would have done so.
Until now—until Saul Parenti—she had been free to believe that her sexuality was under her own control, and that there was no danger whatsoever of her physical desire for a man making her want to break the rules she had set for herself.
Until now.
Those few minutes in Saul’s arms, with her senses hungering beneath Saul’s kiss, her flesh clamouring for Saul’s touch, had changed everything. Like a genie let out of a bottle by a person who did not believe such things could exist, she was now having to deal with something that she had believed could never happen.
How was it possible for her of all people to feel such an uncontrollable flood tide of physical desire for a man she actively disliked? It went against everything she knew and understood about herself. Or rather everything she had thought she knew and understood about the person she wanted to be. Inside her head she could see once again the small family group: the mother, preoccupied, tense and impatient, the baby—the good child—sleeping in the pram, whilst she—the bad child—disobeyed her mother’s instructions, ignoring them to give in to her inner need to follow her own instincts. As a result of that two members of that trio had died whilst she, the third, had survived.
Since then she had worked unceasingly to be ‘good’ and to make amends, but now, thanks to Saul, she was being forced to accept that the wilful, reckless side of her nature had not been banished at all.
Nothing could be returned to what it had been before Saul’s fierce kiss had ripped from her the protection of her own delusion to show her the raw, physical reality of her desire for him.
How had it happened, when she had always been so careful and so controlled? She didn’t know. What she did know, though, was that trying to deny its existence would be pointless—as pointless as trying to hold back the tide. It had seared its reality into her senses and sealed itself there with the pain of its white-hot heat. Perhaps this was her punishment for the past? The agonising price she must pay for what she had done? To be tormented by a need that would never be satisfied.
She might not know why she was being forced to endure the agony of physical desire for a man she disliked, and whom she knew disliked her, but what she did know was that Saul must never discover her weakness. He must never know that she wanted him, that the desire he aroused in her was overwhelming—and, most humiliating of all, that it was unique in her own experience and felt for him alone.
Like love.
The treacherous thought slid into her mind, to be instantly and frantically denied.
No! What she felt for Saul was nothing like love at all. It was merely physical—physical and nothing else.
Her only comfort was that Saul did not desire her with an equally irrational and overwhelming hunger. Because if he did…But, no—she must not go there.
Her eyes were dry and gritty from lack of sleep and suppressed emotion, and Giselle warned herself that she must try and get some sleep. It was now gone four o’clock in the morning, and she would have to be at her desk for nine—or risk the consequences to her pride. Taking time off because she couldn’t bear to face Saul was not an option she was willing to allow herself.
Broodingly Saul stood staring out of his window and watched Giselle as she entered the building. He should not have kissed her. He wished fiercely that he had not done so. Kissing her had breached his own moral barriers against that kind of intimacy with someone he employed—and, even more disturbingly, deep down inside himself he knew that it had also breached his emotional defences. So why make the hole she had driven through those defences even bigger by spending time he should be giving to other things—far more important things—not only thinking about what had happened but actively dwelling on it?
Because he needed to dwell on it—to focus on it and come up with a plan to deal with it and its potential consequences.
Abruptly Saul turned and strode purposefully across his office.
Apprehensively Giselle headed directly for her office, desperate to avoid seeing Saul, only allowing herself to feel safe when she had closed the door behind her with a sigh of relief—only to realise that she was not safe and that Saul was there, standing in the shadows, watching her.
‘We need to talk,’ he told her peremptorily, not looking directly at her at all as he crossed over to the window and stood there, looking out of it. His dark-suited figure was highlighted by the light coming in through the window. His back was to her, so that she could not read his expression, but she knew that if he chose to do so he could turn round and see hers exposed by the merciless beam of sunlight pouring into the office.
‘What happened between us was a mistake and should not have happened,’ he said.
Giselle could feel her pain fanning her anger.
‘Do you think that I wanted it to happen?’ she challenged him. ‘Well, I didn’t. Because you are who you are, I dare say you believe that all women want to…to be physically intimate with you, and that they hope intimacy will lead to a relationship. Well, I don’t. I don’t want that and I never will.’
Her angry claim was heartfelt enough to surprise Saul into turning round to look at her.
‘It’s easy enough to say that, but show me a woman who doesn’t claim she wants to be free and then claims that all she’s ever wanted is motherhood the minute she’s managed to get pregnant by a man she sees as her meal ticket and I’ll show you a liar,’ Saul retaliated brutally.
His words hit Giselle as brutally as though they had been physical blows, bringing to life her deepest fear.
