‘I will.’
‘Good.’ She had saved the day. She had done what she had set out to do, taken the heat out of the situation, but now she needed to get out of here and get her head together. She sat up and began to pull her dress down, but he reached out his hand to halt her.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Wh
at does it look like? I’m…’ Her words dried in her mouth as his fingertips began to touch her bare breasts, skating enchanting little pathways across the already sensitised skin. She closed her eyes. ‘I’m getting dressed.’
He felt the hot, hard jerk of desire as he pulled her against him, smoothing the palms of his hands over the silken globes of her buttocks and feeling her shudder. It was about time he showed her who was boss.
‘Oh, no, you aren’t,’ he negated quietly.
She wanted to stop him.
No, she didn’t.
She tried to stop him.
No, she didn’t.
Trying to stop someone should amount to more than a distracted little shake of the head. If she had really been trying to stop him then she would not now be squirming with delight as he stroked and touched her, nor be touching him back and hearing him moan so softly.
Nor would her heart be leaping with a wild and delirious kind of joy as he entered her once more. Her last sane thought was that this perfect act was going to achieve the impossible. Leaving her feeling complete.
Yet achingly incomplete.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THEY drove down the mountain road in silence, and for Ella it was a silence fraught with unanswered questions. There was none of the companionable ease she might have expected or hoped for after such a successful morning—which had culminated in that heartstoppingly erotic encounter.
For Nico had retreated.
She had seen it in his eyes once passion had faded. As if someone had suddenly changed the temperature of the tap while you were washing your hands, so that it had gone straight from warm to icy-cold, making you flinch. Even his features, which she had seen look so animated and alive during the act of love, were now simply cool and indifferent.
Oh, he had been sweet enough—he had buttoned up her dress and teased her, and drifted his lips over her skin in a teasing way—but it had felt as though he was simply going through the motions of how a lover should behave afterwards. There had been no sense of real closeness—no conviction that if she had asked him what was going on in that head of his he would have told her.
The intimacy that had been there both before and after they had made love had vanished. And something within her had been sapped. As if by pleasing her physically he had taken away her ability to talk to him as if he was just any man.
So, was this the end of her ‘assignment’? Even if he did take up her suggestion about moving the gallery—did that entitle her to stay? Would she actually want to—was she just going to allow herself to be picked up and put down at will? A plaything for a prince…
She bit her lip and stared out of the window as the white rooftops of Solajoya began to appear.
Nico flicked her a glance.
Now what did he do?
He had a choice, of course. He could treat it as a one-off. Something he had badly wanted and that he had now been given, satisfying his hunger sufficiently enough to drive that hunger away. But it had not been. Even with that stiff, slightly defensive set of her shoulders, he found that he was still turned on. He still wanted to caress her, to run his fingertips over her until she opened up again, like a glorious flower—spreading her petals just for him, so that he could lose himself in their heady perfume.
He swore softly as he crashed a gear, and she turned her head, her eyebrows raised in question.
Nico glowered at the road ahead. He was a superb driver—good enough to grace the circuit of any international motor-race, dammit! So why was he acting like a nervous pupil out taking his test?
The car slid to a halt in front of L’Etoile, and, sucking in a deep breath to give her courage, Ella turned to him. She wasn’t dealing with a normal man, she reminded herself, and she must not expect him to behave like one. No long lingering kiss, or promise to ring her. After all, they were in public now.
Keep it together, Ella, she told herself. Act like a sophisticated career-woman. If it was a one-off, then remember it as something very beautiful and take your heartache back to England with you, to nurse it in private.
She smiled. Take control. Give him a let-out. Give yourself a let-out. A plaything for a prince? Never in a million years! ‘I guess I’d better think about booking my flight home.’