Her face crimson with mortification, Sara stam-mered an apology to the man she had inadvertently bumped into, but her embarrassment was replaced by indignation as he gave her a look of biting scorn instead of accepting her apology in the spirit in which she had given it.
She was still trying to find Frances and having seen her on the other side of the room had been attempting to make her way through the packed restaurant, her eyes on her quarry instead of what was in front of her.
Was it really her fault anyway, she asked herself indignantly as she returned Nick's angry glare with one of her own. He had been sitting at the table at an odd angle with the chair pulled out more than was surely necessary.
'You look cross. Is everything all right?' Frances asked in concern when Sara eventually caught up with her.
'I've just had a bit of a run-in with one of your diners,' Sara admitted ruefully. 'I bumped into him but when I tried to apologise—'
'Which one?' Frances interrupted her.
'That table over there,' Sara replied, showing her.
'Oh, Tullah and Saul Crighton's table.'
Crightons!
Immediately Sara twisted round to stare at the trio.
As luck would have it the couple, obviously Tullah and Saul, were seated with their backs towards her.
But the man she'd bumped into...
Sara's breath rattled in her throat as he lifted his head and glared at her.
'Oh, poor Nick,' Frances was saying. 'He's not been very well.'
'You mean like a bear with a sore head not well,'
Sara responded pseudo sweetly.
Frances's eyebrows rose.
'Oh, dear, he really has upset you, hasn't he?' she sympathised before continuing briskly, 'No, actually he was involved in a very unpleasant incident. Like nearly all the Crightons he's a qualified solicitor but the work he does is extremely specialised and often rather dangerous. Although in this case...' Quickly she explained just how Nick had come to be hurt, but stubbornly Sara refused to be impressed.
'Perhaps it might help if he carried a sign warning people not to get too close to him,' she suggested through gritted teeth.
Frances forbore to comment. Sara was a gorgeous-looking girl and Nick was a singularly handsome man.
Therefore, it seemed logical to Frances that the two of them should be attracted to one another. As the mother of young adults she was also well aware that sometimes such attraction presented itself disguised as hostility.
'It's nine o'clock. You've been working all evening,' she told Sara with a smile. 'Why don't you call it a day.'
'Not yet,' Sara refused determinedly. Armed with the information Frances had given her she was sure she could solve her problem with the recalcitrant computer.
Frances smiled ruefully as she watched Sara walk away, this time giving the Crighton table a wide berth.
She had liked Sara on sight, sensing within her a gutsy determination allied to a warm sense of humour.
Her stunning good looks would cause havoc, of course!
'NICK,' Tullah expostulated as she saw the grim way her brother-in-law was watching the woman's determined circumnavigation of their table.
'Little madam,' Nick seethed without taking his eyes off her departing back. 'Did you see the look she gave me?'
'Well, I certainly saw the one you gave her,' Tullah told him dryly.
'Yes,' Saul corroborated. 'You were hardly your normal charming smooth self with her, Nick,' he pointed out. 'Pretty girl,' he added appreciatively, laughing when Tullah gave him a mock glare whilst saying with wifely warning, 'Saul...'
'Very pretty,' Nick agreed sourly. He wasn't even sure himself just why he had reacted so badly to her.
Common sense told him that the painful jolt she had given his still aching wound had been completely accidental and he knew that normally he would not only have accepted her embarrassed apology gracefully but that he would probably have done everything he could to create a good impression and set her at her ease.
So why hadn't he?
Not surely because of that sharp little jolt of male sensual electricity, that more than a mere frisson of sensation that had seized him at their accidental bodily contact. After all, he had experienced physical desire for plenty of other women before her.
Physical desire, yes, but not that swift pang of dangerous knowledge, that unwanted awareness, that instinct that...that what?
That nothing, he told himself firmly.
'You're right,' he announced, even though neither Saul nor Tullah had said anything. 'I behaved very boorishly...and by rights I should apologise. I wonder where she's gone.'
'Frances will probably know,' Tullah informed him.
'She was talking to her.'
Ruefully Nick pushed back his chair and got up.
'Sara?' Frances responded in answer to his question.
'Oh, she'll be in the office. She's standing in for our office manager....'
Thoughtfully she watched as Nick made his way through the tables.
SARA GAVE a small crow of satisfaction as she finally got the computer to do as she wished. Nick heard it as he pushed open the door of the office. Sara was standing looking at the computer screen, her eyes alight with triumph and pleasure. She was more than just pretty Nick acknowledged as he felt his heart jolt fiercely against his ribs.
Sensing someone's presence Sara turned her head away from the screen, the breath rushing out of her lungs on a shocked whoosh as she realised who the intruder was.
'Frances said I'd find you in here,' Nick told her.
Her body had stiffened and the look in her eyes was both wary and hostile.
Immediately his own body—and emotions—reacted.
'I owe you an apology,' he began tersely.
'Yes, you do,' Sara agreed spiritedly, 'But you're a Crighton and of course Crightons never apologise, especially to women....'
Nick stared at her. Her reaction was so unexpected and so extraordinary that it had taken him completely by surprise.
'What on earth...' he began, but to his fury
he saw that Sara was ignoring him, concentrating instead on the screen in front of her, blanking him so totally and completely that he might just as well not have existed.
Women never blanked Nick. Never! Whilst a part of him was distantly relishing his shock the rest of him was sharply and furiously angry that she could dare to both speak and act as she had.
'Now look here,' he said grimly, 'there's no way you can make that kind of statement without explaining just what it's supposed to mean.'
As he spoke he moved closer to the desk, so close in fact that Sara could feel the angry heat coming off his body. This close he was overpoweringly male.
Tall, broad, his eyes so dark that they could almost have been black, not the navy-blue she knew they were. Excitement and fear raced through her veins like rocket fuel. Caution told her that she had gone too far, but the voice of caution wasn't one Sara wanted to listen to. No, she would much rather listen to the siren lure of the exultation egging her on, telling her she was giving Nick what he deserved.
Ignoring him she continued to work.
Nick had had enough. Irritably he reached out towards her, merely intending to cover her hand to stop her working the keyboard, but the moment his fingers brushed her skin a surge of such powerful sexual immediacy coursed through his veins that the original cause of his physical contact with her was forgotten.
'Just let go of me,' Sara snapped at him, her face as white now as it had been flushed when she had bumped into him earlier in the restaurant, her eyes brilliant with the intensity of what she was feeling.
And what she was feeling was... Instinctively Nick knew that she was as aware of the sexual chemistry between them as he was himself.
For a man who was used to being totally in control of himself and his emotions, what he was experiencing was totally unwanted, so incomprehensible.
'I came in here to apologise,' he reminded Sara sharply.
Angrily Sara raised her head to look at him but the sarcastic response she had been about to make died on her hps unspoken, as for some inconceivable reason her gaze was drawn to his mouth and then his eyes and then back to his mouth again.
Almost as though he were standing outside of himself watching what he was doing Nick was aware of his own actions and his inability to stop them. It seemed to take an aeon of time for him to lean forward closing the gap between Sara and himself and then to cover her mouth with his, but in reality he knew it could only have been seconds. Her mouth tasted vel-vety warm, sweet salt sexy and the pressure of his own against it intensified.