A Mistress, a Scandal, a Ring

Excitement?

Honestly. What was wrong with her? He’d virtually abducted her off the street. Again. The only thing she should be feeling was outrage.

He didn’t end his call until they were descending into the basement of the Vega Tower, by which time her anger was a low simmer that rapidly changed to dismay and a faint sense of panic.

As soon as he’d slipped his phone back into his jacket she blurted, ‘I can’t go into your offices dressed like this!’

She could just picture the beautiful, flawless Lucia, looking at her in her denim cut-offs and tank top with barely concealed horror.

His gaze slid over her, settling briefly on her bare thighs before lifting back to her face. For a second, as their gazes meshed and her breath snagged, she thought she saw a flash of heat in those metallic grey eyes before his features grew shuttered again.

‘We’re not going to my office.’

They went instead to the very top of the tower, via a dedicated lift that ran from the underground car park and gave access to two other levels: the forty-fourth floor, where the executive offices were located, and the floor above, which housed the corporate apartment that Rosa had mentioned as being where he sometimes stayed when he worked long hours.

The lift was one of those super-fast types that made her feel as if her stomach had relocated to her knees, and yet every second of the brief ride felt more like a minute, and every one of those was excruciating.

Because Xavier couldn’t behave like an ordinary person and face the doors. No. He had to stand with his back to one of the side walls, so that no matter where Jordan stood she couldn’t escape his incisive gaze.

As if she was going to perform some kind of Houdini act and disappear from under his nose while the lift was moving!

He stood tall and silent, his hands in his trouser pockets, her bags sitting on the floor beside him.

And he watched her.

She knew it—could feel his gaze like the stroke of a warm hand across bare skin even as she concentrated hard on the toes of her tennis shoes.

Coward. Look at him. Show him you’re just as mad at him as he is at you.

And he was angry. She didn’t need to sneak a look at the tight clench of his clean-shaven jaw to know it. When irritated or frustrated he pinched the bridge of his nose, but when he was angry—truly angry—he simply went very, very still.

Like he was now.

It gave her a small shock to realise she knew all this abou

t him. She’d known him for—what? Five days? Somehow it seemed longer.

So what? Stay mad, she reminded herself—an instruction she promptly forgot as she stepped from the lift straight into the expansive glass-walled living area of Xavier’s penthouse apartment.

Wow.

It was nothing like the beautiful stone villa on the coast, but just as spectacular with its panoramic bird’s-eye view of the sprawling city and the wide blue of the ocean beyond.

Automatically she moved to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows for a better look. From up here she could see the port in the distance and a number of berthed ships, one of which was probably the ferry that would have taken her away from here.

Away from him.

Away from this overwhelming attraction she didn’t know how to handle and away from the danger of humiliating herself again.

She glanced at her watch. There was still over an hour until the ferry was scheduled to leave.

‘Forget it, Jordan.’

She turned and frowned. ‘Forget what?’

‘You’re not taking that ferry.’

It annoyed her immensely that he could read her thoughts as easily as she could read the idiosyncrasies of his body language.