Sophisticated Seduction

‘I want to make sure you know your way about well enough to be safe, so finish your coffee and we’ll go before the day gets too hot,’ Nicholas swept on decisively, ignoring her protest.

‘I don’t need you to do that either,’ Bridget asserted in a stronger voice.

‘As my sister has temporarily lost her senses, that makes her business my responsibility, and that includes ensuring that her employees know what they’re doing,’ he stated decisively.

She regarded him curiously, perception beginning to work. Perhaps he needed someone to bully and direct, with his sister and cousins so far away. After all these years, it must be habitual.

‘Won’t Wanda—?’

‘Wanda can take care of herself. She doesn’t need me. I rang her at her hotel last night to make sure, but I’m seeing her later today anyway.’

‘I can take care of myself. I don’t need you. You and Virginia are both wrong,’ Bridget emphasised tartly. ‘But as you’ve been kind enough to offer to show me around—thank you, Nicholas, I accept.’

He merely laughed at her tone, but Bridget was half regretting her submission. She was subject to a sense of being taken over, sucked into a community in which lives were directed by this man, and where autonomy was smothered and personal will counted for nothing.

‘Then be ready as soon as I’ve finished phoning my cousin Adrian in America.’ Nicholas pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘I don’t suppose Virginia will have been in touch with him, but I’d better check.’

His tone wasn’t quite weary, but he definitely sounded disenchanted, and Bridget stared at him in surprise. He had paused beneath one of the veranda’s ornately carved arches to look out at the morning, or perhaps the lavish expanse of roses, and a stray shaft of sunlight had found his head and was trapped in the darkness of his hair, turning it glossy blue-black—so different from hers, which would have revealed the odd darkly red highlight.

‘Nicholas?’

He turned at the sound of her soft voice and Bridget’s breath caught in her throat as she saw him against the light. He was tall and so dark and—beautiful, a word she had never before associated with his sex, and yet it was true of him and did nothing to detract from his masculinity. But how could it be that she saw him thus, when deep shade obscured his features from her?

‘What is it?’ he questioned her neutrally.

‘Virginia is old. I mean—’ She stopped in confusion because, of course, he was even older.

Nicholas had moved, his face properly visible to her once more, and she saw that he was laughing at her, revealing strong, healthy teeth, white and even.

‘You mean she’s an adult.’

‘I mean she can’t always be your responsibility,’ Bridget persevered. ‘Let her live her own life.’