‘It feels like a lifetime.’
‘Drink your coffee.’ He grinned.
‘And you can stop that, too,’ she snapped. ‘Ordering me around like a puppet.’
His eyes narrowed, the silver behind them glinting as he studied her thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Do you still work for me?’ he asked curiously.
‘Do you mean “work” as in am I still employed by your company?’ she asked.
He nodded.
So she did. ‘I’m due back in the office three weeks on Monday.’
‘Then stop arguing with your boss,’ he commanded.
‘I’m on holiday,’ she reminded him.
The way he reached across the table to grab hold of her hand was so unexpected that she jumped in surprise. ‘You’re on honeymoon,’ he corrected, with softly taunting emphasis. He watched her go pale at the reminder and knew she was thinking of Piers, not of him. He dropped her hand again. ‘And don’t flinch every time I touch you,’ he added, in yet another harsh reprimand.
‘I’m—sorry,’ she murmured, every hint of new-found spirit draining right out of her.
Rafe let out a heavy sigh of irritation. It was odd, really, but she had a feeling it was aimed at himself rather than her.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ he said grimly.
It should have been a relief to get back to their suite, but it wasn’t. She was in desperate need of some space on her own, without the threat of Rafe Danvers invading it, but he wasn’t having that.
He made her hang up all her new things. He made her sit down with him in the sitting room and share a pot of coffee. He made her watch CNN news with him on the TV. And every time her eyes started to close he made them open with some remark that required concentration and an answer.
Did the man never need to relax himself? she wondered crossly when, at last, she was allowed to escape to the relative privacy of the bathroom while she showered and got changed for dinner.
Dinner! Out to dinner! With other people—strange people!
As if she hadn’t been through enough today to make her want to sit down and weep at the stress of it all, they were going out to dinner with a large group of his business colleagues!
‘Oh—damn you to hell, Rafe Danvers,’ she muttered as she fought with hair that did not want to go up in the neat bun she was trying to pin it into. It took a good half-dozen pins to eventually secure it—a half-dozen too many pins, judging by the way her scalp was protesting.
Half-dead on her feet with jet lag, face flushed with impatience at her hair, and literally dancing inside with the state Rafe had put her nerves in, she stood and stared at herself in the full-length mirror.
The dress she was wearing was a strapless short black silk and tulle cocktail dress, which tightly moulded her slender figure from gently thrusting breasts to the very apex of her thighs, where it flared out in a mid-thigh-length skirt of rustling black tulle and left too much of her long black-stockinged legs on show for her liking.
But Rafe himself had chosen it—of course—only this afternoon. He’d forced her to try it on for him, then further discomfited her by allowing his eyes to linger on her much longer than they should have done before he’d said, ‘Wear that for me tonight,’ in a roughened tone that had set the muscles in her stomach tingling—because the tone had matched the expression in his eyes, and she hadn’t liked that either.
The knock sounding at the outer-suite door made her jump in alarm—another indication of how strung out she was, she realised tensely as she listened to Rafe’s long stride as he went to answer it.
Then she stood, staring blankly at her own face without seeing the vulnerable tilt to her soft ruby-painted mouth, or the way her beautiful black eyes revealed how utterly defenceless she felt. She only saw how exhaustion was hollowing out her cheeks, and how she’d had to do a careful bit of covering up to hide the dark circles around her eyes.
Did the straight line of this bodice sit too low on the creamy slopes of her breasts? she wondered anxiously. And the skirt was definitely too short, she decided, biting pensively down on her full bottom lip as she gave an experimental swing of her hips and watched in the mirror the way the fluffy skirt billowed out to show even more leg.
‘Very nice,’ a deep voice murmured huskily from behind her, and she almost cried out in alarm because she hadn’t heard him come into the room. Now her wary gaze flickered upwards to clash with his in the mirror.
‘I—’ That was all she managed; she was suddenly struck breathless and dumb by the height of him, the width of him, the powerful attraction in that dark, tough, aggressively handsome face looking back at her over the top of her own dark head.
Having to fight with herself to do it, she dragged her eyes back to her own reflection and glared at the dress. ‘It’s too short,’ she complained. ‘And too tight.’
‘Rubbish,’ he dismissed. ‘It’s perfect.’ Then in a dusky voice that set her nerve-ends tingling, ‘You’re perfect. Or you will be when we’ve added this…’
He stepped to one side, moving out of the mirror’s range and directly into her full, unprotected view as he came to stand in front of her.