Beth nearly jumped out of her skin as she heard Alex’s husky, sensual voice.
How had he found her here in this quiet corner? And, more importantly, how had he known she’d ordered coffee in the first place? And then, as he placed the tray he was carrying down on the table in front of her, Beth guessed what he had done. There were two cups of coffee on it and a croissant. No doubt all of them charged to her room!
‘I actually ordered my coffee black,’ she told him curtly, and not quite truthfully.
‘Oh.’ He gave her an oblique, smiling look. ‘That’s odd; I could have sworn you were a cappuccino girl. In fact I can almost see you with just a hint of a creamy chocolatey moustache.’
Beth stared at him in angry disbelief. He was taking far too many liberties, behaving far too personally. She gave him a ferociously frosty look and informed him arct
ically, ‘As a woman, I hardly find that a flattering allusion. Men have moustaches.’
‘Not the kind I mean,’ he returned promptly as he sat down beside her, a wicked smile dancing in his eyes as he leaned forward. His lips were so close to her ear that she could actually feel the warmth of his breath as he whispered provocatively, ‘The kind I meant is kissed off, not shaved...’
Beth’s eyes widened in outraged fury.
He was actually pretending to flirt with her, pretending to find her attractive.
She started to get up, too furious to even bother telling him that she was not going to need his services, when, out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of the beautiful crystal lustres the salesgirl was placing on the display shelves of the hotel’s gift shop. Beth caught her breath. They were just so beautiful. The lustres moved gently, catching the light, their delicacy and beauty so immediately covetable that Beth ached to buy them.
A friend of her mother’s had some antique Venetian ones which she had inherited from her grandmother, and Beth had always loved them.
‘What is it?’ she heard Alex asking her curiously at her side.
‘The lustres...the wall-lights,’ Beth explained. ‘They’re so beautiful.’
‘Very beautiful and I’m afraid very expensive,’ Alex told her. ‘Were you thinking of buying them as a gift, or for yourself?’
‘For my shop,’ Beth told him absently, her attention concentrated on the lustres.
‘You own a shop? Where? What kind?’ His voice was less soft now, sharp with interest and something which Beth told herself was almost avaricious—too avaricious to be mere polite curiosity.
‘Yes. I do...in a small town you won’t have heard of. It’s called Rye-on-Averton. I...we sell good-quality china and pottery ornaments and glassware. That’s why I’ve come to Prague. I’m looking for new suppliers here, but the quality has to be right, and the price...’
‘Well, you won’t beat those pieces for quality,’ Alex told her positively.
Beth looked at him, but before she could say anything he was telling her, ‘Your coffee’s going cold. You had better drink it and I had better introduce myself to you properly. As you know, I’m Alex Andrews.’
He held out his hand. A little reluctantly Beth took it. She had no idea why she felt so reluctant to touch him, or to have any kind of physical contact with him. Any other woman would have been more than eager to do so, she was quite sure. So what did that make her? A frightened little rabbit...too scared to touch such a good-looking and sexy man because she was afraid of the effect he might have on her? Of course not.
Quickly she shook his hand, and just as quickly released it, uncomfortably aware of the way her pulse-rate had quickened and her face become flushed.
‘Beth Russell,’ she responded.
‘Yes, I know,’ Alex told her, confessing, ‘I asked them on Reception. What’s it short for?’
‘Bethany,’ Beth told him.
‘Bethany...I like that; it suits you. My grandmother was a Beth as well. Her actual name was Alžbeta, which she anglicised when she and my grandfather fled to Britain. She died before I was born—of a broken heart, my grandfather used to say, mourning the country and the family she had to leave behind.
‘When my parents finally visited Prague, after the Revolution, my mother said that she found it incredibly moving to hear her family talking about her. She said it made her mother come alive for her. She died when my mother was eight...’
Beth made an involuntary sound of distress.
‘Yes,’ Alex agreed, confirming that he had heard and understood it. ‘I feel the same way too. My mother missed out on so much—the loving presence of her mother and the comfort of being part of the large, extended family which she would have known had she grown up here in Prague. But then, of course, as my grandfather used to say, the opposite and darker side of that was the fact that because of his political beliefs he would have been persecuted and maybe even killed.
‘The rest of the family certainly didn’t escape unscathed. My grandfather was a younger son. His eldest brother would, in the normal course of events, have inherited both lands and a title from his father, but the Regime took all that away from the family.
‘Now, of course, it has been restored. There are some families living in the Czech Republic today who have regained so many draughty castles that they’re at a loss to know what to do with them all.