finally made the anger and frustration inside her snap. She flicked the light on, sat up and glared at him, spirals of hair tumbling all over her face. She impatiently pushed them away with the back of her hand.
‘Just why did you bring me here, Darian?’
‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘I’m serious!’ she hissed.
He could see that. The woman who had so entranced him with her feistiness at the casting was back. And how. Her cheeks flamed like roses and her eyes sparked a bright sapphire fire. His eyes drifted to her breasts and he felt his body jerk in reaction.
‘Why do you think I asked you?’ he asked tightly. ‘Because I was angry with you.’
‘Surely if you were angry with me then the most sensible solution would have been to wish me as far away as possible?’
‘But sense doesn’t come into it when sex is involved,’ he said bluntly. ‘Does it?’
His voice was curt, almost cruel. ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘It doesn’t.’
He had planned to have his fill of her. To make love to her over and over again, in every way and in every position. To learn every inch of her body like a man conquering a brand-new country. And only when he had done that would he move on and forget her.
But the time had not been right. Not before dinner, and strangely enough not now, even though they were in bed together and he was naked beside her.
If it had been any other woman he would have started to kiss her. He was experienced enough to kiss away her doubts and have her sighing with pleasure, a consummate enough lover to know how to make her beg for him. But he saw the dried track of a tear, the sudden tremble of her mouth, and something stopped him and he knew that he could not. Not when she looked so cold and so lost and so damned vulnerable.
She’s just acting again, he told himself furiously, but that didn’t seem to make any difference. And deep down he didn’t think she was acting at all—she wouldn’t bother pretending not to have been crying quietly in the dark if she was, would she? He got out of bed and slid on a pair of boxer shorts before climbing back in.
‘What are you doing now?’ she asked, a slight tinge of hysteria to her voice.
‘Allaying your fears that I might try it on in the middle of the night,’ he said gravely. ‘See? I’m quite decent now, Lara.’
Decent? If he had swathed himself from head to toe in voluminous sackcloth, then ‘decent’ would still be the last word she would have used. And now she was confused—from being fearful that he would try it on, that she would have trouble resisting him, her self-esteem had taken a great plummet. Didn’t he want her any more?
‘Come here,’ he said, almost gently, and pulled her against him.
‘No.’ She tried to resist the impact of that warm, living flesh. ‘Go away,’ she mumbled, but she didn’t move.
He smoothed the silken tumble of her curls, thinking how soft they felt, the scent of her shampoo drifting towards his nostrils with its wholesome fragrance. For the first time in his life he felt disarmed by a sense of protectiveness—he didn’t know how and he didn’t know why. He just knew that it couldn’t have come at a more unwelcome time. ‘Just go to sleep, Lara,’ he sighed.
With one final sniff she snuggled against him, and it felt like coming home. Like walking into a room with a fire when you had been outside in the cold. But that was all an illusion, she reminded herself. A wish and a dream and a desire—all mixed up in her head and a million miles away from reality simply because she was a million miles from reality.
Yet the warmth of his embrace was irresistible, as was the rhythmic movement of his hand stroking her hair as he lulled her into a state of utter defencelessness. She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to, and she didn’t want to.
Her last thought before drifting off into a fitful and dreamless sleep was that this was the kind of thing you should do with a man before you had sex with him. Being intimate without being too intimate. Building something slowly instead of grabbing at it. She felt like a child who had gobbled all the icing off the top of the cake. And how she wished she hadn’t.
When Lara’s eyelids fluttered open, it was to find Darian’s space beside her empty. In fact, the room was empty. She blinked her eyes and rubbed them just as the door opened and in he walked, carrying a pile of clothes. Her heart flipped over when she saw him.
It’s just because he’s wearing jodhpurs, she thought—all men looked good in jodhpurs.
The cream trousers defined every sinew of his muscular thighs, clinging to the narrow jut of his hips and the high, hard curve of his buttocks. His shirt was loose and cool, though the fine, filmy material did nothing to disguise the rocky torso and the broad span of his shoulders. Long, soft black leather riding boots completed the ensemble, and for the first time in her life Lara understood why leather was considered synonymous with sex.
But sex was not what she wanted from Darian, she realised, her heart sinking. Or rather, not sex on its own. She wanted more. She wanted affection and respect and tenderness and regard. There was a word for what she desired, and that word was love.
And, judging by the cool, non-committal look on his face, she wanted far more than she could ever have.
‘Good morning,’ she said, feeling almost more shy than if they had had sex.
‘You slept.’ It was a statement. He knew it for fact simply because he had not. The moment she had got into bed with him had been the moment when sleep became, for him, a distant memory.
He must have been out of his head. Playing the protector and the carer when all he’d really wanted to do was drive himself into her sweet and yielding flesh, over and over again. Punishing his body with the nearness of hers and the sweet, feminine scent of her which had invaded his senses until the sun had risen, and unable to do a damned thing about it. He had never known such an acute and excruciating sense of frustration in his life.
‘Yes. Yes, I did get to sleep,’ she agreed. ‘Eventually.’ This was awful—she felt as if he was someone she had just met in the doctor’s waiting room. She looked instead at the pile of clothes he was carrying. ‘What’s that?’
He dropped it onto the foot of the bed. ‘Riding clothes,’ he said shortly. ‘Khalim sent them for you. They belong to Rose and he says you’re pretty much the same size. I’ve eaten breakfast and I’m just off to the stables—so do join us when you’re ready. If you’re still inclined to.’
The dark, unfriendly note in his voice told her that he would rather she didn’t, and with something which she supposed was a smile he was gone, leaving Lara staring after him, wondering what she had done to make him look as if he had been eating something with a distinctly sour taste. Was it sexual frustration he felt? Or frustration that he had actually ended up playing the gentleman?
Wasn’t it crazy that just lying innocently in his arms, with him stroking her hair like that, should have made her feel so…so…dreamy? But tenderness could mean so much more than even the most spectacular orgasm in the world. Even if it was only pretend tenderness.
She showered and put the riding clothes on. Khalim was right—the two women were pretty similar in size, though Lara was taller and, judging by the shirt, her breasts were now smaller than Rose’s. But Rose had had one child already, and everyone knew that pregnancy changed your shape.
Lara stared in the mirror, at her slim hips and breasts untouched by childbirth, and a sudden yearning stabbed at her. Babies were something she had never even considered before, yet now she saw a sharp, snapshot image of a baby at her breast, a beautiful baby with golden eyes and dark ruffled hair.
Stop it, she thought impatiently. Just stop it. He’s gorgeous and he’s a challenge. He’s good in bed, and occasionally he can be tender—but that’s all. You aren’t in love with him, and he certainly