‘You sound very sure about that, little farmer girl,’ he said huskily.
‘Well, I’m not,’ she admitted honestly. ‘I suppose I should have said I willtry not to embarrass you.’
Easing his wide shoulders into the corner of the seat, his eyes glittered over her tense face. ‘Do you really believe I will care if you do decide to embarrass me?’ he asked curiously.
Rachel offered a shrug. ‘I don’t know you well enough to judge.’
‘No, you don’t…’
She didn’t like the way he had said that, or the way he was looking at her now. Her tension was zinging along just about every nerve ending she had in her body and she wished he would just—
‘Are we going to go in there or not?’ she flicked out.
‘In a minute,’ he said smoothly, ‘This conversation is just getting interesting…’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Because it has nothing to do with whether you are going to embarrass me,’ he said ignoring her interruption. ‘It is to do with you being scared that I might embarrass you.’
Rachel stared at him. ‘Why should you want to do that?’
‘My thought exactly,’ he said softly. ‘Yet youare scared that I am going to take you in there, then just leave you to sink or swim.’
Her pink upper lip gave a vulnerable quiver. ‘I was thinking more along the lines of being served up along with the main course,’ she confessed.
He laughed. It was bad of him. But it was a very low, sexily-amused laugh and Rachel laughed too—one of those tense little sounds that jump up unexpectedly from the throat.
The atmosphere changed in that single moment, spinning the tension into a fine thread that eddied across the gap between them then morphed into something else. He moved so fast that she didn’t see him coming, and then it was too late when he had taken arrogant possession of her mouth.
‘You’ve stolen all my lipstick,’ she protested when the kiss came to an end.
‘I know.’ He sat back a little, watching her as she fumbled in her bag for a tissue and her lipstick case. ‘Keep on reapplying it,cara ,’ he advised as she reapplied a coating of pink with a decidedly unsteady hand. ‘Because I find I like doing it. In fact I do believe I am becoming addicted to the taste.’
She handed him the tissue. ‘It looks better on me than it does on you.’
And he grinned, wiping pink from his lips while his eyes tangled with hers. It was no use pretending that they weren’t doing something else here, because they were.
Then suddenly he was being serious. ‘Listen to me,’ he urged. ‘I don’t want you to be anyone but yourself tonight, okay? I don’t care if you want to spend the evening going on about the pros of organic produce. I don’t care if you decide to ruffle your hair into curls or you march off to the kitchens to tout the chef for his business—’
‘I’m not quite that uncouth!’ she cried.
‘You are missing the point,’ he chided. ‘The point being that I don’t give a da
mn if you are just yourself and act like yourself. The only thing I do care about is that you stick to the main story as to how we met and keep in mind that, when we leave here, we go home to my apartment together as a couple, then to bed and to—this.’
Another kiss was on its way to her. ‘Don’t you dare,’ Rachel drew her head back.
But he did dare—quickly, briefly, not enough to steal her lipstick a second time but more than enough to distract her from what he was about to do next.
She felt her left hand being taken. By the time she had the sense to glance down, the fake sapphire ring had been removed and he was already replacing it with one that looked exactly the same.
‘W-what have you done that for?’ she demanded.
‘The fake might have been a good fake,cara , but it did not stand a chance of fooling the experts we are about to meet.’
‘It fooled you when you saw it.’ She was staring at the exact copy now adorning her finger.
‘I was too angry to notice it then.’