Amazingly he was grinning when he turned back to face her. ‘You idiot,’ he chided. ‘This is Hong Kong—the most cosmopolitan city in the world! There isn’t a person on this crowded little rock worth their salt who can’t speak better English than we do ourselves!’
‘Oh,’ she said, feeling foolish.
‘Ten minutes,’ he repeated, and was still laughing at her when he disappeared into the bedroom.
When he came back, she was standing by the window gazing across the bay towards the less famous skyline of Kowloon.
‘No calls?’ he asked.
She turned to find him standing there in a beautiful slate-grey suit and pale blue shirt, with a slim navy tie knotted at his throat. His hair was still slightly damp, his tanned jaw swept clean of the shadow that had darkened it before. He wasn’t looking at her but was concentrating on tugging his shirt-cuffs into a neat line around the cuffs of his jacket, and so missed the silent gasp she couldn’t hold back as her senses reacted to how unnervingly attractive he was.
‘No,’ she answered, feeling slightly breathless.
He glanced up. Perhaps some of her agitation was showing in her voice. His eyes narrowed on her face, coolly assessing as they explored her pale, rather confused, expression. ‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded.
‘I…nothing,’ she denied, looking quickly away from him. ‘W-will I need my jacket?’
‘Maybe not outside,’ he answered, after a short, sharp pause that said he did not believe her. ‘But the buildings are all air-conditioned and it can be quite cool inside them. And, anyway,’ he added as he strode past her to hook her jacket off the back of the chair she had draped it on, ‘despite the heat, people dress conservatively here. Without the jacket you look like a tourist. With it,’ he added, settling the silk-lined linen across her shoulders, ‘you look like the elegant wife of a businessman.’
He came round to stand in front of her, the clean smell of him further disturbing her already disturbed and confused senses. He stood a full head taller than she did, putting her eyes on a level with his square, cleanly shaven chin.
‘Shaan…’ he murmured slowly, ‘…if you’re worrying about you and I sharing a bed tonight, then don’t.’
‘I’m not!’ she denied.
‘No?’ he mocked. ‘Well, something is certainly troubling you.’ He lifted a hand to her chin, his fingers gently urging her to look at him.
‘It—it just doesn’t feel right,’ she explained shakily.
‘All this—enforced intimacy with a man I hardly—’
‘Like?’ he inserted.
‘I never said that!’ she denied, lifting protesting eyes to his. His expression was disbelieving and she sighed, wishing he would just give her a little space so she could untangle the mess her emotions were in. ‘You’re difficult to—’
To ignore, she had been going to say, but stopped herself because she knew he wouldn’t understand. But that was exactly the right way to describe the problems she was struggling with just now. She needed—wanted—to be able to ignore him as a living, breathing sexually attractive male, but she couldn’t, because with each passing minute she spent in his company she was becoming more and more aware of him.
A man she could quite easily tumble headlong into love with.
No! The way her brain flashed that frightened protest at her made her stiffen up like a board. ‘Can we just go now?’ Her eyes pleaded so anxiously that he grimaced, then sighed in exasperation.
‘Sure,’ he agreed. ‘Why not?’ And he let go of her, leaving her very aware that she had just managed to offend him—again.
CHAPTER FIVE
IT WAS a trying afternoon, if only because Rafe was so determined to fill every second of it.
He discarded the idea of using one of the hotel’s chauffeur-driven cars in favour of travelling on the underground.
This was an experience in itself to Shaan, after being used to London’s aged underground system, but she would have appreciated it more if she hadn’t been so tired—and if that last little scene in their hotel suite hadn’t placed some stiffness between them.
They left the underground at a place called Central, which brought them smack bang into the middle of corporate Hong Kong. And the moment they stepped outside it was like having that wet blanket slapped in her face again.
‘Two minutes and we’ll be out of it,’ Rafe assured her, and, with a hand on her arm, rushed them across a busy road and in through a pair of huge plate glass doors which led—thankfully—back into blissful coolness.
His Hong Kong branch office was situated in a building that resembled a futuristic space rocket straight out of a Jules Verne novel. Shaan left her stomach behind when the lift rocketed them up thirty floors in half as many seconds. Then the doors opened, and she found herself staring at the most beautiful oriental woman she had ever seen.
Smiling in welcome, her lovely sloe-shaped eyes were fixed directly on Rafe. She sent him a bow and said something in Chinese to him, which he replied to in the same language. Then she looked curiously at Shaan.