He froze. ‘What are you talking about?’
She shook her head. ‘What happened on the sofa wasn’t planned, so if you’re going to hate yourself for it could you please do it elsewhere?’
She wasn’t completely sure that she wouldn’t welcome a repeat, despite the polarising vibes now emanating from Remi. And just what did that say about her willpower?
‘Maddie—’
‘If we’re not going out, I’d like to go to my suite now, please,’ she interrupted, not sure she could take any more of that look on his face.
For another long moment he stared narrow-eyed at her, until stinging awareness grew into unbearable proportions. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak his phone burst to life.
He stared at the screen with a mixture of grim resolution and irritation. ‘I need to take this call. Then we’ll talk. Yes?’
Licking her lips, Maddie nodded, managing to hold herself together until he left the room. Then she hightailed it to her suite on embarrassingly shaky legs.
She was staring into space, her senses roiling out of control, when her own phone rang.
It was with trembling hands and an unfocused mind that she answered. It took a minute for Mrs Jennings’s distressed tones to sink in. And as Maddie rushed for the door she was almost grateful for the distraction of this new bombshell that had been thrown into her life.
Because now she didn’t have to dwell on the terrifying knowledge that what she’d just experienced with Remi Montegova had fundamentally changed her. And that there might be no going back.
CHAPTER SIX
REMI SUPPRESSED ANOTHER groan as he stepped out of his dressing room and headed back into his private living room. At the ringtone announcing his mother’s call, part of him had relished the news he intended to give her, even though he knew she would resist it. But he’d already warned her he would do things his way.
With the charged tension between them, he’d been reluctant to leave Maddie, and he’d almost changed his mind on seeing the lingering arousal in her eyes. Remembering the taste of her. Her unfettered responses. Her tight innocence.
The cold shower he’d taken minutes ago, after cancelling his invitation to the opera, was rendered useless as his body surged in fiery recollection. He quickened his steps. And arrived in an empty room.
Maddie wasn’t in the main living room. Or in her suite.
‘Where is she?’ He repeated his earlier question to Percy when he rushed into the kitchen. Only this time he instinctively knew he would like the answer even less than last time.
‘She’s gone, Your Highness. She requested a taxi fifteen minutes ago.’
Remi attempted to
rein in his irritating alarm as he dialled Maddie’s phone. The request to leave a message reminded him that she’d confessed to switching her phone off. They’d been distracted by other matters before she could turn it on again.
Anger rising, he picked up the suite’s phone and dialled Raoul, his chief of security.
‘Where is she?’ he snapped for a third time.
‘She’s in a taxi heading south, Your Highness.’
‘Why did she leave?’ Remi despised the intensity of the disquieting sensation.
‘She didn’t say, Your Highness. She only said to tell you something came up.’
Remi took a long, deep breath, aware of his fraying control. ‘Did something happen this afternoon? Something to indicate what was suddenly so urgent?’ he breathed.
‘I’m sorry, Your Highness. I don’t know.’
Fury cut through his disquiet. But even that was unwelcome. He was far too wrapped up in Maddie Myers. And yet he couldn’t locate an off switch. That cloying need to know everything about her smash through him again.
Dio, he was being irrational. The woman had a right to her secrets, whatever they were. But the sensation wouldn’t go away. The discovery of her innocence had revealed another facet of her character that stunned him. But his admiration for Maddie for standing on her own two feet in the face of her challenges was also the reason he was annoyed with her now.
And, call him a chauvinist, but her streak of independence was beginning to grate as badly as her absence. After the pleasure he’d given her, after watching her come apart so spectacularly in his arms, would it hurt her to yield to him a little?