The day could hardly have gone much worse. And it was all her own doing.
CHAPTER SIX
SINKING BACK INTO the creamy soft seats of the limousine, Oti fought the urge to close her eyes.
She hadn’t slept a wink for the last couple of days, tossing and turning each night, her thoughts returning over and over to Lukas. And that kiss.
The way her whole body ignited each time she replayed it in her head. No one had ever come close to making her feel like Lukas did. Making her ache like he did.
After what had happened to her that ghastly night almost fifteen years ago, she’d begun to think that no one ever would.
In fact, she’d begun to conclude that there had to be something wrong with her. Why had she insisted on carrying it with her, letting it overshadow any hint of a relationship with any man since?
Ultimately, she’d been rescued. Other women went through far, far worse ordeals. So why had she carried it with her all these years? Why didn’t she feel the same drive that other young women her age felt?
And then Lukas had stepped into her life and she’d felt something shift inside her, even from their first meeting. However much she’d tried to pretend otherwise, there had been something about Lukas that had simply lifted all those heavy, suffocating layers away.
She’d thought their kiss in the cathedral had been unbalancing enough, but the other night had just upended her world completely.
Oti couldn’t stop replaying it. It was on a loop that she couldn’t—didn’t want to—break. And that made the man so much more dangerous to her. Just like she’d always thought he was.
God, how she’d wanted him to keep kissing her. To touch her, the way he’d deliciously threatened to do. That rich, dark voice of his had played with her senses, turning them in on themselves so that she could barely think straight.
So that all she’d been able to think of was Lukas, and the way he’d been tasting her. Teasing her. She’d felt so wanton—desired and desirable. More than that, he’d made her feel as if there was nothing lacking about her at all. As if she’d just been waiting for this—for him—all this time. It was surely one of Lukas’s greatest skills, and she’d been helpless to resist him.
If he hadn’t stopped, then Oti was in no doubt that she would have given herself up to him right there and then, on that sofa in her bedroom suite.
Giving her virginity to a man who barely liked her, let alone loved her.
She might ask herself what she’d been thinking, except the truth of it was that she hadn’t been thinking. She hadn’t been capable of thinking at all.
Edward was right. She’d been playing with fire the moment she’d agreed to her father’s preposterous plan to marry her off to a man like Lukas Woods. Whilst she might have told herself that she was sacrificing herself for a greater purpose—to get money for Edward’s surgery—the truth was far less noble.
She had wanted Lukas from that very first meeting, in a terrifyingly exciting, utterly carnal way. Her body had recognised it, even if her mind had refused to accept it.
But it was getting harder and harder to lie to herself. Not least because the money was there—from Lukas—in her account, and still...that raw, urgent longing hadn’t gone away.
It was all so confusing.
The fact that she hadn’t even had to sleep with the man told her so much more about what kind of a person he was. And it didn’t match the ruthlessness of his reputation.
She should have everything she wanted. And yet she didn’t. Because what a part of her really seemed to want—physically if not emotionally, of course; she wasn’t that crazy—was Lukas. And she couldn’t shake that sense of regret and blame over what had happened between them the other night.
Nor the rawness that scraped somewhere unfathomable, deep inside her chest.
Perhaps talking to Edward again today would clear that up. Being able to finally assure him that the procedure was a possibility—that, as long as the tests proved him to be a viable candidate, money wouldn’t be a stumbling block—should erase any lingering doubts about Lukas from her mind.
As well as any final remnants of guilt.
‘Commandeering my driver again?’
For the third time in almost as many days, Oti found herself startled by her fake husband. She watched, horrified, as he slid into the back seat across from her. She tried—and failed—to stop her eyes from soaking up the sight of his long, mouth-wateringly muscular legs, which his tailored suit did nothing to diminish. Quite the contrary; they stretched out in front of him so very languidly, practically inviting her gaze to roam upward.
Oti blew out a breath of frustration. Even here, in the back seat of a car, he wore power like a bespoke suit. And, like everything else, it fitted him immaculately.
‘What are you doing, Lukas?’ she managed, her voice scratchier than she would have liked. But that couldn’t be helped.
‘Heading into the office. Some of us work for a living.’