CHAPTER THREE
MARC’S MOOD WAS BLACK. Blacker even than it had been that torturous evening at the fashion show, with Celine trying to corner him. He’d hoped the brush-off he’d given her would mean she’d give up. He’d been wrong.
She was still plaguing him—still set on inviting herself to the Villa Derenz on the blatant pretext of house-hunting. It had been impossible to refuse Hans’s apologetic request—and now he’d been landed with them arriving this week.
Marc’s reaction had been instant—and implacable. He’d blocked her before—he would just have to do it again. However damn irritating it was to have to do so.
His eyes rested now on the means he was going to have to use. Tara Mackenzie.
He knew her name, and it had been easy enough to find out where she lived. He cast a disparaging eye around the dingy apartment. The front door opened on to the lounge, which was cheaply furnished and messy—belongings were scattered on battered settees, and a rack of washing was drying in front of the window.
His gaze swept round to the woman he’d tracked down.
And he veiled it immediately.
Even casually dressed, in jeans and a loose shirt, Tara Mackenzie was a complete knockout. Every bit as stunning as he remembered her. The same insistent, visceral response to her that he’d felt at that fashion show, that he’d been doing his damnedest to expel from his memory, flared in him again. Deplorable, but powerful. Far too powerful.
He crushed it down.
She was staring at him now, with those amazing blue-green eyes of hers, and had opened her mouth to speak. He pre-empted her. He wanted this sorted as swiftly as possible.
* * *
‘I need to talk to you. I have a business
proposition to put to you.’
His voice was clipped to the point of curtness. Just as it had been before at the fashion show. Tara’s hackles rose automatically. She was still reeling from seeing him again—still reeling from the overpowering impact he was having on her, that seemed to be jacking up the voltage of her body’s electricity as if she’d suddenly been plugged into the mains.
This time he was not in a hand-made tux, but in a dark grey killer business suit that screamed Mr Rich and Powerful! Don’t mess me about!
Just as the look on his face did. That closed expression on his hard-planed, utterly unfairly devastating features and the obvious aura of impatience about him. His automatic expectation that she would meekly listen to whatever it was he was about to say.
He went on in the same curt, clipped voice, his faint accent almost totally supressed. ‘Extend the role you adopted at the fashion show and you can make five thousand pounds out of it,’ he said, not bothering with any preamble.
Tara frowned, and then she smiled, enlightenment dawning. It wasn’t a genuine smile, but it helped her control that voltage hammering through her.
‘Blondie still pestering you, is she?’ she put to him.
She saw his expression tighten at her sardonic observation. Obviously he was annoyed, but he was acknowledging, tacitly, what she had said.
‘Well?’ It was his only response.
‘Tell me more.’ Tara smiled sweetly.
The electricity kindled by his utterly unexpected arrival had sparked a kind of exhilaration in her. It dawned on her that he was resenting having to approach her. And that, she knew, feeling another spark inside her, was really quite gratifying...
Just why that should be so she did not pause to examine.
He took a short breath, his eyes still like lasers on her. ‘A week of your time—ten days at the most. It would be...residential,’ he said, ‘but entirely...’ His eyes suddenly closed over their previous expression. ‘Entirely synthetically so. In other words, on the same basis as before.’ A tight, non-humorous smile tightened his mouth. ‘For appearances only.’
Was there a warning in the way he’d said ‘only’? Tara didn’t know and didn’t care. It was entirely irrelevant. Of course it was ‘appearances only’. No other possibility. Any woman thinking anything more of him would need her head examined!
‘You would,’ he continued, in that businesslike voice, ‘be my house guest.’
Tara’s eyebrows rose. ‘Along with Blondie, I take it?’
He gave a brief nod. ‘Precisely so.’