Did he really believe she was ill? Or was his being here some form of retribution on his part for leaving him sitting in the restaurant all that time?
‘Have you consulted a doctor?’ he demanded to know.
‘I am a doctor,’ Darci informed him, and was rewarded by the raising of dark blond brows as he widened those chocolate-brown eyes.
She hadn’t expected—not in her wildest dreams!—that Luc would actually turn up at her apartment this way after she had stood him up. If she had, she would have kept the door locked and barricaded herself in her bedroom until he went away again!
But she had stopped shaking now, and while her heart was still beating far too wildly in her chest, the palpitations had thankfully ceased.
All she had to do was reassure Luc that her illness wasn’t a hospital case, and then maybe he would leave.
He had to leave!
Because just having him here in her apartment was more unsettling, more disturbing, than anything she had ever known in her life. The overhead light was making his hair appear silkily soft in contrast to the harder planes of his aristocratic face. It was enough to overwhelm a woman’s senses—any woman’s senses!—completely.
In fact, Darci wasn’t sure she didn’t have a fever, after all!
She was definitely more aware of Luc Gambrelli, more physically aware of him, than she had a right to be…
‘And what is your diagnosis?’ Luc persisted, slightly surprised—although why he should be he had no idea—at her choice of profession.
But, in his defence, no doctor he had ever consulted, on the rare occasions that he’d been ill, had ever looked like Darci Wilde.
In fact, he would have thought that just facing all that wild red hair, those come-to-bed green eyes, the full pout of her mouth and the temptation of her full, thrusting breasts across the desk in a doctor’s consulting room would be enough to raise any man’s temperature!
As his own was rising now, as he realised that she wore absolutely nothing beneath those striped pyjamas…
As garments, they shouldn’t have been in the least sexy. They were obviously meant for someone much bigger in size—the shoulders hanging loose and the sleeves falling over the slenderness of her hands, and the trousers only held in place by the tie-string at her slender waist as they bagged about her hips. With their awful green-and-cream striped pattern, the pyjamas should have been anything but sexually alluring. But the low neckline of the jacket revealed the slenderness of Darci’s throat and a creamy expanse of her bare breasts as they thrust pertly, her nipples taut, against the cotton material.
Luc could imagine nothing more erotic than slowly undoing the buttons down the front of the pyjama jacket to reveal those thrusting breasts, then lavishing the full attention of his lips and tongue across her hardened nipples…
‘My diagnosis?’ Darci echoed, moistening her lips before replying, although she was slightly disconcerted as Luc’s dark gaze followed the movement. ‘I have the start of a cold, I believe,’ she dismissed briskly, in an effort to dispel the air of—of—intimacy that slowly seemed to be surrounding the two of them.
Where was the cautious Kerry, the worrier, when Darci most needed her?
Although after Kerry’s anxiety over the last two days, she had a feeling her friend might have little sympathy with Darci’s present predicament. Especially as it was completely self-inflicted! Kerry, without having even met Luc Gambrelli, had warned Darci against interfering, seeming to know instinctively that it would be dangerous to wake this sleeping tiger.
It was a pity that Darci’s instincts hadn’t been as acute!
And that she hadn’t thought to pre-warn Grant that under no circumstances was he to reveal her address to Luc Gambrelli….
But it had never occurred to Darci, as she’d made her fiendish plan to leave Luc Gambrelli sitting at Garstang’s, that he would actually feel concerned enough about her supposed ill-health to actually seek her out!
The man was completely unpredictable, she decided.
‘As I’m sure you appreciate,’ she went on firmly, ‘there’s no actual cure for the common cold, and it’s also highly contagious. In fact, I don’t think you should even be here in the same room with me,’ she added, belatedly registering the intensity of his dark gaze as it roamed freely across her face and body.