Giorganni's Proposal

'The costume was made for you, Beth, darling. So appropriate,' Dex drawled, loud enough for the neighbours to hear, Beth thought bitterly, and then to her astonishment he caught her by the shoulders and lowered his dark head. She thought for a terrifying minute he was going to kiss her, but his lips grazed her cheek. 'And I still have the scratch-marks to prove it,' he whispered, for her ears only.

Beth blushed even redder. A vivid image of Dex's large naked body covering hers flashed in her mind's eye, and her own stupid reaction, her slender arms clinging to him as if her life depended on it. Angry with herself, and him, she pulled out of his hold.

Deliberately sidestepping Dex, and focusing her attention on her stepbrother, she said, 'Come on, Mike, we had better get going or we'll be late.' Safely in reach of the door, she dared to look at Dex again.

'Nice to see you again, Dex, but, as you can see, we're on our way out. Perhaps you can ring me the next time you're in town.'

'Yes, I will do that,' he said suavely, walking towards the door.

Beth opened the door for him with a polite smile on her face, tinged with a profound relief that he was leaving. She glanced at the keys in her hand, and realised she could hardly carry a bag.

'Give them to me, Beth,' Elizabeth suggested, seeing her dilemma. 'I'm the only one with pockets, as Mike so readily informed me when it came to paying the taxi fare on the way over.'

'That's Mike,' Beth said with a laugh, handing the keys over, and was complacently congratulating herself on her adult handling of the situation, even if her stomach felt as if a horde of butterflies had taken control of it, when Mike decided to get in on the act. . .

CHAPTER SEVEN

How it had happened, Beth did not know. One minute she was showing Dexter Giordanni out of her door, and half an hour later the same man was helping her out of his limousine while Mike and Elizabeth were already halfway down the steps to the open door of Mike's old college friend's restaurant in Holland Park. The restaurant was closed to the general public for the night in order to host the private Hallowe'en party.

Shrugging Dex's hand off her arm, she snarled, 'I don't need your help, thank you very much.'

>

Stuck in the back seat of the car, with Dex on one side and Mike on the other, it had been the journey from hell for Beth. Unable to complain at Mike's high-handed attitude in inviting Dex to accompany them to the party, she had silently fumed. The close proximity of Dex's large body had only infuriated her further. Much as she hated to admit it, his closeness, his warmth, the familiar scent of him, had set every nerve in her body on red alert.

'Temper, temper, Beth. There's no need to play the part of the spitting cat quite so enthusiastically,' he opined, grinning down at her.

'And there's no need for you to be here,' she shot back, wanting to knock the smile off his handsome face. 'You could easily have said no to Mike's invitation. You're not in fancy dress, and you'll stand out like a sore thumb. It's not your scene at all,' she ranted on.

But Dex silenced her by placing a long finger over her mouth.

'My scene or not, I could not desert you in your hour of need.'

Beth's eyes widened in puzzlement. 'My need?' What on earth was he talking about? She needed Dex like a hole in the head! She was still fighting to recover from their last disastrous encounter.

'I pride myself on being a gentleman, and it was obvious you did not have a date for the evening. You know what they say: Two's company, three's a crowd. I had to step in and save you any embarrassment.'

His mock concern raised her temperature another notch. 'Why, you patronising prig! If I had wanted an escort for the evening, I could have had one.'

'If you say so. But let us get inside; we are holding up the traffic.'

Only then did Beth notice the cars drawn up behind Dex's limousine, and about a dozen people approaching. Before she could think of a suitable retort, Dex slipped his arm around her waist and urged her down the steps and into the foyer. She knew he was winding her up deliberately, and belatedly she thought of an answer.

'I didn't have an escort because I didn't want one. I intend to play the field tonight,' she declared, with a casual sophistication she did not feel. At barely five feet two, and dressed as a cat with whiskers, sophisticated she was not. . . Anyway, it was a lie. Actually, all she really wanted to do was run home. But she refused to give Dex the satisfaction of knowing how much seeing him again had upset her.

'I am in the field,' Dex murmured, swinging her around in his arms and holding her close against his large body. 'Play with me,' he drawled huskily, his grey eyes narrowed intently on her face.

Beth swallowed hard. There was no mistaking the flare of desire in the depths of his eyes as one large hand slid down her back and pressed her hard against his muscular thighs.

Beth glanced wildly around. She tried to ease away, but it wasn't that simple. The small restaurant entrance was a mass of bodies, from ghosts to devils, druids— and drunks, by the look of it, as one particularly plump man, in what looked like a nightshirt, fell against her.

'Come on.' Dex's hand dropped from her waist and, curving a protective arm around her slender shoulders, hauling her hard into his side, he guided her through the crush of people into the large dining room where there was a lot more space.

Intensely aware of his thigh brushing against her hip, and his hand on her shoulder, it took all Beth's willpower to repress the shiver his touch ignited.

'I'm all right now,' she said curtly, slipping out from under his arm and glancing around.

Beth's green eyes widened incredulously at the scene before her. On a platform at one end of the room, a disc jockey dressed in a red Spandex suit, a cape and horns— the devil incarnate!—was doing his stuff. The music was loud, and multi-coloured flashing strobe lights cast weird and wonderful shadows over the centre of the room, where a couple of dozen people dressed as demons, witches and warlocks, and some very scantily clad women, gyrated in time to the beat. . . Around the sides, people lounged at tables, drinking and laughing. It reminded her of an oil painting she had seen in the Tate Gallery by a seventeenth-century Italian master, depicting hell.