Their eyes tangled and hers dipped involuntarily to his mouth. She heard and felt the sharp intake of his breath and pulled back, heart beating fast.
For a second there...
If he touched her she didn’t know what she would do. She suspected the worst. She dreamt of his hands on her body and his mouth on hers. But everything was different now, and she refused to let herself slip back into letting her body rule her head.
‘I love all the stuff, Sergio,’ she said, regaining her composure and moving to admire one of the table lamps. ‘The colours are perfect. Very warm. Just my kind of style.’
Sergio, who was busy trying to subdue the sort of erection that ached to be touched, barely heard her.
‘Upstairs.’ His voice was harsher than he’d intended. ‘A quick look round and then we can leave. I have the keys and the house is ready for you to move in whenever you are.’
Susie took the hint. Whatever charge had sprung up between them it was one he wanted to kill as thoroughly as she did. Thinking that did something to her, made her feel sick, and she darted up the stairs, slowing down to take in all the bedrooms. Four of them. And at the very end...
She stopped dead in her tracks and gazed in wonder at the studio which overlooked the back garden and through which streamed light from windows that covered the expanse of nearly one wall.
‘Will it do?’
She turned to him and smiled shyly. ‘I have a studio...’
She explored every glorious inch of it while he stood by the door, his dark eyes following her every small movement. She loved the house but here, in this studio, she was like a kid in a candy shop.
‘The light’s absolutely perfect,’ she enthused, pausing to admire just how perfect it was by standing and staring out of the window. ‘And the workbench...the double sink...’ She admired both for a while. ‘I can put my easel just there...I won’t have to sit at that awful table with a light next to me, trying to get the colours right...’
‘Bad for a pregnant woman,’ Sergio agreed gruffly.
They’d been politely circling one another for so long now that he hadn’t realised how much he missed seeing her truly relaxed. He’d never wanted to kiss her as much as he did just at that moment. He was sick to death of being the good guy. He knew what the outcome of this situation should be and waiting to get there involved depths of patience he had never known he possessed.
She walked towards him and flung her arms around him in a hug.
A hug. He didn’t want a hug. He gently disengaged her, because if she pressed herself any closer to him he knew that he wouldn’t be responsible for what happened next. Just as he knew that what happened next would shatter the fragile relationship between them and send her on the first train back to Yorkshire.
Which was something he wasn’t going to allow.
He was playing a waiting game, and it was a game at which he had next to no experience. He was a man who got what he wanted, and gently going down different paths and exploring different avenues to get there was unheard of.
But it would be worth it.
She was having his baby, and she wasn’t going to disappear halfway up the country to bring it up without his input. He had no doubt that should she do that it wouldn’t be long before some man took an interest in her. She would be a mother, but she would also be so damned sexy that she took your breath away.
And in her search for Mr Right she wouldn’t be inclined to slam the door shut on any hopefuls, would she?
‘Yes. It is.’
Embarrassed at her enthusiastic response, which had not been returned, Susie exited the room with a final backward glance.
The atmosphere had changed. How, she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She just knew that something had sprung up between them that threatened the control she had been working so hard to establish.
‘I take it you don’t loathe it, the way you assumed you would?’ This as they were back in the car, heading away from the house.
‘I thought it was going to be like your apartment.’
‘You’re telling me that you loathe my apartment?’ He kept his tone light but it was an effort.
‘It’s very, very impressive, but the more time I spent in it the more cold and clinical I found it...’