Now Natalia was approaching the end of her first year at university, that flicker of light beckoning his freedom he’d seen before her parents had died was flickering again, brighter than it ever had before. Technically Natalia was now an adult. She still needed him but not in the way she had before. Nowadays she only needed his money and his London home to ‘crash’ in, as she put it, when she went out partying with friends in the city. She was young, working hard and enjoying her life, exactly as she should be.
He’d promised himself that once she’d completed her first year he would start living his life for himself. He no longer had to worry about being a good influence or role model. He could enjoy the wealth he had created and experience what life had to offer but which responsibility had denied him for so long.
He never wanted to have any form of responsibility in his personal life ever again.
His business, though, was a different matter entirely and it was this he vowed to protect from Carrie Rivers’s poisonous pen.
He drank some more of his wine and reflected that it was fortuitous that Carrie had set her sights on him when he had the freedom to do whatever was needed to stop her. Whisking her to the Seychelles would have been unthinkable a year ago when he’d still planned every minute of his life around Natalia’s schedule.
Setting his empty glass on the table, he got to his feet, rolled his neck and stretched.
He would hit Carrie with the truth in the morning. Until then, he intended to extract his last few hours of fun from her.
* * *
Carrie marched into Andreas’s bathroom, switched the light on and stopped short.
Soft lighting revealed a space that wasn’t a bathroom but a marble palace. The walk-in shower alone was bigger than her bathroom.
But it was the deep, sunken bath she approached, as opulent as anything Roman emperors had bathed in. Half a dozen people could fit in it with room to spare.
It took her a few moments to work out where the plug was. Then she turned the taps on. A surge of water gushed out, not just from the taps but from tiny round holes the entire circumference, all pouring quicker than she had ever known water to pour before.
She found bath foam in a cabinet and added a liberal dollop, which immediately filled the room with a delicious warm spicy scent, then adjusted the water temperature some more, resisting the urge to set it on cold. When the bath was run and filled with thick foam, she dried her hands and went back into his bedroom.
Her bravado almost deserted her as she approached his bed.
She’d been in his room a number of times that day but this was the first time she’d had to go near his bed.
She took a deep breath before carefully untucking the sheet. She pulled it back to form a triangle, then smoothed it, trying not to think that only the night before these sheets had covered his naked body.
Because he did sleep naked. She knew that on an instinctive level she couldn’t begin to understand and the mere thought made her lower abdomen clench tightly.
You’ve had too much sun, she told herself grimly, lifting his pillow to plump and immediately releasing Andreas’s scent trapped in the Egyptian cotton. She hurriedly put the pillow back down as the scent entered her bloodstream and, for a moment, her pulses soared with such strength she felt dizzy.
She blinked hard to regain her focus and stared at the pillow as if it could bite her.
‘Is my bath ready?’
She jumped.
Andreas stood at the threshold of his bedroom, a wry smile playing on his lips.
How long had he been there, watching her…?
‘Yes. There’s fresh towels on the rail. Everything’s ready for you.’ How she managed to get the words out with her heart thrashing so wildly and leaping in her throat she didn’t know.
‘Good.’ He stepped into the room, eyes on her as he removed a cufflink from the sleeve of his shirt.
Suddenly terrified that he was going to strip in front of her, she forced her legs to move towards the door to her own room, sidestepping around his huge figure, which somehow seemed even taller and broader than it did in daylight hours.
‘I could do with some water,’ he said as her hand touched the door handle. ‘Can you bring a glass up for me please?’
A please? That was a first.
Carrie nodded tightly and hurried out of his room, down the stairs and to the kitchen, resolutely telling herself over and over that she’d had far too much sun that day and that was why her veins were fizzing so. The young kitchen assistant was just finishing for the night, a reminder that very soon the house would be empty of everyone but her and Andreas…
All she could hope was that this was her last duty of the evening.
Her heart still hammered frantically as she walked back up the stairs with his glass of water.