‘You want me, Marc! I know you do!’ she cried, her voice slurring, ‘I would be so, so good for you! Let me show you.’ She swayed again, as if to throw herself into his arms.
‘Celine, you are married to Hans,’ he growled.
Dear God in heaven, was he to endure this now? On top of everything else? Fighting off Celine, with her rampant libido loosened by the alcohol she’d consumed all evening?
Her face twisted. ‘Hans?’ She all but spat out the name. ‘He means nothing to me! Nothing! I should never have married him! I can’t bear him. I can’t bear him to touch me! He’s old and pathetic and boring!’ Her voice was vicious, cruel. ‘I want to divorce him! Get him out of my life! I want a man like you, Marc—only you!’
Marc thrust her from him, stepping aside, filled with disgust at her. ‘Get to bed, Celine. Sleep it off. You are the last woman on this earth I’d be interested in, and I wouldn’t be even if you weren’t married to Hans!’
He heard her gasp in stunned disbelief and outrage, but he was turning away from her, plunging inside his office. Slamming the door shut behind him. He leant back against it, slipping the lock. Not trusting Hans’s unspeakable wife not to try and follow him in.
He swore fluently. Cursing her. Cursing the whole world. Cursing, most of all, the fact that upstairs, in a bedroom he must not let himself go anywhere near, was the one woman on earth that he wanted.
Who was tormenting him beyond endurance.
* * *
Tara woke. Instantly awake after dreams she dared not remember.
I can’t bear this! I can’t bear this any longer!
To have to act this role with Marc—only act it! Act it and keep him at bay at the same time. To tell herself over and over again that it was just role-play, nothing more than that!
Except it wasn’t, was it? She could no more fool herself that she was acting than she could tell herself that he was!
Memory burned in her of that slow dance to end all slow dances... Their own bodies had betrayed them, shown them that neither of them were acting...
No! She mustn’t think of it! Must not remember it!
She was here for one reason only: to protect Marc Derenz from another man’s wife. And she was doing it for money, as a paid employee. Anything else was not real.
Whatever their bodies told them.
She hauled her mind away. So what? So what if she could not stop her body’s reaction to him? If she could not stop that electricity surging within her whenever he looked at her, touched her? It didn’t matter—not a jot—because none of this was real.
And even if it were real, she told herself, her thoughts bleak now, she could not let it be real. She was an outsider to this world. Her life was in England and she was moving to the country, starting afresh, getting out of the fashion world. Out of the orbit of men like Marc Derenz.
However powerful and devastating his impact on her...
With a heavy
sigh she got up, went through into the en suite bathroom. There was another gruelling day ahead of her. She had better brace herself for it.
Yet as she headed downstairs a little while later she noticed there seemed to be a different atmosphere in the villa. It was quieter, for a start, and as she crossed the salon to reach the terrace where breakfast was always served she realised she could not hear Celine’s dominating voice yapping away.
She walked out. There was only Marc, sitting in his usual place at the head of the table, drinking his coffee, perusing the morning newspapers.
Tara frowned. ‘Where are Hans and Celine?’ she asked as she took her seat. Her expected sense of awkwardness after the night before had vanished in her surprise at not seeing his guests there.
Marc looked up. He hadn’t heard her step out on the terrace. His eyes went to her, riveting her like a magnet, then instantly veiling.
‘They’ve gone,’ he said.
Tara’s frown deepened as she reached for the jug of orange juice. ‘What do you mean? More house-viewing?’
Marc sat back, folded his newspaper and set it aside with a deliberate movement. His mood could not be more different from his mood when he had ploughed up the stairs last night, thrusting the vision of the drunken, vicious-mouthed harpy that was Celine from him, wanting only to seek oblivion from what Tara had so tormentingly aroused in him.
The news that had greeted him this morning had wiped all that from his mind, leaving only one emotion. And that had brought with it only one decision that now burned in him, just as the memory of Tara kissing him had, of how their bodies had clung to each other in that devastating slow dance...