Still unable to believe she wasn’t grabbing at his job offer with eager hands, Lucas watched as she walked through the restaurant, his gaze mesmerised by the curve of her calves, which led down to the slenderest ankles he’d ever seen. Suddenly he could understand why men living in the Victorian age had found them highly arousing.
He told himself to look away but somehow he couldn’t. Somehow Tara Fitzpatrick’s back view seemed to be the most beautiful thing he’d looked at in a long time, with those red curls spilling wildly over her shoulders. Her dress was slightly creased from where she’d been sitting but it was brushing against a bottom firmed by hard work and regular cycling—a realisation which was rewarded by an unwanted hardening at his groin. What the hell was happening to him? he wondered irritably. Was it simple physical frustration? Had Charlotte’s unexpected appearance at his house this afternoon reminded him just how long it had been since he’d had sex? He remembered their split, when he’d grown bored with her and bored with bedding her. Because despite the actress’s undeniable beauty and sexual experience, hadn’t making love to her sometimes felt as if he were making love to a mannequin? And there hadn’t been anyone since, had there? Not even a flicker of interest had stirred in his blood, despite the many come-ons which regularly came his way.
With an impatient shake of his head, he glanced at his cell-phone to see what the markets were doing, but for once his attention was stubbornly refusing to focus and when he looked up, Tara was back. She must have attempted to brush the fiery curls into some kind of submission, because they looked half-tamed. Her eyes were bright and her air of youthful vitality made his heart clench with something he didn’t recognise. Was it cynicism? He shook his head, confused now and slightly resentful because he’d come out tonight thinking this was going to be a straightforward exercise and it was turning into anything but.
‘The bill, Tara,’ he said impatiently. ‘Have you asked for it?’
‘I’ve done more than that.’ She gave a wide smile. ‘I’ve paid it.’
‘You’ve paid it?’ he repeated slowly.
‘It’s very reasonably priced in here,’ she said. ‘And it’s the least I can do, since we came here in your car.’
As he followed her out of the restaurant—after a farewell even more ecstatic than their greeting—Lucas found himself trying to remember the last time a woman had offered to pay for a meal. Not recently, that was for sure. Not since those days when he’d had nothing and heiresses had sniffed around him like dogs surrounding a piece of fresh meat. When he’d been forced to leave his fancy school because there had been no money—or so he’d been told. But pride had made him refuse to accept the charity of women who had been hungry for his virile body. He’d fed himself. Sometimes he’d eaten the food left lying around after a meal in the directors’ dining room. And sometimes he just used to go without. Tara had been wrong when she’d suggested he’d never eaten peasant food, he thought, the harsh reminder of those days making his jaw clench as his car purred smoothly down the quayside towards them.
But when he joined her on the back seat the bitter memories were dissolved by a rush of something far more potent. Lucas felt a beat of promise and of heady desire. Flaring his nostrils, he inhaled her subtle scent, which was more like soap than perfume. Half turning his head, he saw the brightness of her hair and suddenly he wanted to tangle his fingers in it. One slender thigh was placed tantalisingly close to his—a gesture he suspected was completely lacking in provocation—yet right now it seemed the sexiest thing he’d ever encountered. He swallowed as desire beat through him like an insistent flame and if it had been a
nyone else he might have reached out and caressed her. Touched her leg until she was squirming with pleasure and widening her thighs and whispering for him to touch her some more.
But this was Tara and he couldn’t do that because she worked for him. She worked for him. She made his bed and cooked his meals. Ironed his shirts and kept his garden bright. She was an employee he wanted to accompany him to America. She wasn’t a prospective lover—not by any stretch of the imagination. He stared straight ahead, attempting to compose himself as the traffic lights turned red.
Her heart pounding and her shoulders tense, Tara told herself to stop feeling so nervous as the powerful car purred through the city streets because none of this was a big deal. She’d just had dinner with her boss—that was all—and he’d just offered her a job in America, which was a massive compliment, wasn’t it? She’d never been in his chauffeur-driven car before either, and travelling home in such luxury should have been a real treat. Yet she was finding it difficult to appreciate the soft leather or incredibly smooth suspension as they travelled through Dublin. All she could think about was how different Lucas seemed tonight and how her reaction towards him seemed to have undergone a dangerous and fundamental shift. From being a demanding employer, he seemed to have morphed into a man she was having difficulty tearing her eyes away from. For the first time ever, she could understand why he inspired such a devoted following among women. Suddenly, she got why someone as beautiful as Charlotte would be prepared to humiliate herself in order to wheedle herself a way back into his life.
And I don’t want to feel this way, she thought. I want to go back to the way it was before, when I tolerated him more than idolised him and was often infuriated by him.
The car pulled into the driveway of his Dalkey house but instead of being relieved that the journey was over, all Tara could feel was a peculiar sense of disappointment. Blindly, she reached for the door handle, her usually dextrous fingers flailing miserably as she failed to locate it in the semi-darkness.
‘Here,’ said Lucas, sounding suddenly amused as he leaned across her to click a button. ‘Let me.’
Of course. The door slid noiselessly open because it was an electronic door and didn’t actually have a handle! What a stupid country girl she must seem. But Tara’s embarrassment at her lack of savvy was exacerbated by a heart-stopping awareness as Lucas’s arm brushed against hers. She swallowed. He’d touched her. He’d actually touched her. He might not have meant to but his fingers had made contact and where they had it felt like fire flickering against her skin.
Scrambling out of the car into an atmosphere even stickier than earlier, she cast a longing look towards the heavy sky, wishing it would rain and shatter this strange tension which seemed to be building inside her, as well as in the atmosphere. She scrabbled around in her handbag to fish out her key but her fingers were trembling as she heard a footfall behind her and Lucas’s shadow loomed over her as she inserted it tremblingly into the lock.
‘You’re shaking, Tara,’ he observed as she opened the door and stepped into the house.
‘It’s a cold night,’ she said automatically, even though that wasn’t true. But he didn’t correct her with a caustic comment as he might normally have done.
And the strange thing was that neither of them moved to put on the main light once the heavy front door had swung shut behind them, and the gloom of the vast hallway seemed to increase the sense of unreality which had been building between them all evening.
There was something in the air. Something indefinable. Tara felt acutely aware of just how close Lucas was. His eyes were dark and gleaming as he stared down at her and she held her breath as, for one heart-stopping moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. She felt as if he was going to pull her into his arms and crush his lips down on hers.
But he didn’t.
Of course he didn’t.
Had she taken complete leave of her senses? He simply clicked the switch so that they were flooded with a golden light, which felt like a torch being shone straight into her eyes, and the atmosphere shattered as dramatically as a bubble being burst. A hard smile was playing at the edges of his lips and he nodded, as if her reaction was very familiar to him.
‘Goodnight, Tara,’ he said in an odd kind of voice. And as he turned away from her, she could hear the distant rumble of thunder.
CHAPTER THREE
THE NEXT FEW days were an agony of indecision as Tara tried to make up her mind whether or not to accept Lucas’s job offer. She tried drawing up a list of pros and cons—which came up firmly weighted in favour of an unexpected trip to America with her boss. Next she canvassed her friend Stella, who told her she’d be mad not to jump at the chance of joining Lucas in New York.
‘Why wouldn’t you go?’ Stella demanded as she folded up one of the tiny smocked dresses belonging to the twin baby girls she nannied for. ‘You loved New York when we went last Christmas. Apart from the ice-rink incident, of course,’ she added hastily. ‘And that man really should have been looking where he was going. It’s a no-brainer as far as I can see, so why the hesitation?’
Tara didn’t answer. She thought how lame it would sound if she confessed that something felt different between her and Lucas and that something unspoken and sexual seemed to have flowered between them that night. Or would it simply seem deluded and possibly arrogant to imply that Dublin’s sexiest billionaire might be interested in someone like her?
But something had changed. She wasn’t imagining it. The new awkwardness between them. The shadowed look around his eyes when she’d brought in his breakfast the morning after that crazy dinner, which had made her wonder if his night had been as sleepless as hers. The flickering glance he’d given her when she’d put the coffee pot down with trembling fingers before he’d announced that he was flying to Berlin later that morning and would be back in a couple of days—and could she possibly give him her answer about accompanying him to America by then?