Max gave his familiar waspish smile. ‘Oh, come now—do you need it spelled out?’
She gave another shrug, not bothering to respond. Bastiaan thought she was Sabine—not Sarah. For a moment a thought struck her. Should she introduce Max to Bastiaan—see if he couldn’t persuade him to sponsor their production? But that would mean explaining that she was Sarah, not Sabine—and all her objections to that disclosure still held. She just could not afford to let her role as Sabine contaminate her identity as an opera singer, compromise her future reputation.
‘Well?’ Max prompted. ‘Off you go to him—it’s you he’s here to see, that’s obvious. Like I say, be nice to him.’ His eyes were veiled for a moment. ‘Just don’t be late for rehearsal tomorrow, OK?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ she snapped at his implication.
Whether he was joking or not, she didn’t care. She was too tired to care. But if Bastiaan had taken the trouble to turn up here, she had better return the courtesy.
Max was now on his phone to Anton and she left him to it, making her way through to the front of house. Her emotions were mixed. She felt strange—both a sense of reluctance and a stirring of her blood. They warred within her.
As she approached Bastiaan’s table he got to his feet. He seemed taller than ever—and suddenly more forbidding, it seemed to her, his lean body sheathed in a custom-made tuxedo. Was it because of the momentary tightening of his features? The veiling of his dark eyes? Whatever it was, she felt a shimmer go through her. Not just of an awareness that was quickening her pulse, but of its opposite as well—a kind of instinctual reserve.
She would keep this as brief as possible—it was the only sensible thing to do.
‘M’sieu Karavalas,’ she greeted him, with only the slightest smile at her mouth, a nod of her head.
An eyebrow lifted as he held a chair for her. ‘Bastiaan, surely?’ he murmured. ‘Have we not advanced that far, mademoiselle?’
There was light mockery in his invitation to use his given name while reserving more formality for his own addressing of her. A mockery that played upon what he knew—must know—about her receptiveness to his masculine potency, his own appreciation of her charms...
She made no reply, merely gave a flickering social smile as she sat down while he resumed his seat.
‘So, what have you done with Philip?’ she asked. She kept her tone light, but this was, after all, the only reason that his cousin was here.
She saw a dark flickering cross his eyes. ‘I’ve just returned from driving him to Paris,’ he answered.
Sarah’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘Paris?’
Bastiaan lifted his cognac glass. ‘Yes,’ he said smoothly. ‘He’s meeting his mother there, and visiting family friends.’
‘So, how long will he be away?’ she asked. She sought to keep her tone light, still, but it was hard—every nerve-ending was quivering with the overpowering impact this man had on her.
‘Long enough.’
There was a hint of a drawl in his voice and it made her stare at him. She tried to quash the sudden flare in her veins as his veiled, unreadable gaze rested on her. A gaze that suddenly seared its message into her.
‘And now, having disposed of the problem of my young cousin,’ Bastiaan was saying, his voice dragging across her nerve-endings and making them flare with a kind of internal shiver that she felt in every cell of her body, ‘we can move on to a far more interesting subject.’
Something in his face changed and he shifted slightly, relaxing back, it seemed to her, and lifting his cognac glass, his long, strong fingers curved around the bowl. His eyes rested on her with an open expression in them that was pinioning her where she sat.
She could not answer him. Could only sit, lips slightly parted, feeling her heart start to race. The rest of the room had disappeared. The rest of the world had disappeared. There was only her, sitting there, her body shimmering with a sensual awareness of what this man could do to her...
And then a smile flashed suddenly across his features. ‘Which is, Mademoiselle Sabine, the subject of where we should dine tonight.’ He paused, a light in his eyes. ‘Last time you disdained my suggestion of Le Tombleur. But, tell me, does it meet with your approval tonight?’
‘Tonight?’ Her echo of his question was hollow, hiding the shock beneath. Hiding the sudden, overwhelming spike of adrenaline that had shot into her veins as she’d realised what he intended.
Amusement played about his well-shaped mouth. ‘Do we need to wait any longer, Sabine?’
All pretence at formality was gone now. All pretence at denial of what had flared between them from the very first. There was only one reality now—coursing through her veins, pounding in her heart, sheering across her skin, quickening in her core.
This man—this man alone—who had walked into her life when she’d least expected it, least wanted it, could least afford to acknowledge it. This man who could set her pulse racing...in whose dark, disturbing presence her body seemed to come alive.
Temptation overwhelmed her. The temptation to say Yes! Yes! to everything he was offering. Simply to let his hand reach across the table to hers, to let him raise her to her feet, lead her from here and take her where he wanted...
To a physical intimacy, a sensual intensity, an embarkation into realms of sensuous possibility that she had never encountered before.
And why not? Why not? She was free, an adult and independent woman. Her emotional ties to Andrew, such as they’d been, were long gone. She was no ingénue—she knew what was being offered to her...knew it was something that would never come again in her life. For there could never be another man who would affect her the way this man could.