He watched her build a flatbread into a soft taco, not being shy with the high-calorie avocado paste, either.
“What?” she asked defensively.
“I’m not used to seeing a woman eat like that.”
She bit back a spiteful, Too busy watching them starve? She really didn’t want to be that person, but she didn’t know how else to handle him.
“Why are you here?” she asked instead.
He paused in preparing his own flatbread. “Why are you here, Tiffany? Why did your family send you to meet me?”
The weight of his gaze turned her shrug into a shiver. “Apparently I’m the only one who is a member.”
His brows went up in surprise.
“I inherited my husband’s fortune. My father isn’t exactly struggling, but he doesn’t qualify.”
“I read about your accident. I’m sorry for your loss.”
She prickled, waiting to see if he would make more of it, dig deeper, question how a married woman could have been a virgin.
“I’m also a member and was one long before our civil war. The money you accuse me of stealing is Bregnovia’s. It’s earmarked to fund our recovery.”
She eyed him, seeing a contrary mix of Euro-sophistication and obdurate leader. When he caught her looking at him, her heart skipped. She looked away.
“I’ll have to request a report on you from the powers that be. Find out how you made your fortune,” she said.
“I’ll tell you. It’s a spigot system I developed for the oil industry, inspired by what I learned working in vineyards after finishing my engineering degree.”
Despite her inner warnings to hold him off, she was intrigued. “That seems an odd choice. What was an engineer doing in a winery?”
“Rebelling,” he said flatly, not inviting more questions as he reached to the wine bucket and drew out a dripping green bottle. “This is from my country. You’ll enjoy it.”
Of course she would. Who would dare not?
His arrogance was growing on her if she was finding it more amusing than annoying.
“What do you mean, you were rebelling?”
He drew a subtle breath, as though gathering himself for something difficult. “If you were to order a report on me, you would learn my parents sent me to live in Germany when I was six. For my safety and to give me a better life. Our country has been annexed by one neighbor or another since before the First World War. There were constant outbreaks of independence-seeking followed by terrible repression. My parents couldn’t leave, but they smuggled me out to friends. I can’t complain. My foster parents were good people. The husband was an automotive engineer who pressed me to follow in his footsteps. As a vocation I didn’t mind it, but when I graduated I felt as most young people do. That this was my life and I could do as I liked.” He shrugged, mouth twisting in self-deprecation. “I’m not proud of abandoning my potential to pick grapes, but it allowed me to bring a fresh perspective when I went to Russia, planning to make my fortune drilling for oil.”
“Where you fashioned this doodad that is so popular it made you into a bazillionaire?”
“Da,” he confirmed with a nod.
“Humph.” She reached for her wine. “Does the rest of the world know this?”
He lifted a shoulder dismissively. “The press prefers to sensationalize what I did with my money.”
“Which was to fund a war.”
“I freed my country.”
“And now you own it.”
“I lead it. What do you think of the wine?”
She was no sommelier and didn’t bother with sniffing and swirling, but she thought the light color was appealing and she enjoyed the way the initial tang, almost fruity, eased into something more earthy. Not oaky. Vanilla?
She tried again, wanting to determine what it was. But as much as she loved wine, alcohol had been off-limits as her body had needed every advantage to recover. That made her a lightweight. She had to be careful about losing her head around him.
As the memory of their dirty dancing and everything that followed bathed her in heat, the proximity of a bedroom and sitting here in her robe suddenly seemed incredibly dangerous and intimate.
* * *
Ryzard watched a glow of awareness brighten Tiffany’s skin, filling her compelling blue eyes even as she looked into the crisp white wine she set aside. Her reaction might be in response to the alcohol, but his male instincts read her differently.
He shifted in his chair, widening his knees to make room for the growing reaction tugging insistently between his legs.
Tricking the waitstaff into granting him entry to her room had been the oldest one in the book, but as he’d suspected, she wouldn’t have seen him otherwise and he wanted answers. At this precise second, however, he found himself with only one thing on his mind: her. She was more complex than he’d given her credit for, both when he’d lost himself in the mecca of her flesh and when he’d assumed she was attempting to manipulate him.
She was far more beautiful than he’d taken the time to notice this morning, too. Then his attention had been drawn to the scarring, his focus on the pain it indicated. Now he could see what had existed before discoloration and a raised jagged line had bisected her cheek. Blonde, blue eyed, with skin like a baby and the bone structure of an aristocrat, she was Helen of Troy.
Not that he was prepared to go to war ever again, but he could imagine men who would. Her young husband must have been intimidated, knowing how coveted she was.
“It’s rude to stare,” she said, growing redder in one cheek.
“I’m not staring. I’m admiring.”
Her mouth shrank in rejection, and so did his brain. He forced himself to look away from thick lashes that swept down to hide her eyes. This meeting wasn’t about kindling an affair that had barely started, no matter how much the thought appealed.
It appealed far too much. He could barely concentrate as memories of her pushing her ass into his groin as she writhed with pleasure under his slippery touch filled his head. The heady power of fondling her to orgasm had made him drunk and was overshadowed only by how good she had felt squeezing him in her hot, perfect depths.
But his country came first. He couldn’t forget that. Couldn’t forget anything.
He shook himself out of his fascination and spoke briskly.
“Your father seems exceptionally well connected in Washington. By sending you to speak to me, he is signaling that your country is likely to support my petition for recognition at the UN, is he not? Has he told you this is forthcoming?”
“He’s under that impression, but who knows what the attitude will be tomorrow? Welcome to politics. You know how these things work.”
He did, and the hardest lesson he had learned after being in a war was when to back off and use diplomacy instead of force to get what he wanted. It was also standard practice to weigh a person’s impact on an agenda before developing a relationship.
Maybe he hadn’t properly examined how their affair could affect his goal before he made love to her, but Tiffany’s knowledge and connections suggested she could have a very positive influence.
A wild rush of excitement flew through him as he found a rationale to continue their affair, but he forced himself to hold on to a cool head and gather information first. “Does your father have any sway over your country’s decision makers?”
“He has followers. Believers in his vision. Isn’t that how you got elected, by cultivating the same?” The remark was somewhere between haughty and ironic.
“You don’t seem to be one of them. His followers, I mean. It’s quite obvious you’re not one of mine. Yet.”
“Ha,” she choked, but she lowered her lashes as if to prevent him reading something different in her eyes. “Never yours and while I’ll always cheer for Dad, I’m tired of living my life by his career,” she said with dour humor and popped a cherry tomato into her mouth, pursing her lips in a pout as she chewed.
“When is the election?” he asked, trying not to watch her plump lips too closely.
“Not for a year, but the campaigning is well under way. He was leaving for Washington as we were coming here.”
“We?” he asked sharply, territorial instincts riled.
“My brother and I.”
“Ah. That’s fine then.” He frowned. Whatever relief he felt in knowing there wasn’t another man in her life was buried under the discomfort of revealing he saw himself in the role. What was it about her that not only affected him but also lowered his ability to hide how much?
She lifted her brows. “Jealous?” Her smile was taunting, but her voice thinned across the word, suggesting a vulnerability that further undermined his resistance to her.
He shouldn’t want her this badly, but he did. Last night had been exceptional, and she was a practical connection to cultivate. Where was the sense in fighting it?
“Possessive,” he corrected. “You have a lover, draga.”