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‘This is your house.’
‘I knew you’d get there eventually, cara.’ He watched the two spots of angry colour appear on her smooth cheeks. ‘So, what’s your opinion … professionally speaking? Does it have potential?’
‘Professionally?’ she echoed, thinking very unprofessional thoughts as she fixed him with a murderous glare. Just how long was he going to insult her by pretending this job offer was anything but an elaborate hoax?
‘I realise it’s all subjective, but do you like the place? Could you see yourself—?’
‘I can see myself pushing you off a cliff!’
She sucked in a deep breath, causing Roman’s glance to drop. Having a baby changed a woman’s body and though Izzy was lighter and more fragile-looking than he recalled, her breasts were definitely fuller. His eyes darkened as he remembered how one had fitted perfectly in the palm of his hand. Now they would overflow, the soft, silky, milk-pale flesh … He took a deep breath and pushed away the tactile image, but not before his body had hardened helplessly.
His sculpted lips twisted in a smile of self-mockery. For some reason around this woman his normal iron self-control took a holiday. What was it about her? It wasn’t as if she were overtly sexual. She had a great body, as he knew only too well, but she didn’t flaunt it. Look at the way she was dressed today, the shirt buttoned up to the neck, baggy creased trousers, and not a scrap of make-up. It was something elusive and intangible about her that, like smoke, defied his attempts to pin it down, control it.
As he scanned her tense features he wondered why he looked at her and saw something different from everyone else … How many times at that damned wedding had he heard her referred to as serene?
She had not been serene that night they had spent together. He saw an image of her sitting astride him, her smooth thighs locked tight around his hips, her head thrown back and the sheen of sweat making her pale skin glisten in the darkness. She didn’t look serene right now either; she looked like an exhausted young mother who had just received a nasty shock.
A beautiful but exhausted young mother. It would take more than lines of exhaustion bracketing her soft full mouth and dark shadows under her stunning blue eyes to diminish her looks.
He was in part at least responsible for putting the shadows there, he thought, and pushed away the stab of unaccustomed guilt. This was a situation that needed resolving. He had already missed out on the first precious months of his daughter’s life and he was not going to miss out on the next while they bargained out a deal.
‘Sorry, no cliff, but you could always improvise.’ She liked to project the cool and calm image, but he had caught her off guard and people revealed more of themselves when they were off guard.
Izzy felt her anger drain away and with it her taste for this conversation. After all the heart racing she felt horribly flat. ‘You got me here, but what I don’t understand is why you went to all this effort. Did you really expect me to stay? I’m taking Lily home, but don’t think I won’t send you the bill for this wasted journey, because I will!’
Even while she was hating him, at another level she was noticing the shadow of purple-black growth on his jaw and lean cheeks, the air of restless male vitality he exuded and how incredibly sexy he looked in the black jeans that clung to the long, muscular lines of his powerful thighs.
‘Why not look around first? You might like what you see,’ he drawled.
Izzy, refusing to acknowledge his reference to her drooling contemplation of his lean, muscle-packed body, met his knowing gaze with a defiant glare.
‘Think of my home as your own.’
Home had a permanent sound and Roman had never actually had a home as such. He had over the years owned various properties because he liked the space and privacy and hotel suites gave little of either.
The only home he had known had been the town house near the university where his parents had worked and lived during term time, but his recollection of it was dim. Vacations had been spent on various digs in various far-flung corners of the globe, and when he was small he had been dragged along but usually left in the hotel room.
Then as he’d got older and bigger he had spent his summers either staying with friends’ families or with a distant aunt of his father’s in Tuscany.
‘I thought you lived in Italy.’
‘I do for a large part of the year, but recent developments make it necessary for me to have a British base, and I have never thought that the city is the best place to bring up a child.’
Izzy maintained her scepticism and filed away the statement to deal with later. Any spare energy she had was being used to stay upright. ‘So you just popped out yesterday and bought this place?’
‘Obviously not.’
A tiny gurgling sound quickly escaped Izzy’s throat. The surprises just kept coming. Roll with the punches, Izzy, she told herself. Tomorrow this will all be a memory.
‘I’ve owned it for …’ he screwed up his eyes and glanced back at the building as he made the mental calculations ‘… two, almost three years now?’
Her sapphire eyes regarded him with disbelief. ‘You’re asking me?’ How could a person own somewhere like this and not know how long they’d owned it for? If she had needed proof that Roman Petrelli lived in a different world than she did, she had it.
‘Is it important? It’s structurally sound and actually in better condition than I thought it would be.’
‘I’m really not interested in your …’ She stopped and directed an incredulous look at his face. ‘You make it sound like you’ve never seen it before.’
‘I haven’t.’
‘You bought it without seeing it?’ The idea seemed utterly preposterous to Izzy, who felt herself sinking back into a numb state of disbelief.
‘It’s what I do. It was a speculative purchase—the price was good.’
In other words, she thought scornfully, he had profited from the misfortunes of others.
‘And I could afford to sit on it until the market—’
She cut across him, her voice flat as she asked, ‘Why?’
‘The place was bought at the height of the property boom by a—’
‘I mean, why am I here?’ Not that she would be for long. If it weren’t for Lily being asleep, she would already have been trotting down that winding driveway, but if it weren’t for Lily she wouldn’t be here anyway.
She glanced towards her sleeping daughter cocooned in the baby carrier and experienced the familiar, almost suffocating swell of love, so intense that she felt light-headed. Although the light-headed feeling might have something to do with the fact that she hadn’t been able to force down more than a couple of bites of the unappetising sandwiches she had bought on the train, and breakfast—God, that seemed like a lifetime ago—had been a slice of toast. She lifted a hand to her head and tried to remember if she had actually swallowed any of the toast.
‘You look as if you’re about to fall down.’
Izzy read the concern in his rough tone as criticism and her chin came up. She might look awful but it was damned rude of him to point it out.
And to add insult to injury he looked incredible, as always. He didn’t seem capable of looking bad, no matter what the situation.
A deep visceral longing she refused to acknowledge twisted itself like a vine around her resentment as she made the journey from his booted feet to his glossy head … Somewhere around his taut middle her fingertips began to tingle.
By the time she reached his face other parts tingled too, her cheeks were flagged with rosy heat and she was having a problem regulating her breathing. Long, lean and hard, he was more male than any man she had ever encountered.
She had always been dubious of the theory that in some throwback to a time of hunter-gatherers women chose an alpha male to father their children, but maybe …? Not that she had been looking for a father, just a lover, someone who could make her forget. Her blue eyes glazed as her thoughts drifted back.
And he had.
He had made her forget her name. She had taken pleasure from his body, revelling in a sensuality that she had not known she possessed. As the buried memories surfaced the past and present collided and for a moment she was looking at Roman and hearing, not the words coming from his lips, but a deep animal moan of pleasure that had been wrenched from his throat when she had curled her fingers around his silky, throbbing shaft …
CHAPTER SEVEN (#ulink_887c39be-38ef-5535-b3ad-35e4c99691ac)
‘I SAID are you all right?’
Izzy blinked. This time there were no extenuating circumstances; this was simply unvarnished lust. She dodged Roman’s gaze, denying the feelings, ignoring them in order to stay sane, stay safe.
‘Fine.’ Other than the ripples of hot sensation spreading outwards from a core that lay low in her belly. ‘Will you stop looking at me like I’m some sort of specimen you want to dissect and pick apart?’
‘If you’ll stop undressing me with your eyes.’
Shame washed through her like icy water. Instead of remembering the sex between them, she should be remembering the awful hollow feeling she had felt the morning after. She was never, ever going to feel like that again; she had learnt the hard way.
‘I was not!’
He arched a brow and grinned. ‘My mistake.’
Only it wasn’t; he knew it and so did she.
‘You wouldn’t look so hot either if you’d just travelled on public transport with a small child. I suppose you think it’s easy?’ She slung him a belligerent glare just in case he thought she was canvassing the sympathy vote.
‘I hadn’t thought about it.’ But he was now.
‘You have no idea, do you?’
The mild contempt in her superior little smile would have irritated him had he not realised she was right. He glanced down at the sleeping child. Izzy was the one who had spent the sleepless nights with Lily, which made it doubly frustrating because she was resisting his attempts to make up for that now.
He put the carrier carefully down on the ground. ‘Then tell me,’ he suggested. ‘I want to know.’
His focus had been totally on what he had missed out on, and not how different her life must be as a single mother from how it had been as a single girl. She had once been able to walk into a bar late at night and see someone she liked and now she could not just act on impulse. Maybe this was not such a bad thing. He had always considered himself pretty broad-minded and not a possessive man, but the idea of the mother of his child spending a night with a man, any man, filled him with a violent revulsion.
So far he had been preoccupied with resenting the time he had missed with his daughter and planning for the future; now for the first time he was realising how much her unplanned pregnancy must have changed her life too.
‘I should have sent a car for you. Whoa, easy, let me …’
‘What are you doing?’ she snarled, backing away, dragging the handle of the folded buggy with her as the wheels gouged grooves in the thick gravel before it was removed from her grip.
‘I thought you were going to faint.’ He remained ready to step in because she had definitely swayed.
She narrowed her eyes. ‘I don’t faint.’
Roman controlled his growing irritation with her belligerent independence with difficulty. ‘Fine, you don’t faint,’ he said, sounding bored. ‘But wouldn’t you be more comfortable continuing this conversation indoors, in the warm?’
‘I’m not a child. You don’t have to humour me.’ Her eyes slid from his. She had no idea what it was about this man that brought out the very worst in her. She took a deep breath. ‘All right.’
It was the practical response because she would not be comfortable continuing this conversation anywhere, but the wind had picked up while they were standing there and the chill would soon start to penetrate Lily’s cosy padded jacket. She bent forward to pick up the baby carrier.
‘Let me.’ He paused, his hand above her own.
Izzy’s fingers tightened over the carrier handle. After a brief internal struggle she stepped back, tucking her hands into her pockets. After all, it was only the carrier she was relinquishing to him. To make a fuss would only serve to highlight the insecurities she was struggling to hide. Roman’s next comment suggested she wasn’t doing this very well.
‘I’m not trying to steal her, just helping.’
She knew he was looking at her but with her jaw set she stomped up the steps, her eyes trained on her feet. ‘Steal her over my dead body.’ She paused as she entered the hallway, unable to repress a startled admiring intake of breath.
‘This place must have quite a history. Is the panelling original?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ His taste ran to the modern, and convenient. If they had been talking a private up-to-date gym, and the latest in computer technology, both items that this place lacked, Roman would have been interested.
‘But just think about all the people who have lived here over the centuries.’
‘I’m more interested in the plumbing, which is a bit basic. This way—the library is the second door on the left.’ He nodded and stood to one side to let her go ahead of him.
Izzy, who would have liked to linger in this magnificent space, followed his directions and found herself in another equally pleasing room. It was being warmed by a fire burning in the massive stone grate and was lined with a row of south-facing mullioned windows that filled it with light.
‘I thought nobody lived here,’ she said, staring at the book-filled shelves.
‘They came with the house.’ His gaze moved over the book-lined walls. It was actually quite a pleasant room. ‘Sit down, before you fall down.’
‘I’m …’ She responded to the pressure only because she couldn’t stop her knees from trembling.
She sat there, her arms primly folded in her lap, and watched as he set the baby carrier down carefully and strolled across the room to the console table where a tray of coffee and sandwiches had been placed.
He pushed down the plunger of the cafetière, turning his head to enquire, ‘Black or white?’
‘White, no sugar.’
He piled a plate with some sandwiches and carried them across to where she was sitting, along with her coffee.
Her skin, dotted with freckles that stood out clear against the pallor, had an almost transparent quality. ‘I don’t want to get blamed if you pass out.’
‘Are you going to stand over me while I drink this?’
‘Yes.’
Pursing her lips she picked up the china cup. ‘Anything for a quiet life.’
He laughed. ‘Not so that you’d notice … and a sandwich,’ he added when she put the cup back down.
Izzy slung him an irritated look, but she actually had three sandwiches, discovering she was starving. ‘Satisfied?’ she asked sarcastically as she pushed the plate away and sat back in her seat, folding one leg under herself. ‘Do you have to stand there like some guard dog?’
She kept her expression neutral as his narrowed dark eyes moved over her face, but it was a struggle.
He didn’t respond to her question, but his mouth did lift up at the corners as he flopped with languid grace into an armchair. Izzy felt the tension in her shoulders lessen as he stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed one ankle over the other. It was easy to feel at a disadvantage when he was towering over her.
She began to tap her toe on the polished wood floor as he set his elbows on the aged leather armrests.
‘Some people would call this kidnapping.’
‘A bit over the top, don’t you think?’ he drawled.
Her fury shifted up several notches as she folded her arms across her heaving chest. She sketched a smile and gave him a flat look.
‘Oh, yes, I’m definitely overreacting.’ The man was unbelievable, as well as being totally unscrupulous and manipulative.
His dark brows lifted. ‘The job is genuine. I offered it to you and you could have refused, but you took it.’ He rose in a graceful fluid motion and angled a questioning look at her face. ‘There was no coercion involved.’
Izzy wished he would stay in one place or at least keep sitting down; the man was like some prowling jungle cat, all restless energy and unpredictability. In some ways she would have felt more relaxed with the animal he reminded her of in the room rather than the man himself!
