STANDING HUDDLED IN a shop doorway opposite the now dark café, Xan waited for Tamsyn to emerge but it was already ten after seven and still she hadn’t shown.
The shop doorway remained defiantly closed and he wondered if perhaps she’d slipped away unseen from the back of the building. He wondered what lengths she would go to in order to avoid him.
He’d imagined...
What?
That she would be deliriously happy to see him, despite him having failed to contact her after their passionate night at the palace? Despite the fact that he’d hired a private jet to get away from Zahristan as quickly as possible the next morning, after leaving her only the briefest of notes, and then had disappeared for the best part of three months?
Yes. That’s exactly what he’d imagined because it had happened so often before. Women took whatever crumbs he was prepared to offer them. They were grateful for anything they got and even when they complained it wasn’t enough, they still came back for more. He’d meant it when he’d told Tamsyn he wasn’t deliberately cruel—despite the tearful accusations sometimes hurled at him in the past. He was just genuinely detached. He’d learnt detachment from the moment he’d left the womb—that was one of the inevitable legacies of having a mother who was so bogged down with self-pity that she barely deigned to notice her child. He never raised hopes unnecessarily, or proceeded with a relationship if the odds were stacked against it. And breaking the heart of his friend’s new sister-in-law was never going to be on the cards.
He shouldn’t have bedded her in the first place which was why he hadn’t hung around the day after the wedding. Why he’d deliberately avoided seeing her and instead gone riding with the Sheikh, who had seemed to have enough problems of his own without Xan adding to them.
He had waited for the dust to settle and his libido to cool and for a short period of time to elapse. Then he had flown out to his beautiful waterfront estate in Argolida on the Peloponnese Peninsula, to begin the future which had been mapped out for him so long ago. There had been several meetings with the young woman he’d once agreed to marry and he had gone through the motions of what was expected of him. It should have been simple, but it had turned out to be anything but. He had stumbled at the first hurdle—he who never stumbled. Failure wasn’t a word which featured in his vocabulary and for weeks he had attempted to cajole then scold himself into a state of acceptance—an acceptance which had stubbornly refused to materialise. He’d witnessed Sofia’s bewilderment as he struggled to find the right things to say. He had pictured his father’s distress when he explained that the marriage was a no-go he should never have agreed to. For the first time in his life he hadn’t known which way to turn. If he married Sofia he could not make her happy, but if he walked away—what then? Her pride would be wounded and his family’s reputation tarnished.
It had been at the beginning of a conference call with the Sheikh last week that a solution had suddenly occurred to Xan. It wasn’t perfect—but then, what in life could be regarded as perfect? But it would suffice. It would have to. And surely it was better than the alternative.
His throat dried as the café door swung open and Tamsyn stepped out into the rainy night and suddenly every thought drained from his mind. Yet why should his heart race like a train when she was dressed so unbecomingly? In her faded jeans and ugly padded jacket, she shouldn’t have merited a second glance. But something seemed to happen to his vision whenever Tamsyn Wilson was around and he found himself unable to tear his eyes away from her. It had happened the first time he’d laid eyes on her but it was a whole lot worse now. Was it because, despite her sassiness and outspokenness, she had been an innocent virgin—thus defying all his jaded expectations? He kept replaying that moment when he’d first penetrated her sweet tightness and she’d made that choking little cry, her mouth open and moist as it had sucked helplessly against his shoulder.
Her hair was tied back, her ponytail flowing behind her like a curly red banner, but her face was pale. So pale. From here you couldn’t see the freckles which spattered her skin like gold. He found himself remembering the ones which reposed in the soft flesh of her inner thighs. How he had whispered his tongue over them...tantalising and teasing her, before bringing her to yet another jerking orgasm, which had left her shuddering against his mouth.
He began to walk towards her, aided by the red gleam of the traffic lights which was reflecting off the wet road like spilled blood. And then she saw him, her eyes first widening and then narrowing as she put her head down and increased her speed and Xan felt a flicker of excitement as he realised she was trying to get away from him, just like she’d done at the palace. Did she really think she would outpace him? Didn’t she realise he’d seen the yearning look of hunger in her eyes when he’d walked into that steamy café, and it had echoed the hunger in him?
‘Tamsyn!’
‘Can’t you take a hint?’ she shouted back over her shoulder. ‘Just go away, Xan!’
She didn’t slow down as he followed her along the wet pavement but he caught her up easily enough, his long strides easily outperforming her small, rapid steps. ‘We need to talk,’ he said, as he caught up with her.
She stopped then. Lifted up her chin to glare at him and the raindrops glistened like diamonds on her freckled skin as she stood beneath the golden flare of the streetlamp.
‘But that’s where you’re wrong!’ she contradicted fervently. ‘We don’t need to do anything. Why would we when there’s nothing between us? Didn’t you make it plain that’s what you wanted when you slipped out of bed that morning, taking great care not to wake me?’
‘Why?’ he parried softly. ‘Did you want there to be something between us?’
‘In your dreams!’ she declared. ‘Even if I did want to get involved with a man—which I don’t—you’re the last person on the planet I’d ever choose! I already told you that.’
A low sigh of relief escaped from his lips and some of the tension left him. ‘That’s probably the best news I’ve heard all week,’ he said. ‘And yet another reason why we need to have a conversation.’
Tamsyn steeled herself against the sexy dip in his voice, brushing the rain away from her cheeks with an impatient fist. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ she hissed. ‘I’m not interested in what you’ve got to say, Xan. I’ve just been sacked and it’s all your fault.’
His eyebrows shot up. ‘My fault?’
‘Yes! If you hadn’t come into the cafe—swaggering around the place as if you owned it and demanding I take a break I wasn’t entitled to—then I’d still have a job. Your attitude made me so angry so that I answered you back, giving that witch of a manageress the ideal opportunity to tell me not to bother coming back tomorrow.’
‘So that’s the only reason you were fired?’ he questioned slowly.
Tamsyn told herself she didn’t have to answer. That she owed him nothing—and certainly not an explanation. Yet it was difficult to withstand the perceptive gleam in his eyes or not to be affected by the sudden understanding that since Hannah had gone away to live in the desert, she really was on her own. That once again she was jobless, with nobody to turn to—with outstanding rent to pay on her overpriced bedsit. Giving a suddenly deflated sigh, she shrugged, all the energy needed to maintain the fiction of her life suddenly draining away. ‘Not the only reason, no,’ she agreed reluctantly. ‘I guess I’m fundamentally unsuited to being a waitress.’
Beneath the streetlight, his eyes gleamed. ‘All the more reason for you to have dinner with me, since I have a proposition to put to you which you might find interesting.’
The suggestion was so unexpected that Tamsyn blinked. ‘What sort of proposition?’
Tiny droplets of rain flew like diamonds from the tangle of his ebony hair as he shook his head. ‘This isn’t a conversation to have in