Rumours: The Ruthless Ravensdales: Ravensdale's Defiant Captive (The Ravensdale Scandals) / Awakening the Ravensdale Heiress (The Ravensdale Scandals) / Engaged to Her Ravensdale Enemy (The Ravensdale

Holly gave a mock shudder. ‘Ooh! Do you promise? I love it when a man gets all macho with me.’

His jaw clamped down so hard she heard his back teeth connect. ‘Firstly, you’re not dressed appropriately,’ he said. ‘I have staff members about the property—both young and old—who would be offended by your lack of modesty.’

Holly laughed at his priggishness. He wasn’t worried about his staff. He was worried about himself. How she made him feel—out of control and unsettled by it. What fun this was turning out to be. ‘Are you in some sort of time warp?’ she said. ‘This is the twenty-first century. Women can dress how they want, especially on private property.’

‘Secondly, you’re not here to party,’ he said as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘You’re here to work. W-O-R-K. Maybe you haven’t heard that word before. But by the time you leave I swear you’ll know it intimately or I’ll die trying. Sophia is waiting for you in the kitchen. There’s a meal to prepare.’

‘Go help her yourself,’ she said with playful splash of her toes that sent a spray of water over his crisply ironed trousers. ‘You’ve got two arms.’

Those two strongly muscled arms suddenly reached down into the water and hauled her to her feet to stand dripping in front of him. Close to him. So close she could feel his body heat radiating towards her. Any second now she thought she would hear the hissing of steam.

‘I gave you an order,’ he said, breathing hard, eyes glittering darkly.

Holly stood her ground even though his hands gripping the tops of her arms were searing through her flesh like scorching-hot brands. The proximity of his hard body was doing strange things to hers. She could feel a pulse of excitement roaring through her flesh, a zinging awareness of all that was different between them: his maleness, her femaleness, his determination to keep control and her determination to dismantle it.

It crackled in the air they shared like a current set on too high a voltage.

She looked at his grimly set mouth and the dark shadow of sexy stubble that surrounded it. The clench of his jaw that suggested he was only just holding on to his temper. Her heart began to thump, but not out of fear. It wasn’t him she was afraid of but her reaction to him. She had never felt her body react in this way. His touch triggered something raw and primal in her. She had never felt her body ache. Pulse and contract with a longing she couldn’t describe because she had never felt it quite like this before. She wasn’t a virgin but none of her few sexual encounters had made her flesh sing like this. He hadn’t even kissed her and yet she felt as if she was on a knife-edge. Every nerve in her body was standing up and waiting. Anticipating. Wanting. Hungering.

But then he suddenly dropped his hands from her arms. The movement was so unexpected she nearly toppled backwards into the pool but somehow managed to regain her balance. She maintained her composure—just—with a cool look cast his way. ‘One thing you should note,’ she said. ‘I don’t take orders. Not from you or from anyone.’

His jaw worked for a moment. She saw the way his eyes went to her heaving chest as if he couldn’t stop himself. When his gaze re-engaged with hers it burned with heat as hot as a blacksmith’s fire. ‘Then you will learn how to do so,’ he said with a thread of steel in his voice. ‘If I achieve nothing else out of this month, I will achieve that. You will do as I say and not question my authority. Not for a moment.’

Holly inched up her chin. ‘Game on.’

* * *

Julius paced the floor of his office a short time later. How could he have let Holly get under his skin like that? He had gone down there to draw a line with her but she had flipped things so swiftly he had ended up acting like a caveman. He had never felt more like slaking his lust just for the heck of it and to hell with the consequences. His body was still thrumming with the thunderous need she had stirred in him.

Holly was doing her best to break him, to reduce him to the level of a wild animal. She was taunting him with every trick she had in her repertoire. She was in his house, in his private sanctuary, for the next four weeks. Four weeks! How was he going to withstand the assault on his senses?

She was so determined, so devious, so...distracting. His flesh still tingled with the aftershocks of touching her. Her skin against his had felt hot. Scorching hot. Blistering. He could still feel the sensation firing through his body. Touching her had unleashed something frighteningly primal in him. It roared through his blood like a wild fire. He had been knocked sideways by the sensation of holding her so close to the throbbing need of his body. It had been all he could do to keep himself from ripping that ridiculous see-through underwear away, driving himself into her and thrusting madly until he exploded.

Was he so sex-deprived that her teasing come-on had reduced him to the behaviour of a wild beast? The temptation of her, the thrill of touching her, of smelling that intoxicating scent of jasmine, musk and something else he couldn’t pin down had wiped out the motherboard of his morality like a lightning strike.

What was it about her that caused him to react this way? She was wilful, wild, unpredictable and wanton. Being anywhere near her was like fighting an addiction he hadn’t even known he possessed. He wanted her. He ached to have her. He pulsed with the need to feel her surround him with her hot little body. He could feel it rippling through him: lust let loose taking charge of him, demanding, dictating, directing. Dismantling all of his efforts to resist it.

He would resist it.

He would resist her.

He was not a hedonist. He wasn’t a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal who could only respond to primal urges. He had intellect, discipline and self-control. A moral compass. A conscience.

Julius sat down heavily on his Chesterfield office chair, rotating it from side to side as he gathered his fevered thoughts. What was that crack Holly had made about his celebrity parents? So she knew exactly who he was, did she? Had she known all along or had someone told her? Sophia wouldn’t have said anything. He trusted his housekeeper to take a bullet for the sake of his privacy. Had Holly somehow stumbled on his identity? No doubt that was why she was playing her seduction game. She wanted a celebrity trophy to hang on her belt. A show business shag to boast about to her friends. Could there be anything more nauseatingly vacuous?

He was lucky the press left him alone here in Argentina. He was able to walk around without the paparazzi documenting his every move. In England it was different. As a child he had found the intrusion terrifying. As an adult it was nothing less than sickening. Being chased down the street, cameras shoved in his face, when he was coming and going to lectures at university. Hounded while he was trying to go on a date with someone. It had got to the point where he had stopped dating. It wasn’t worth the effort.

He was often mistaken for his brother, Jake, and that caused heaps of trouble, the sort of trouble for which he had no time or patience. Jake had no issues with the press. Jake accepted it as part of being related to famous people, but then, he had always been the more outgoing twin. Although Jake had no aspirations to be on the stage, he loved being the centre of attention and used their parents’ fame to get what he wanted—a constant stream of beautiful women in and out of his bedroom. Jake didn’t mind being compared to their father. He wore it like a badge of honour.

Julius would rather poke a skewer in his eye.

He would not have people compare him to his father. It wasn’t that he didn’t love his father. He loved both of his parents in a hands-off sort of way. He had never been one to wear his emotions on the outside. Even as a child he had never been the sort of person who was comfortable with over-the-top displays of emotion. His parents’ loud arguments, their torrid displays of temper and their passionate and very public reunions had always made Julius cringe with embarrassment. He was glad he’d spent most of his childhood and adolescence at boarding school. He had found study an escape from the unpredictability of his home life. He had found the structure, order and strictly timetabled life a natural fit for his personality.

Jake, on the other hand, loved spontaneity. Jake hadn’t enjoyed the discipline of school and had always found ways to buck the system. He was like their father in that he lapped up the attention and if it wasn’t shining his way he found a way to make it do so.

Julius hated the limelight. He liked to work quietly in the background without the world’s eye honed on him. His success as an astrophysicist had drawn far more attention to him than he would have liked but he comforted himself with the fact that he was successful in his own right, that he hadn’t used his parents’ fame as a way of opening any doors. He took a great deal of satisfaction in his work and, although the hours and the responsibility of heading a software company, along with his regular work came with its own set of problems, he enjoyed the flexibility of working from home, flying in and out as necessary.

The fact that the sanctuary of his home was now occupied by a mischievous hoyden was a state of affairs he would have to address, and soon. How was he supposed to concentrate with her flouncing around his villa?

The way she had challenged him as if fighting a duel. Game on. What exactly was she trying to prove? Hadn’t she done enough by that little strip show in the pool? She was supposed to be making a new start. Reforming her bad ways. But from the moment she’d arrived she’d been playing him like a puppet master. Tugging on his strings until he was so churned up with lust he couldn’t think straight. That was no doubt why she wouldn’t accept the room Sophia had prepared for her on the third floor. Of course that room wouldn’t suit Miss Bedroom Eyes. It was too far away from his. What did she have in mind? A midnight foray into his suite?

He would not allow her to win this. She would not get the better of him. She might think he was just like any other man she had lured into her sensual web in the past. She might think he was weak and spineless and driven by hormones—but she would soon find she had underestimated him. Big time.

He was putting an end to this before it got started.

Holly Perez was going straight to jail and he was making damn certain she wasn’t collecting two hundred pounds—or anything else of his—on the way past.

CHAPTER FOUR (#u2749712f-7352-5476-818a-34ed57cbdfd4)

HOLLY WAS HELPING Sophia by preparing the vegetables for dinner while the housekeeper had a lie-down. Not because Julius had commanded her to get to work but because Sophia clearly couldn’t do much with her wrist in a restrictive brace. Holly remembered all too well how painful a damaged limb could be. The simplest tasks were a nightmare and if you did too much it could compromise the healing process.

Besides, she quite liked cooking, for all that she’d told Julius she couldn’t boil an egg, or words to that effect. She even liked cleaning. The repetitious nature of it was somehow soothing. It had helped her many a time as a child and teenager to put some order into the chaos of her home life. Her mother had got to the point of not being able to cope with the running of the home so Holly had taken it over. From a young age she knew how to cook, clean, tidy cupboards, fold washing and iron. It had also been a way to keep her stepfather from criticising her mother for not doing things properly around the house. If the house was as perfect as Holly could make it then a day or two might pass without a showdown.

What Holly didn’t like was being ordered about. Controlled. No one was going to command her like a serf. If she chose to do something, then she would do it because it was the decent thing to do, or she wanted to do it, not because someone was trying to lord it over her.

As if Holly had summoned him with her thoughts, Julius came striding into the kitchen. ‘I want a word,’ he said. ‘In my office. Now.’

She blithely continued peeling the potato she was holding. ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes. I’ve still got the tomatoes and the courgettes to do.’

He came to the opposite side of the island bench to where she was standing and slammed his hands down on the surface, nailing her with his gaze. ‘When I issue you an order, I expect you to obey it immediately.’

Holly held his intensely sapphire gaze with an arch look. ‘Why can’t you talk to me here?’ She lowered her voice to a husky drawl. ‘Or are you worried your housekeeper will come in and catch us at it on the kitchen bench?’

His eyes went to her mouth for the briefest moment before flashing back to hers, twin flags of dull red riding high on his cheekbones. ‘I want you out of here by morning,’ he said. ‘I’m withdrawing my support for the scheme. You can find some other fool to take you on or you can go straight to jail where you belong. I don’t care.’

‘Fine.’ Holly put down the peeler, untied the apron Sophia had given her and tossed it on the bench. ‘I’ll go and pack my things. Sophia can take over here. I’ll just go and wake her from her nap and tell her. Her wrist was giving her a lot of discomfort earlier so she took a stronger painkiller. I reckon she’s been doing too much because she doesn’t want to let you down. But, hey, that’s what she’s paid for, right?’

He glanced at the half-prepared meal before reconnecting with Holly’s gaze. ‘You—’ he bit out. ‘This is one big game to you, isn’t it?’

Holly leaned over the bench so her cleavage was on show. He reared back as if the backdraft of a fire had hit him in the face. ‘You know what your trouble is, Julius? You don’t mind if I call you that, do you? It makes things a little less formal between us since we’re living together and all, don’t you think?’ She heard his teeth audibly grind together as she fluttered her eyelashes at him but she carried on regardless. ‘Your problem is you’re sexually frustrated. All that pent-up energy’s gotta have an outlet. You’re tearing strips off me when what you really want to do is tear my clothes off.’

His expression was thunderous. ‘I have never met a more audaciously wanton woman than you. You have zero shame.’

Holly gave him an impish smile. ‘Aw, how sweet of you to say so. Such flattery is music to my ears.’

He muttered a savage swear word and pushed his hair back from his forehead. It looked as if it wasn’t the first time he’d done it that evening. The thick, glossy strands were in a rumpled state of disorder. His whole body was taut, rippling with tension. He reminded her of a tightly coiled spring about to snap.

‘Here’s what you’ve got wrong about me,’ he said, facing her again with a hardened glare. ‘I can resist you. You might think all those come-on looks will make me fall on you like some hormone-driven teenager, but you’re wrong.’