Duty At What Cost?

Exceptional legs, he thought, his gaze trekking slowly back up to her face.

She arched a brow that told him she hadn’t taken kindly to his once-over, or to the implied intimacy in his tone.

‘You know each other?’ Gilles regarded Ava in surprise.

‘No.’

‘Oh?’ Gilles cut his curious gaze back to Wolfe.

‘Shall I tell him, or do you want to?’ Wolfe drawled.

After briefly glaring all sorts of retribution his way, she turned a serene smile on Gilles and Anne. ‘It was nothing. I had a small problem with my car and your friend kindly provided me with a lift to the château.’

‘A small problem with your car?’ Gilles frowned.

Wolfe held her gaze as he felt the others turn to him and told himself to leave well enough alone. Ruffling her glorious feathers was not on his agenda, even if his body was demanding that he forge a new one—preferably starting with her naked on top of a set of silk sheets. ‘What Her Highness means is that she had a car accident, climbed your outer wall and got captured by my men—’

‘And stole your horse because you were being incredibly rude!’ she provided, cutting Gilles’s blustering in half.

Wolfe shifted his weight and stuck one hand into his pocket. ‘And here I was thinking you stole him because you wanted to go for a ride.’ He rubbed his hand across his abdomen, unable to stop himself from teasing her a little.

‘I did think about it,’ she murmured huskily, the quick dart of her pink tongue caressing her lower lip and sending a bolt of lust straight to his groin. ‘But since he wasn’t up to my usual standard I thought why bother?’

Wolfe laughed at her bald-faced put-down. Gilles was fortunately too worried about her accident to pick up on the subtext, but Anne’s interested glances told him that she wasn’t quite as obtuse.

‘You weren’t hurt?’ Anne queried, concern lacing her words.

‘A bump on the head,’ Ava dismissed casually. ‘Really, the whole thing was incredibly insignificant.’

Wolfe’s lips quirked. ‘You know, I wouldn’t have described it that way myself.’

‘No?’ Ava held his gaze. ‘Maybe you need to get out more.’

‘Maybe I do,’ he agreed, noting the line of pink that highlighted her lovely cheekbones. Maybe he needed to get out with her. No. He’d already decided not to go there. But, damn, he was enjoying sparring with her.

‘But what were you doing on the wall?’ Gilles interrupted with a frown.

‘Well, trying to get down, obviously,’ Ava returned pithily. ‘Which would have been a lot easier if you hadn’t removed that lovely old chestnut tree.’

Gilles gave a typically Gallic shrug. ‘I had no choice. It was a security risk.’

Wolfe laughed right up until the moment she shared a warm smile with Gilles. Again he wondered at their history. Had she been in love with his friend? Was she still? Was that why Gilles had asked him to watch out for her? Was it possible she would cause trouble if he didn’t? Questions, questions, questions. And there was really only one he wanted answered.

How responsive would she be in his bed?

* * *

His name suited him, Ava mused absently, nursing a flute of champagne as she willed the evening reception to finish.

Predatory.

Intense.

Arrogant.

And utterly transfixing when he turned those molten toffee-coloured eyes on her. Not to mention aloof and emotionally unavailable if the evening gossip was to be believed.

‘They call him Ice, and apparently he has a heart as hard to find as a pink diamond,’ one woman had said, giggling as she’d gazed longingly across the room at him.

Ava had rolled her eyes. She knew many women saw an unattainable man—especially a wealthy alpha male like Wolfe—as a personal challenge to go forth and rehabilitate, but she wasn’t one of them. She was only interested in a man who was caring and considerate and who respected a woman as more than just a trophy to be admired and trotted out when it suited him. A gentle, sophisticated man, who was looking for love and companionship more than short affairs with a variety of women.

That thought reminded her of the luncheon she’d had with Anne last month. ‘Hot’ and ‘divine’ were words that had been bandied around when she’d talked about a friend of Gilles’s called Wolfe. As had ‘confirmed bachelor’. Ava remembered zoning out at that point, telling her friend she wasn’t at all interested in commitment-phobes like her ex. Which put Gilles’s ‘hot’ friend with the beautiful eyes and corrugated abdominal muscles firmly off her Christmas list.