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Better.
Much better.
Wrapping a towel around her head, she cleaned her teeth, sprayed deodorant everywhere—it stung in some places—and gargled with mouthwash.
Okay, she was most definitely awake now.
Scampering into the bedroom, she pounced on her knapsack and plucked out her sensible knickers. Teaming those with her sensible bra—the one that didn’t show beneath the shirt she’d bought, she chose dark trousers and a red cardigan rather than a jacket.
High heels, of course …
With trousers?
Discarding the trousers, she tugged on the skirt.
No good. Pale legs.
Throwing it off, she grabbed the trousers again.
Shirt, trousers, high heels …
Shirt, trousers, desert boots …
Definitely high heels.
Spinning in front of the full-length mirror, she viewed herself as critically as a two-and-a-half-second spin would allow.
Whatever the day ahead held, she was ready for it.
There was no time for make-up, and her hair was a candyfloss explosion she just bound in a band as she raced to the door. Her hand stalled halfway to the handle. Back up. What about the survey she’d prepared?
And some of the duty free scent she’d bought on the plane.
Squirt everywhere; sneeze. Finished.
Ready.
Two seconds to tuck the survey under her arm in a professional manner, and tip her chin at a businesslike angle. And still two minutes left on the ten-minute deadline.
She opened the door. ‘Oh, hell!’
‘Hello, yourself …’
Did Raffa have to turn on the wolfish smile as he leaned one hand against the doorjamb? What toothpaste did he use? He smelled so good he made her hungry, and his teeth were really, really white …
‘Did I interrupt something? Only you look …’
Attractively flushed? Horrendously heated? ‘No … you didn’t interrupt anything.’ She drew a confident laugh from her depleted laugh quiver. ‘Not at all … I was just hurrying to get everything together.’ Fingers crossed behind her back. ‘Because I didn’t want to hold you up.’
‘You didn’t … So, did you have time for breakfast?’ He brought his arm down and straightened up, so she had that Lilliputian feeling again, compensated by a thrilling glimpse of tanned, stubble-shaded skin above the crisp white business shirt … and the deep blue silk tie … and the dark, sharply tailored suit that was either Armani or Savile Row.
Armani, Casey guessed, instinctively smoothing her chain-store trousers. No. She was wrong. It was Ozwald Boateng. The kingfisher silk lining gave it away. God, he was so sexy. And she was so red-faced—and just everything she had vowed not to be.
‘What’s that you’ve got under your arm?’ he demanded.
She grimaced. Hair? Dear God! Damp patch? Almost worse. She had to replay the application of deodorant in her mind before she could relax. ‘Oh, you mean my folder?’
‘What else?’ He frowned attractively. ‘May I?’
She handed it over.
‘What is this?’ He turned it in his hands.
‘My preliminary survey of my findings at the shopping mall …’
‘You typed it up?’ He leafed through the pages.
‘I used the business centre at the hotel. My handwriting’s dreadful …’
Without even sunglasses to hide his extraordinary eyes, Casey felt as if she were under a particularly penetrating microscope, with her deepest, darkest secrets laid out on a slide while Raffa put his eye to the scope. ‘Will I do?’ she said, wishing she could cut the nervous laugh; it was making her nervous. She assumed a look of quiet confidence as Raffa’s gaze ran swiftly over her.
‘You look lovely,’ he said.
She did?
No one had ever told her she looked lovely before. She was frequently told she was too intense, too career-orientated, too serious, too driven. And in fairness all of the above was true. Lovely, however, was not a word anyone associated with her.
‘Shall we?’ he invited, gesturing towards the bank of elevators down the hall.
She had to rip her stare from his face first, which wasn’t easy.
So what now? Casey wondered, trying not to make it too obvious that she had to run every now and then to keep up with Raffa. The avenue they were speeding down, which could never be called a corridor in a million years, had a gilded roof that arced above them, decorated with cherubs and rosettes of flowers, while the marble floor was strewn with priceless rugs and guarded by towering pillars garnished with gold leaf, lapis lazuli, and enough light to illuminate small town. So, if this was merely Raffa’s flagship hotel, what would his palace be like? Not that she ever expected to see it, of course.
Casey swayed dizzily as they reached the apex of the glass atrium. Was it her fear of heights, her reaction to the sight of Raffa in a business suit looking even sexier than he had in jeans, or the wildest daydream of all—which, if she had been another, bolder person entirely, was to loosen that tie and peel back that jacket?
In front of his bodyguards?
Casey shuddered as the black-clad men emerged from the shadows. She viewed them nervously. Should she greet them or not? She decided not when they stared past her.
‘You’re a woman, and so invisible,’ Raffa informed her discreetly.
Oh, good … She had to get used to the idea that Raffa was never alone.
Was Raffa ever alone?
She refused to progress that thought. And as she preceded him into the glass elevator and felt him behind her, like a power source that made all the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand to attention, she wondered if he somehow sensed her attraction to him and her total ignorance of such things too.
‘How do you like the hotel, Casey?’
‘A lot—thank you …’ She stared fixedly ahead. This wasn’t the time to explain that she was terrified of heights, or to acknowledge that they were really high up and travelling down the side of one of the tallest buildings in the city at lightning speed. It was a relief when Raffa moved in front of her, blocking the view—or it might have been if he hadn’t been standing quite so close.
‘Are you scared of heights?’ he said, frowning. ‘You should have said. We could have travelled another way.’
Base-jumping, clinging to his back?
She’d put nothing past him.
And now she had nowhere to stare, but at Raffa, and the wide expanse of his chest. The suit he was wearing complemented the depth of his tan, and hinted at enough of the hard form underneath to tease her senses, while the dark blue silk tie picked up the raven’s wing highlights in his hair. She could only conclude that his face would always be stubble-shaded, since she had never seen it any other way, and those sensual lips—
‘Surely you’re not cold?’ Raffa observed as she shivered delicately.
‘No. I was just thinking.’
‘Share your thoughts?’
Her wild, erotic thoughts? Not a chance. She might be gauche and inexperienced, but there was nothing wrong with her imagination. She collected herself with difficulty as the ground rushed up to meet them. ‘I was thinking about an article I read in the newspaper.’ Out of time sequence, but she was almost telling the truth. ‘It mentioned the price paid for a car’s licence plate …’
‘Tell me more,’ he prompted.
‘It fetched three million dollars. That’s a lot of money. I just wondered if that was the usual result for an auction in A’ Qaban?’
Something sparked in his eyes. ‘It can be … with the right auctioneer. Why do you ask?’
There was definitely something more; something Raffa wasn’t telling her. ‘I’m just curious,’ Casey admitted. Curious, and wondering how to turn all the cash sloshing around A’Qaban to the good of the country at large. ‘Are we heading straight to a meeting?’ she asked as the lift slowed, thinking it the perfect opportunity to do some digging.
‘We’re going to start with a little more getting to know you time first.’
‘We are?’ Her throat constricted at the thought of Raffa getting to know her better.
‘After I introduce you to my team.’
Ah.
‘So you can relax now,’ he murmured as the glass and steel doors slid open.
How could she do that when he appeared to have perfected the technique of reading her mind?
She slotted in to his team as if she’d been working alongside them for years. They wore Armani, while Casey carried off her pick of chain-store items with effortless grace. She talked the same language, and added some words of her own. This wasn’t the ruffled woman who had landed in A’Qaban, but a competent, capable executive, whom anyone could see was more than ready to make the next move up the ladder. She was handling this first meeting with much more aplomb than he had anticipated. Had he been guilty so far of judging Casey on her fragile self-image rather than on her business acumen?
He listened intently as she talked his team through her findings at the mall, and watched with interest as she turned in profile to progress her Power Point presentation. The close-fitting trousers she had chosen in the mall hinted at her figure, while the short, red tailored cardigan clung to her slender shoulders, emphasising the femininity she took such pains to disguise. That puzzled him. What was she frightened of?
By the time he brought the meeting to an end an idea had occurred to him. The successful candidate would be someone who could work as easily outside the office as inside; they must get on confidently with people from all walks of life. And, following on from their earlier conversation, Casey’s next test was obvious.
CHAPTER SIX
‘WHY are we here?’ she said, leaning forward to peer out of the limousine window as they drew up outside one of his warehouses on the dock.
‘To show you some things you have to sell.’
‘I have to sell them? What? Where?’
‘Why don’t you wait and see?’
How pretty she was when she did that smile/frown thing. Waving the driver away, he helped her out of the limousine himself. In fact, he was done with drivers.
‘Could you have my car delivered?’ he asked discreetly, while Casey stood staring up at the outside of the aircraft-hangar-sized warehouse in awe.
‘Certainly, sir. Which car would you like?’
Casey’s words about excess flew into his mind. She could be his conscience for the day, he decided wryly, asking for the Tesla to be delivered dockside.
‘The Tesla? Yes, sir.’
‘Come on,’ he said, turning to Casey. ‘Let’s go inside …’
He took her through a small side door into a yawning space, packed with everything from a stretch Hummer to a side room holding enough cutting-edge carbon technology tack for five teams of polo ponies. There was enough excess inside here to give her a blue fit.
‘What on earth is all this?’ she said softly, and he could already hear her mind cogs whirring.
She was probably imagining a store where she would have to put all these things on sale under the same roof, and wondering how on earth she was going to organise it.
‘We’re not finished yet,’ he warned as he led the way down an aisle lined with packing cases stretching high into the silence of the dust-flecked air.
‘What is all this?’ she repeated.
Her voice was tense and excited, though she kept her distance as they walked along.
‘You like a challenge, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she said cautiously.
‘Then let’s move on to the inner sanctum.’
There were guards on the door, and a number of pass codes had to be inputted before finally iris recognition allowed him entry. Once they were inside he could see she was surprised by the fact that, compared to the rest of the facility, this was a relatively comfortable and ordinary-looking office. Having shut them inside the hermetically sealed space, he touched a hidden lever, and a safe in the floor began to rise.
‘Any more surprises?’ she asked him when he glanced at her.
They shared a moment, and this time he let his gaze linger. ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we?’ he teased her gently as she looked away. ‘I’m not wholly sure what surprises you yet.’
Now she blushed.
Taking a key fob from his pocket, he approached the safe and keyed in the numbers, changed remotely on the fob every few minutes by satellite signal. He heard her gasp when the door sprang open as if by magic. Withdrawing a small leather suitcase, he suggested she sat down.
‘I’ll bring it over to the table,’ he said, ‘so you can take a proper look. There are things in here it would be better not to drop …’
* * *
Raffa drew up a chair and sat close by without touching her. It was hard to relax, but she must relax if she were to concentrate. She inhaled deeply, drawing on his delicious scent and warmth, allowing her eyes one last greedy glimpse of his strong, pirate’s face before putting herself on a strict Raffa-free diet.
