Settling The Score

‘Yes, you are!’ he chided gently.

‘I’ll get hysterical if I want to!’ she yelled. ‘Who wouldn’t get hysterical if they were stuck in a lift with a complete stranger?’

He gave a lazy smile, the corners of his mouth turning up in a way which suddenly made Romy’s heart thunder as it had never thundered before. ‘Do I make you nervous, then?’ he queried wickedly.

‘Yes, you jolly well do! And I’m certainly not going to accept this false imprisonment lying down!’

It was the worst thing she could have said, and the answering glint of light in his grey eyes made her fervently wish that she could rephrase that last statement!

‘What a pity,’ he murmured.

‘In fact, I’m going to yell for help!’ she announced wildly, saying anything—anything—to stop him looking at her in that way... She glared at him challengingly.

‘Be my guest,’ he drawled, and carelessly loosened the tie of cornflower silk which was knotted around his throat. ‘Yell to your heart’s content, sweetheart!’

Sticking her mouth as close to the door as possible, Romy shouted, ‘Help!’ at the top of her voice, and listened as the word echoed its way down the silent lift shaft. She drew in a deep breath for another attempt. ‘Help!’ But again her shout simply echoed into nothingness, and the lack of response made Romy’s heart race with real fear.

‘Why don’t you yell for help?’ she challenged.

‘Because there’s no one out there to hear us,’ he pointed out reasonably. ‘It’s a little-used lift. We would do much better to wait until we hear someone banging around, and then yell!’

‘And what if we never get out?’ she babbled, moving forward and clutching onto his lapels with white-knuckled fingers, her voice rising to a high, brittle note which threatened to crack. She buckled against him. ‘What if We die of thirst, or starve to death?’

‘We won’t,’ he soothed, and almost absently stroked the blonde hair which was now resting against his chest. ‘We’ll be just fine.’

She quickly dropped her hands from where they were busy creasing the linen of his lapels! ‘No, we won’t! We’ll be stuck here for ever! I just know we will! I—’

He lifted her chin with his forefinger so that she could not escape that blazing, stormy gaze. ‘The classic remedy for hysteria is a slap to the face.’ He cut across her words with a frown which gradually gave way to a slow, careful smile. ‘But I’m not inclined to do that. For a start, it’s such a beautiful face...’

The softness in his deep voice instantly and magically diffused all the terror she felt. A beautiful face? Romy went pink with pleasure at the compliment, and then immediately started thinking how pathetic she must look! And should he really be saying something like that to an engaged woman?

But when she threw a covert glance down at her left hand she discovered that she had left her engagement ring lying on the dressing table in the hotel room. There was no outward symbol to show the world she was spoken for. So she had better start acting like a mature woman who was about to be married!

Fixing her most intelligent look on her face, she drew a deep, calming breath and said steadily, ‘And how do you propose we get out of here?’

He stared down at her intently, his face and body suddenly tense. His eyes were cold and grey, Romy noted with a shiver—as hard and as glittering as a blade of steel.

Romy instantly became aware that all normal sounds had been deadened—muffled by the pulses which thundered in her head. Her line of vision had contracted to one small area, and she found that all she could see were the firm, sensual curves of his mouth.

He seemed to move fractionally towards her, and for one heart-stopping moment she actually thought that he was about to bend that dark, gorgeous head to kiss her—and found that she was holding her breath, waiting and anticipating his next move.

Then suddenly he laughed, and shifted his weight rather awkwardly, as though he was uncomfortable. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any immediate solution. So we’ll just have to wait. Sooner or later someone is bound to notice that one of us is missing or that the lift is firmly stuck between floors.’

‘Of course,’ she said stiffly, and deliberately turned her back on him, feeling absolutely mortified—aware that for a moment back then she had very much wanted him to kiss her. Had he been aware of her wish, too?

Was that another sign of pre-wedding nerves? she wondered worriedly. Wanting total strangers to pull you into their arms and to kiss you to within about an inch of your life? Tight-lipped, she stared at the blank wall, feeling disgusted with herself.

Dominic looked at the tense set of her shoulders, his mouth hardening as he recognised the hypnotic pull of sexual attraction which was building up in the confined space with all the speed of cells multiplying.

He tried to rationalise the situation. He had given little time or thought to pleasure over the past year, and this overwhelming need to crush her against him was probably just his body’s reaction to such self-imposed denial.

He had been working flat out for months and months, taking on a job in a law firm in Hong Kong for which he had been much too young and too unqualified, but in which he had absolutely triumphed—to everyone’s astonishment bar his own.

For Dominic was determined to succeed, to be the first member of his family who didn’t live in fear of the bailiffs.

He had grown up in poverty—real, abject poverty—with a mother who was proud and hard enough to let her only child go hungry. And Dominic had never forgotten hunger. Memories of that great aching emptiness gnawing away at the pit of his stomach had driven him on and on. He had vowed to stop only when he had made enough never to have to worry about hunger again.

The only trouble was that he had reached that stage a long time ago, but had blinded himself to the fact.

His whole life was work. Women did not feature in his grand scheme of things. Women distracted you with their beguiling eyes and their soft bodies. And women like this one—with her honey-blonde hair rippling like moonbeams over pert, high young breasts—well... Dominic could imagine never wanting to work again if he lost himself in her arms.

Oh, he dated occasionally—but in relationships he could control. Completely. And for this reason his affairs usually tended to be with older women.

Women who knew the score. Women in their early thirties, with established careers of their own, who were not looking for a permanent partner. Or, at least, that was what they always told him at the beginning. Three months down the line, when they started talking babies and houses, Dominic would be forced to end the relationship as gently as possible.

Settling down was simply not an option at this time in his life and he sometimes wondered whether it ever would be. For he had never known happiness or security in his own childhood and so had no idea how to create it.

He shifted his weight as he felt the uncomfortable heaviness of desire building up, but unfortunately there was nowhere to look at that moment, except at the source of that desire.

His eyes lingered reluctantly on the pure, clean sweep of her neck. Noted the way her simple blue T-shirt and denim mini-skirt flowed down over her slim, healthy curves. God, but she looked so young and so beautiful! And so impossibly innocent, too!

But innocent she could not be, he decided grimly—not from the way she had looked at him just now. He had surprised a wide-eyed look of pure invitation on her face. This happened to Dominic with such monotonous regularity that it usually left him cold, however beautiful the woman. And yet for some reason, with this woman, it was taking every bit of will-power he possessed not to succumb to it.

Romy had started to feel hot Tiny pinpricks of heat began to scratch irritatingly at her forehead, and surreptitiously she drew the back of her hand across it.

‘Perhaps we should sit down,’ he suggested.

She turned, suddenly aware of how close he was, the scent of him invading her nostrils like the sweetest perfume. ‘Wh-why?’

‘Because it’s hot and stressful in here.’ Very stressful, he thought ruefully as he watched the tiny pulse at her temple beat so frantically. ‘Confined space, and all that. Aren’t we supposed to conserve oxygen and energy in such a situation? I don’t want you fainting on me.’

Romy smiled. ‘Do I look like the fainting type?’

He narrowed his eyes. ‘You look...delicate, if you must know. Too pale with those shadows bruising your eyes—as if you haven’t been sleeping much lately.’

‘I’m sorry I asked!’ she joked, but she slid to the floor as he had suggested, and looked rather pointedly at the space beside her. ‘But if all you say is true, then shouldn’t you be joining me?’

As soon as Dominic saw her coltish young legs sprawled in front of her, he knew he had made a mistake. A big mistake. He tried to will the desire away, but by now it was in such an advanced state that it stubbornly refused to go.

And she was right; he really ought to join her. Standing was no help to his discomfort at all. From here he had a too tantalising view of what her breasts might be like if they were bare. Whenever she moved, the thin blue material of her T-shirt moved fractionally with her—so that he caught an occasional glimpse of the creamy flesh above the luscious swell of her breasts.

He reluctantly crouched down and arranged his long-legged frame in the cramped space with difficulty. And found that sitting beside her was the only sensibly way to stop him from staring at her more than was absolutely necessary.

‘Are you frightened?’ he asked her conversationally, in an effort to distract himself from the rapid rising and falling of her breasts as she tried her best to act unconcerned by his proximity.

‘I’m not sure,’ she hedged, because she found it difficult to lie, and in truth she was very frightened indeed—though more by the intensity of her body’s reaction to a man who was a complete stranger than by her entrapment.

She could feel the heat pricking her skin, the insistent peaking of her nipples beneath the gossamer-fine lace of the bra she wore. ‘Are you?’ she asked, more urgently than she had intended. ‘Frightened?’