The Man She Shouldn't Crave

WITHOUT her really noticing it the restaurant had gone very quiet. There was a lull in the general conversation, and even the quiet clink of cutlery, porcelain and glass had evaporated. Rose looked up.

Plato had changed clothes since she’d seen him earlier. He was wearing some kind of suit that made him look older, harder…incredibly sexy…and he was coming towards her across that restaurant as if nobody else existed.

Rose sat up a little straighter, her heart slamming against her ribs.

He didn’t look very happy. Which was fine with her. She didn’t feel very happy with him either.

He bore down on her. His hands hit her table and rattled the cups. He leaned in and icy grey eyes clashed with her own startled blue.

‘You do not leave the apartment without letting me know where you are going.’

She jumped in her seat and she saw him register her reaction, because for a moment his expression softened a little as he searched her face.

‘Rose, do you understand me?’

He was looming over her the same way he had the other night in her house, when he’d come storming in all suspicion and sex appeal. Except right now what she felt was a rising tide of anger—because this wasn’t her problem, it was his.

Plato pulled out the chair opposite and dropped into it, moody and tense, framing the table with his big arms as he rested his hands on opposite ends.

She glared back at him, blocking out all the wonderful things she knew about him and making herself concentrate on the rekindled suspicion that he just wanted to control her.

‘You cannot wander this city on your own.’

He was looking at her as if trying to work her out. She could have told him she was having the same problem.

Yet even as he was being completely unreasonable she was viscerally responding to the deep, masculine note in his voice, to the way he looked at her, all of her, as if she was the one being unreasonably provocative, as if she’d invented her mouth and her breasts and her hips to distract him from what was necessary right now. Pulling her into line, putting the hard word on her about who she was in his life.

Most shockingly, the woman in her was glad of it—was in her imagination unbuttoning her little jacket, one button at a time, never taking her eyes off him just so she could see him suffer a little longer, and then climbing over the table and making it all better.

Sweet bejesus, she was out of control with this man.

‘It’s not safe,’ he said.

There’s something wild in you, Rose. Bill’s words came back to her. No man wants a wife who can’t control herself.

She swallowed hard.

Damn it, I’m allowed to be passionate and sexual and happy…

‘What? This restaurant?’ Her voice was low and husky and…taunting. She actually saw him respond, the way his eyes went down, settled on her mouth, his features growing taut with sexual intent. Rose began to tremble inside. ‘Has there been an outbreak of salmonella I don’t know about?’ Her joke fell flat.

Plato dragged his attention away from her to pull out his phone. He thumbed through it and laid it down in front of her on the table. Rose looked down at the screen. It was an internet image of herself and Plato at the airport. Her face wasn’t completely covered by her bag and she was entirely recognisable.

Her blood ran cold.

‘The company we settled on for security in the clubs announced the deal yesterday, before we gave the all-clear,’ Plato said flatly. ‘It’s the reason the media were at the airport. I would have protected you from it had I known. But your face, Rose, is now public property.’

Every muscle in her body pulled tight. ‘Will—will people see this in the States?’

How on earth did she explain Plato to her family? She couldn’t even explain him to herself.

‘I doubt it.’ He picked up his phone, long fingers closing tensely around it.

The adrenalin surge over, she felt a little faint. A fork slipped and clattered on the plate.

‘This isn’t Toronto, Rose, it’s Moscow, and there’s a certain level of security I require—especially at the moment.’

Rose was a little thrown. Not by the security stuff—everyone knew rich Russians were super-sensitive about those things—but the fact there might be a reason why he hadn’t wanted her to leave the apartment.