‘Why not tomorrow?’ she asked her, knowing that she was going to have to extend the length of her original visit if she did as the other woman wished.
‘No. No, that is not possible. Arrangements have to be made,’ the woman told Beth.
‘Very well, then...’ Beth wondered if she should offer to provide her own transport for the journey, but she was loath to involve Alex in what she was doing. After all, he was not going to be very pleased to discover that she was giving her business to someone else when he plainly wanted her to give it to his cousins.
However, before she could say anything, the gypsy was telling her, ‘I will meet you here a week from now at seven o’clock in the morning. We will drive all day. You will see the factory and then we will drive back. You will bring with you some money...’
Some money. Beth looked at her in alarm.
It had been her intention to pay for any goods she ordered via her bank, but, rather than discuss this with the gypsy, she decided that she would leave the financial side of things until after she had reached the factory. She wasn’t one hundred per cent sure she totally trusted the gypsy, and the truth was that if the glass she had shown her hadn’t been so spectacularly beautiful and so very covetable Beth suspected she would not have entertained the idea of doing business via her.
In fact, Beth decided, as she walked back towards the hotel a little later, Prague was having the most decidedly odd effect—not just on her behaviour but also on the way she viewed herself.
Lust, the kind of healthy, energetic, empowering lust that other women were so cheerfully and self-confidently able to admit to, had never been an emotion Beth had expected herself to feel. She had always thought that emotionally she simply wasn’t robust and self-motivated enough, that she simply didn’t possess the energy or the confidence to say ‘I want’ about anything or anyone, and yet here she was, after less than a week here in Prague, being forced to admit to herself that not only did she want, but she wanted very powerfully and lustfully indeed. And she didn’t just mean the beautiful glass.
Such knowledge was enough to stop her momentarily in mid-stride. Cautiously she dared to examine this admission a little more closely. Was her yearning to touch and explore the male beauty of Alex’s body as powerful and compelling as the urge she had experienced to hold and caress the beautiful glass?
The heat that flooded her body gave her its own answer. In her hands the glass had felt cool and smooth, heavy and solidly curved, the raised rim of gilding sensuously rough against her fingertips in contrast to the smooth contours of the glass itself.
Would Alex’s body feel the same? Heat exploded inside her, showering her, turning her veins heavy with liquid excitement. The sensuality of her own thoughts, so completely contradictory to anything she had experienced before, totally bemused Beth, teasing and tormenting her, enticing her to explore them further.
It was growing dark. She ought to get back to the hotel, she warned herself shakily.
As she walked past the reception desk the young man on duty called her name.
‘Mr Andrews has been asking for you,’ he told Beth as she approached the desk. ‘He has left you a message.’
Reluctantly Beth took the sealed note he was handing her, but she didn’t open it until she was in her room.
I had hoped to invite you to join my cousins and myself for dinner this evening, but unfortunately I could not make contact with you. I shall pick you up at the hotel in the morning at ten o’clock unless I hear from you to the contrary. If you wish to telephone me the number is...
Just for a moment Beth was tempted to dial the number and tell him triumphantly that she had found the glass she wanted, and without his help, but common sense warned her that this would not be a good idea. Especially since it seemed obvious that he had still not given up hope of persuading her to buy from his family, if his statement about intending to ask her to have dinner with them was anything to go by.
Had he taken someone else to meet them instead...that elegant older woman, perhaps? Determinedly Beth pushed him out of her thoughts. There were things she had to do. She was still bubbling over with excitement about what she had seen and longing to share the excitement with someone. It was too late now to ring Kelly, but she would do so tomorrow. She would have to ring her bank as well, but that could wait until after she had visited the factory. Beth wasn’t sure how she was going to be able to wait.
Squeezing her eyes tightly closed, she tried to visualise the glass she had seen, but, infuriatingly, the image that formed behind her closed eyelids wasn’t that of the beautiful glassware but of Alex Andrews’ strong, masculine features, his compellingly unusual steel-grey eyes smouldering with a mercurial heat that made her heart flip excitedly against her chest wall and her stomach muscles contract with sensual urgency.
CHAPTER SIX
BETH WOKE UP, her body tensing as she recognised from the strength of the light filtering through her hotel bedroom curtains that she had slept beyond her normal waking-up time.
And then she started to relax as she remembered that this morning she did not have to get up early, since today she was not planning to visit any factories.
The decision she had made late last night to leave a message for Alex Andrews on his answer-machine, thanking him for his help but stating quite firmly that she now no longer needed his services and asking him to leave her a bill, had, rather oddly, not given her quite as much satisfaction as she had anticipated.
Beth frowned as she climbed out of bed and walked naked into her bathroom.
The weight she had lost in the trauma following the break-up of her relationship with Julian had now been replaced, banishing the hollow-eyed gauntness which had not suited her small curvy frame.
Prague had brought the sheen back to her hair and the glow back to her skin.
Quickly she showered and put on clean undies, then blow-dried her hair. She had just finished highlighting her naturally delicate and pale skin with blusher and applying her lipstick when she heard the room service waiter knocking.
Quickly she reached for her robe and, wrapping it tightly around her body, she went to let him in.
‘Thank you, that’s...’ she began, and then stopped as she realised that the man pushing the trolley wasn’t her normal room service waiter but Alex Andrews. Her eyes widened even further as she saw that the table wasn’t set up just for one but for two.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded in angry confusion, instinctively pulling th