“I find you attractive,” she admitted, and immediately blushed. It was as if she’d deliberately stepped onto a gangplank high over the concrete. Her footing seemed wobbly and threatened to drop her into a hard fall.
“Do you,” he disparaged.
His tone peeled a layer off her composure. She told herself she was being mature and didn’t have enough invested to have anything to lose, but her self-respect grew thin and strained. Bug eyes. Don’t talk to my friends. They all think you’re ugly anyway.
At the same time, she put herself into Roman’s shoes and thought she knew the source of his cynicism. “If you think I’m making some kind of awkward play for the rich guy, that’s not true.”
“You’d think I was just as attractive if I lived in a cardboard shack in a back alley?” he scoffed, arms folding and chin coming up with arrogant challenge.
Dear Lord, he was attractive. Like a Greek god with all that burnished skin over toned muscle, his aura one of superiority and might.
She almost blurted out how she’d walked away from the sort of wealth and education that would have made any job unnecessary for the rest of her life. If he only knew how much contempt she reserved for powerful men and how sorry she felt for the women who loved them...
But all that was behind her, and this moment was only about her and him. Who they were in this moment.
“I might,” she allowed with a weak shrug. This was a physical thing. She suspected no matter where she had encountered him, she would still be unable to control her response to him.
“You don’t even know me,” Roman derided. “Why—?” He bit off the word, looking out to the water, gripped by an angry frustration that went beyond his response to her. He closed his hand on the rail, trying to retain his grip on the situation.
But his gaze tracked unerringly back to Melodie. The low neckline of her shirt accentuated her slender neck and delicate collarbone, offering a teasing glimpse of the upper swells of her breasts. Her damp hair fell in waves around her bare face. She had the sensual innocence of a maiden from a primitive jungle culture, pure temptation in her open regard, Eve-like in her patience for him to succumb to the desire drumming through him. The message was subliminal and as irresistible as a siren’s.
Come to me.
All he could think was, This is a damned sight more than attraction. He was blind with lust, trying to hang on to a cool head while his body still felt the writhe of hers nudging against his erection. She’d inflamed him with their kiss, promising untold pleasure, appealing straight to the basest part of him and completely undermining his capacity for logical thought.
Thank God Ingrid had interrupted them. He was disgusted with himself for kissing her in the first place, let alone allowing her response to ignite his own. The moment he’d walked away from her, he’d begun grasping for rationalizations to explain how he’d reacted so uncontrollably. Maybe he had it wrong. Maybe she wasn’t Gautier’s daughter. Maybe her presence here wasn’t by design.
But he’d reviewed everything and it was all too neat. Her mother hadn’t been in society in years, yet her funeral had been a who’s who of the Eastern Seaboard. Melodie had not only started her new wedding business the minute she had put her mother to rest, but had immediately curried favor with an old family friend who happened to be the mother of his PA. The timing was auspicious indeed. And her fall into the pool, orchestrated so beautifully, allowing her to linger in his home while her clothes dried, was equally suspicious.
Not only that, since yesterday he’d learned that Gautier Enterprises was bleeding red ink by the gallon. And he’d turned up additional photos showing Melodie under her father’s wing, all of them beautifully stoic in the face of her mother’s death. Most significantly, sly moves were happening behind the scenes. Roman’s customers were being offered exorbitant discounts if they signed exclusively with Gautier. False promises were being made about the performance of the most recent Gautier product, and dishonest warnings were circulating about Roman’s.
A fresh rush of hatred had encompassed him a moment ago as he’d looked at a photo of her with her father. Grim anger coiled through him that Melodie had anything to do with the man. He wanted her to be real, not a weapon her father was wielding. Not a willing foot soldier against him.
And he hated himself for being susceptible to her. He’d fallen for Anton’s lies once and was edging dangerously close to being taken in by Melodie’s. It was intolerable.
He’d learned all her weak points, though. Her father might have insulated himself very thoroughly, but she was wide-open. All his plans were in motion. With a tap of a key, he had ensured Ingrid would pick up his email insisting she fire Melodie, and with another ensured Melodie would have no home to go back to in Virginia. The rest of the false front she’d built would collapse like a row of dominoes over the next hours and days.