Lucy Ellis – The Man She Shouldn't Crave (страница 8)

Twenty minutes later, as he seated her at their table, she was still thinking business even as her inner princess did a pirouette. The restaurant was on the seventy-fifth floor of a famous building. Rose had read about it in a glossy magazine recently. She just hadn’t expected she’d ever be dining here.

‘You could have just asked, you know,’ she said with a little smile.

‘Asked?’ Plato took his seat opposite her and leaned in closer, his focus intent on her face as if she fascinated him.

‘To have dinner with me.’

‘Is that what this is about?’ he asked.

‘What else could it be?’

He was silent for a moment. ‘I apologise for making assumptions,’ he said, in that deep, dark voice.

‘I hadn’t realised you’d made any.’ But they both knew he had. ‘Oh, you mean the groupie comment? Sorry to disappoint you. I’m about as interested in sport as you are in lipstick.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ he replied, his voice pitched low and intimate.

He eased forward, bringing his forearms down on the table, and suddenly it felt awfully small and insubstantial between them—although if she looked around the restaurant their table was no smaller than anyone else’s.

‘I could develop a fascination for the subject.’

It was a clichéd line and they both knew it. Plato didn’t back off, though. If anything the space between them seemed to get smaller and smaller, until all she could see was the suggestion of what his firm mouth could do to her lipstick and the gleam of purpose behind those rain-dark eyes.

Rose knew it was her birthright as a Southern woman to flirt, but this man was outside her experience—and she also wasn’t sure if overt flirting was going to get her what she wanted. Although at this point she wasn’t entirely certain what that was.

Plato leaned back and gave the maître d’instructions about their meals, but his eyes never left hers. Rose was glad of the low lights in the restaurant, the candles between them, the shadows that hopefully went some way to disguising how susceptible she was to him.

‘You wanted to hear about my business?’

‘Da, the destiny date,’ he said easily.

Rose couldn’t repress a smile at the way he said it in that deep, dark voice. As if it were a little children’s toy she was wheeling out when of course it was so much more.

‘I’m looking to sign one or two of your players up to do a publicity piece for my agency.’

‘You didn’t think to approach our PR people?’

‘Uh-huh, I’m sure that would have worked.’

He lifted those big shoulders in a heavy shrug that said, What can I do? I’m an important man. I don’t handle the small stuff.

Yet he had. He’d turned up at her front door.

‘Why did you turn up at my house?’

Yes, why not just blurt it out, Rose?

He seemed about to say something, then shook his head as if whatever he had been thinking had amused him. ‘My security team showed me your blog,’ he said.

Rose scrambled to remember what she had written.

‘I was concerned, naturally. I thought I would check it out.’

The blog or her? Rose peered back at him warily.

‘Why would you be concerned? I didn’t defame anybody. It was just a silly laugh.’

‘Is that what it was, Rose?’ He didn’t show it by any particular movement in his face or note in his voice but Rose sensed his sudden watchfulness.

‘My blog bothered you,’ she said slowly.

‘Let’s just say it drew attention to a couple of things the media don’t need to get wind of. But I accept you are who you appear to be, Rose. A young woman running an internet dating site.’

‘Is this about the Sazanov brothers?’

He shrugged negligently. ‘It doesn’t matter now. It’s taken care of.’

‘Then why did you come to my house?’

Plato drummed the table with his left hand. ‘Sometimes even grown men can behave like hormonal boys, dushka.’

Rose forgot about the Sazanov brothers. Forgot about the embarrassment of him reading her silly blog. She even—almost—forgot about how he had bossed her around in her own home, in her underwear. Was he saying he was attracted to her? He’d wanted to see her again?

‘You wanted to see me,’ she said, hoping the thrill that gave her didn’t show—or her subsequent embarrassment.

‘Da.’ He didn’t look embarrassed at all. ‘I meet beautiful women all the time. Many give me their contact details. You did so in an unusual way.’

Rose’s excitement dimmed. So much for being special.

‘Then, of course, I learned you had done the same with each and every member of the team. I was—disappointed.’

‘Right.’ She struggled to find something amusing to quip back at him, but she was feeling her own disappointment.

‘I was concerned as to your motives, and when Security located you I decided to handle it myself.’ A half-smile tugged at that firm mouth of his. ‘As I said, my judgement was somewhat clouded by other considerations. The main one being I wanted to see you again.’

Rose gripped her champagne flute. ‘Well, there is that,’ she said faintly.

‘It’s fortunate I did,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have liked a member of my security team coming to your door tonight, finding you in that—what do you call it?’

Rose’s mouth felt dry and her head a little light.

‘Nightie,’ she said airlessly.

‘You wear that to bed? Alone?’

Someone had turned up the temperature in the room. Rose jerked her glass to her lips. ‘Mmm …’ She fudged her answer and swallowed.

‘Such a waste.’ He was watching her with obvious interest, his eyes dark and moving over her flushed face.

Rose almost dropped her glass. Liquid splashed. She looked about for a cloth but Plato was already reaching across, blotting the tablecloth, his eyes never leaving hers.

‘I didn’t ask you,’ he said, in that deep accented voice that thrilled her to her toes. ‘Are you unattached? Is there someone?’

For almost two years she had been the most unattached woman in Toronto, and right up until this very moment she had been happy to keep it that way. ‘No, there’s no one.’ Why was her voice all breathless and girly? It made her sound like such a push-over.

For this man I could very well be a pushover.

‘I celebrate that news,’ he said with a slight smile.

He was so foreign. So dangerous to her equilibrium. One moment they were having a business dinner, and suddenly it was all sex. Yes, it was definitely about sex.

She told herself she hoped she wasn’t such a ninny that she was going to fall for all that macho bunkum about her nightie and being alone in her bed and needing a man …

But she was very much afraid she was.

Oh, for land sakes pull yourself together, Rose.

‘The reason you’re here isn’t because I wrote my cell number on your hand,’ she said defensively. ‘You got ticked off because I did the same for each and every one of your precious players.’

He chuckled, and the sound was a lovely rumble in his chest that had Rose tilting forward to be closer to it. Self-preservation should have seen her putting some space between them, because right about now she was becoming aware she felt a little out of control with this man. It was as if she kept slip-sliding towards him, and she didn’t really understand why this was so.

‘I’m here for the same reason why every one of those players was given strict instructions not to use that number,’ he replied easily. ‘You’re an incredibly beautiful woman.’

She was? Rose struggled to find something to answer that, but her mind was spinning like a wheel without grip on incredibly beautiful. Trying to focus, she felt her brain slowly start to function again, and she … Hang on, what did he mean the players had been instructed not to use her number?

‘You use your femininity to your advantage,’ he observed lazily, as if this pleased him. His lashes were at half-mast. Everything about him reeked sexual confidence. ‘I’m not complaining.’

Pushing through the dozens of messages the woman in her was reacting to, as if sexual switches were being thrown here, there and everywhere, Rose grasped onto the one thing she knew was true. She most certainly did not play the womanly wiles card! And if the players couldn’t use her number this afternoon had been a waste of time. She was back at square one.