“Absurde, he always has it chilled.”
Naturally, when I returned I pounded on the door again. It was beyond my capacity to behave where he was concerned. The dogged, bullheaded facet of my personality beat reason and intellect over the head and seized the controls. “Come in, damn it!”
Good. I was glad he was irritated. The little voice of reason spoke up, begged me to back off. This is not a man to be toyed with, it screamed. So of course, I ignored it.
Inside his office, I found him standing in the middle of the room, leaning on his cane, his other hand casually resting on his hip. What checked me wasn’t the subtle tension in his shoulders, it was the volatile energy lurking beneath the stillness.
I looked up into the beautifully severe face that loomed over me and held out the glass. My hand hung for what felt like a long time. He didn’t take it, just narrowed his eyes, indicating that retribution would be forthcoming. “Put it on my desk,” he said, his voice so calm it bordered on mockery.
I walked around him, giving him a wide berth, and placed the glass next to the bottle. “Will that be all, sir?”
“No.” His hard, tight smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I want you to go get a lint cloth and dust all the TV screens.”
When I explained it to Mrs. Arnaud, her smile fell. “Unbearable…j’en ai marre…what’s wrong…don’t understand,” she grumbled, banging drawers open and shut in her search for a dust cloth. That sparked a satisfied twitch of my lips. Good. Let her be annoyed with him too. “Here,” she said as she handed me the cloth, “let’s pray he’s in a better mood the rest of the day.” I stalked back to the office and opened the door without knocking.
“Aren’t you a quick study,” he drawled, his sensual lips curving sardonically. I was ready to wave the white flag. He had won this round soundly.
He sat in a club chair facing a wall covered in flat screen televisions, his injured leg stretched out straight, the other bent. I ignored him, held my tongue; one of us obviously had to be the adult. I began to dust the sets with quick, gentle strokes, stretching up on my toes and bending forward to reach the top of them. All the while I could feel him watching, scrutinizing every inch of me. My ears burned in embarrassment. “To the left more.”
In a moment of temporary insanity, I fantasized about slapping the cold, arrogant look off his face––then kissing him…and then I wanted to beat myself black and blue just for thinking that. “Did I miss anything?”
“No. You can go,” he mumbled. His voice was tight. I turned to get a better read on him and found his color high, his eyes downcast. He scowled at the carpet and the hand on the armrest clenched and released repeatedly.
Not smug at all. Huh, strange. How in the world had his wife put up with him? This mystery required either a stiff drink, or a lobotomy. I stood there anticipating another snide remark but none came. When he looked up again, his eyes were shuttered, closed for business.
“You can go,” he said quietly.
So I did.
Chapter Seven
Touch, vital to life yet so easily taken for granted. I had been denied that basic human need for six long years. I hadn’t missed it, hadn’t even noticed its absence with all the other needs taking precedence. Now it was storming back with a vengeance.
By the time I dragged by achy body into the shower, it was late in the evening. I turned the water on as hot as I could bear it and bent my head, allowing it to beat down my neck. I closed my eyes and a catalogue of fuzzy images elbowed their way to the forefront of my tired mind. Scruff on a lean jaw the color of summer wheat. The dense crowded edge of a fan of lashes. A pair of brandy colored eyes.
No. No…No.
Desperate to purge the images, I flipped through my memory bank in search of anything to distract myself with. Aleksander. All dark handsomeness and subtle charm. He had a way of carrying himself that made him seem more worldly than everyone else around him; a quality that most women didn’t fail to notice. I certainly didn’t. His features were perfect, almost pretty for a man, and he knew it. He used his assets with the lethal precision and skill of a trained predator. He was flirting with a girl with long, blonde hair when I first saw him. She hung on his every word, staring as if she had just discovered the sun. He leaned in to whisper something in her ear, looked across the university courtyard, and our eyes tangled. Stunned, I couldn’t look away, trapped by the charismatic glint in his obsidian eyes. Then he winked at me and returned to seducing the blonde. I wanted him as I had never wanted anything or anyone before. I thought we were destined for each other. Destiny, however, had other plans.