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‘Saturday evening?’ he pressed abruptly.
Darci deliberately gave the alternative suggestion some thought, knowing as she glanced at his face from beneath lowered lashes that the egotistical Luc Gambrelli wasn’t best pleased by her obvious hesitation.
He was going to be less pleased when she didn’t even turn up for their dinner date!
‘Why not?’ she finally accepted offhandedly. ‘As long as you intend taking me somewhere sinfully expensive.’ She looked up at him beguilingly, wondering how he liked the idea of literally being used as a meal-ticket.
He didn’t, if the tightening of his mouth and the narrowing of his gaze was anything to go by!
Although it was an emotion he quickly masked as he gave a shrug of those broad shoulders. ‘I’m sure I can find somewhere appropriately sinful,’ he replied.
‘Sinfully expensive,’ Darci corrected—did this man have to reduce everything to the nerve-tinglingly sensual?
‘Of course,’ he drawled, the confident warmth back in those dark eyes as he easily held her gaze and released his grip on her arm to trail his fingers caressingly downwards.
Darci’s breath caught in her throat at the headiness caused by that light touch. Her skin actually seemed to tingle, her own fingers contracting slightly as his thumb intimately stroked the palm of her hand.
It was deliberate seduction, she told herself firmly. Something this man was a master at. In fact, he probably had a diploma on his bedroom wall—as well as several dozen notches on his bedpost!—to testify to his expertise on the subject!
Telling herself that didn’t help in the slightest as those long tapered fingers linked with hers and he once again lifted her hand to his lips, his breath warm against her skin as he brushed his mouth against her knuckles, his dark eyes easily holding hers as his tongue rasped briefly—tasting?—where his lips had just kissed.
A master of seduction? The man should come with a public health warning!
No wonder poor Mellie had fallen victim to Luc’s advances…
‘Until Saturday evening, then, Darci,’ he confirmed, releasing her hand as he straightened. ‘Is Garstang’s sinfully expensive enough for you?’
The exclusive restaurant wasn’t one that Darci had ever been to—a junior doctor’s pay didn’t exactly run to establishments that didn’t even list the prices on their menu!—but she had heard of it, of course, and Grant had been there several times, she knew.
‘It sounds perfect,’ she accepted.
‘I’ll call for you—’
‘No, I’ll meet you at the restaurant at eight o’clock,’ Darci told him firmly; having this man arrange to pick her up was not part of her plan at all.
Garstang’s exclusivity, and the fact that Luc Gambrelli was perfectly confident about being able to secure a booking in a top-class venue that was totally booked months in advance, made it the perfect venue for the humiliation Darci intended to inflict.
She could just picture him now, sitting at the table in the fashionably exclusive Garstang’s, looking oh-so-lethally attractive as he waited for her to arrive.
As he waited.
And waited.
Until it finally dawned on him that Darci had no intention of turning up.
That the legendary lover Luc Gambrelli had been publicly stood up.
Sinfully delicious!
CHAPTER THREE
‘ARE you sure you don’t want to come to the party with Michael and me?’ Kerry paused at the door, on her way out to meet her fiancé for the evening.
‘Perfectly sure.’ Darci grinned at her flatmate reassuringly as she sat on the sofa wearing an old and comfortable pair of pyjamas and wrapped in her duvet. ‘I have the evening off, my favourite DVD—’ she held it up ‘—and a bowl of toffee popcorn; what more could I possibly need?’
‘Luc Gambrelli?’ Kerry suggested provokingly.
‘Forget it!’ Darci protested.
‘Doesn’t it bother you at all that you could actually be out with him this evening, instead of sitting at home alone eating popcorn and watching a film you’ve already seen a dozen times before?’ Kerry sounded incredulous.
‘Not in the least,’ Darci assured her smugly. ‘Just sitting here imagining Luc Gambrelli waiting at a table in Garstang’s for me to arrive is enough to make my evening.’
Kerry looked troubled. ‘You agreed that you would call the restaurant and let him know you weren’t going to turn up,’ she reminded her reprovingly.
Yes, as a concession to Kerry’s worrying the last two days Darci had agreed to do that. She just hadn’t said when she would do it!
Twenty, even twenty-five minutes past eight o’clock should do it, she had decided. Long enough for the egotistical Luc Gambrelli to be made to feel decidedly uncomfortable at the curious glances of the other diners and the restaurant staff that were sure to be directed his way as it became more and more obvious, as the minutes slowly ticked by, that his date for the evening wasn’t going to turn up.
‘Stop worrying, Kerry. I will call the restaurant and make my excuses,’ Darci promised.
‘Dammit, I forgot to tell you!’ Kerry exclaimed. ‘Mellie phoned earlier. She wanted to know how Grant’s premiere went on Thursday.’
Darci frowned. ‘She did?’
‘Stop looking so worried, Darce,’ her friend replied. ‘I wasn’t stupid enough to tell her what you’re up to.’
‘Good.’ Darci breathed her relief.
‘Although I probably should have done,’ Kerry continued. ‘I’m sure Mellie would be the first person to tell you to just let this go.’
‘I am letting it go,’ Darci rejoined. ‘Do stop worrying, Kerry! After tonight I don’t expect to hear from Luc Gambrelli ever again.’
Kerry raised her eyes heavenwards. ‘Let’s hope not.’
‘Just go, and let me enjoy my movie and my popcorn,’ Darci told her friend laughingly, as Kerry still hesitated in the doorway.
She heaved a genuine sigh of relief when her flatmate finally complied. Although Darci had a feeling that Kerry might be right when it came to how Mellie would feel about her interference where Luc Gambrelli was concerned…
Oh, well, it was too late now—and she really did intend to stay well away from the Sicilian in future.
She wait until half past eight before telephoning Garstang’s and asking them to pass a message on to Luc Gambrelli that she wasn’t well and so wouldn’t be able to meet him after all, hastily refusing the offer of having Mr Gambrelli brought to the telephone so that she might tell him that herself; she didn’t want to even hear that sexily persuasive voice again!
But that didn’t mean that she hadn’t thought about Luc Gambrelli a lot over the last two days—that she hadn’t remembered the delicious shiver that had run down her spine as his lips had brushed across the back of her hand, and how her body had responded as he’d detailed how he would like to make love to her, while all the time that devilish sense of humour had glinted in his eyes.
And she had guilty thoughts of him right now, as he sat in the restaurant, waiting for her to arrive, probably under the increasingly pitying gazes of the other customers. Thoughts that kept intruding as she tried to watch her favourite film…
It was only the memory of the way Luc Gambrelli had so callously hurt Mellie that made Darci so certain she had been right to carry out her plan to stand him up tonight. The man simply didn’t have the right to go around breaking women’s hearts without even a backward glance. And especially when that woman was a friend of Darci’s.
Then why did she feel so increasingly uncomfortable about what she had done?
It was ridiculous.
Luc Gambrelli deserved everything he got!
When the doorbell rang, a little after nine o’clock, Darci knew she was relieved at the interruption in her tortuous thoughts. She didn’t in the least mind pausing the DVD to go and answer the door—any visitor would be a welcome diversion.
Until she opened the door and found that visitor was Luc Gambrelli…
Darci gaped at him, rendered totally speechless as she took in how suavely handsome he looked, in a black silk shirt and black tailored trousers worn beneath a tan suede jacket. The latter was almost a perfect match for his overlong, burnished gold hair, and the shirt and trousers gave the strong angles of his face and his superbly moulded mouth a slightly saturnine appearance.
All of it succeeded in making Darci feel completely vulnerable, dressed as she was in men’s striped cotton pyjamas, with her face completely bare of make-up, her hair tousled and her feet bare!
Her legs were in danger of buckling beneath her, she discovered, and she quickly put out a hand to clasp tightly onto the door, the panicky palpitations she could feel in her chest bringing a deep blush to her cheeks.
‘I—What—How—’ She was gabbling like an idiot, Darci recognised disgustedly. ‘What are you doing here?’ She finally managed to string a whole sentence together.
Luc took in Darci’s appearance in one sweeping glance: her tumbling hair, her flushed face, fevered green eyes. His gaze narrowed as he noted the men’s pyjamas she wore and wondered to whom they had originally belonged…
He shrugged broad shoulders. ‘I was concerned about you after receiving your message at the restaurant you weren’t well,’ he responded. ‘So I telephoned Grant and asked him for your address.’
Those green eyes widened. ‘And he just gave it to you?’
‘Why would he not?’ Luc replied.
‘Well, because—because—’ She gave an incredulous shake of her head.
‘Once I had explained to him that the two of us should have been having dinner together this evening he was quite happy to be accommodating,’ Luc assured her smoothly. ‘May I come in?’
‘I—Well—Yes, I suppose so,’ she accepted grudgingly as she moved back from the door.
Luc stepped inside, noting the crumpled duvet on the sofa before turning back to look at Darci. ‘The maître d’ at Garstang’s informed me that you have a fever.’
‘Yes,’ Darci confirmed, hoping the warmth she could feel in her cheeks looked convincing.
Because Luc Gambrelli was a totally disturbing presence in what she had always considered her private sanctum!
He seemed so big—he was well over six feet to her five feet nine inches—and he made the sitting-room seem somehow smaller, his steel-muscled body totally dominating and exuding a power, a barely restrained strength, that caused a rivulet of apprehension to skitter down the length of Darci’s spine.
Did he really believe she was ill? Or was his being here some form of retribution on his part for leaving him sitting in the restaurant all that time?
‘Have you consulted a doctor?’ he demanded to know.
‘I am a doctor,’ Darci informed him, and was rewarded by the raising of dark blond brows as he widened those chocolate-brown eyes.
She hadn’t expected—not in her wildest dreams!—that Luc would actually turn up at her apartment this way after she had stood him up. If she had, she would have kept the door locked and barricaded herself in her bedroom until he went away again!
But she had stopped shaking now, and while her heart was still beating far too wildly in her chest, the palpitations had thankfully ceased.
All she had to do was reassure Luc that her illness wasn’t a hospital case, and then maybe he would leave.
He had to leave!
Because just having him here in her apartment was more unsettling, more disturbing, than anything she had ever known in her life. The overhead light was making his hair appear silkily soft in contrast to the harder planes of his aristocratic face. It was enough to overwhelm a woman’s senses—any woman’s senses!—completely.
In fact, Darci wasn’t sure she didn’t have a fever, after all!
She was definitely more aware of Luc Gambrelli, more physically aware of him, than she had a right to be…
‘And what is your diagnosis?’ Luc persisted, slightly surprised—although why he should be he had no idea—at her choice of profession.
But, in his defence, no doctor he had ever consulted, on the rare occasions that he’d been ill, had ever looked like Darci Wilde.
In fact, he would have thought that just facing all that wild red hair, those come-to-bed green eyes, the full pout of her mouth and the temptation of her full, thrusting breasts across the desk in a doctor’s consulting room would be enough to raise any man’s temperature!
As his own was rising now, as he realised that she wore absolutely nothing beneath those striped pyjamas…
As garments, they shouldn’t have been in the least sexy. They were obviously meant for someone much bigger in size—the shoulders hanging loose and the sleeves falling over the slenderness of her hands, and the trousers only held in place by the tie-string at her slender waist as they bagged about her hips. With their awful green-and-cream striped pattern, the pyjamas should have been anything but sexually alluring. But the low neckline of the jacket revealed the slenderness of Darci’s throat and a creamy expanse of her bare breasts as they thrust pertly, her nipples taut, against the cotton material.
Luc could imagine nothing more erotic than slowly undoing the buttons down the front of the pyjama jacket to reveal those thrusting breasts, then lavishing the full attention of his lips and tongue across her hardened nipples…
‘My diagnosis?’ Darci echoed, moistening her lips before replying, although she was slightly disconcerted as Luc’s dark gaze followed the movement. ‘I have the start of a cold, I believe,’ she dismissed briskly, in an effort to dispel the air of—of—intimacy that slowly seemed to be surrounding the two of them.
Where was the cautious Kerry, the worrier, when Darci most needed her?
Although after Kerry’s anxiety over the last two days, she had a feeling her friend might have little sympathy with Darci’s present predicament. Especially as it was completely self-inflicted! Kerry, without having even met Luc Gambrelli, had warned Darci against interfering, seeming to know instinctively that it would be dangerous to wake this sleeping tiger.
It was a pity that Darci’s instincts hadn’t been as acute!
And that she hadn’t thought to pre-warn Grant that under no circumstances was he to reveal her address to Luc Gambrelli….
But it had never occurred to Darci, as she’d made her fiendish plan to leave Luc Gambrelli sitting at Garstang’s, that he would actually feel concerned enough about her supposed ill-health to actually seek her out!
The man was completely unpredictable, she decided.
‘As I’m sure you appreciate,’ she went on firmly, ‘there’s no actual cure for the common cold, and it’s also highly contagious. In fact, I don’t think you should even be here in the same room with me,’ she added, belatedly registering the intensity of his dark gaze as it roamed freely across her face and body.
Luc gave a slight smile as he recognised her skittishness for exactly what it was. ‘But I couldn’t possibly desert you when you aren’t well,’ he drawled huskily. ‘Do you live here alone?’ he probed, having thought it was rather a large apartment for just one person.
He wondered if the owner of the pyjamas didn’t live here, too… Although he would have thought Grant would be more circumspect about telling him of Darci’s living arrangements if that were the case…
‘My flatmate has gone out this evening,’ Darci informed him. ‘I have two flatmates, actually, but one of them is away at the moment,’ she finished.
Luc quirked blond brows. ‘Male or female?’
‘Both female, of course,’ she came back tartly. ‘Now, I really do think you should leave, Luc—’
‘And I think that you need someone to take care of you—at least until your flatmate returns,’ he cut in decisively as he slipped his jacket off and laid it across one of the chairs. ‘Point me in the direction of the kitchen and I’ll get you something cold to drink. It’s important to keep up your liquids when you have a fever, isn’t it?’ he opined, when she looked totally nonplussed.
