‘Hi,’ he murmured softly, and her stomach turned over.
‘Hi,’ she responded, feeling shy beneath the intimacy of his gaze. Stupid she knew, after the kind of intimacies they’d shared this afternoon. But she still made quite a play out of sitting up properly to give her an excuse to break that eye contact.
‘Where are we?’ she asked, glancing out of the window.
‘Stuck in traffic,’ he answered wryly. ‘You slept for over an hour,’ he added as the car began crawling forward. ‘Which had me wondering if you didn’t sleep much last night.’
Last night felt a long way away to Samantha—several very long lifetimes in fact. ‘The rain’s stopped,’ she said. It was her way of ignoring his question.
‘Only just,’ he replied, and turned off at the next junction, taking them past place names she recognised but didn’t know why she did. If anyone had asked her she would have claimed never to have even visited London, never mind lived here.
‘You have a house and—what did you say—six hotels in London?’ she remarked. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to simply occupy one of your own suites than take on the added expense of a house?’
‘Oh, very prudent-thinking.’ He grinned.
The grin sent her stomach flipping again, but the words didn’t, because she was very aware that prudence had been her closest companion during the last tough year.
‘Living in hotels all the time is like living on top of the job,’ he explained. ‘Hotels are fine if we only need to be somewhere for a couple of days. But in the long term we both prefer our own private living space.’
And Samantha didn’t miss the smooth way he was including her into what he was saying.
‘So we have an apartment in New York, where my head office is situated,’ he went on. ‘Another in Paris and one in Milan. And a villa in the Caribbean for when we feel the need to really get right away and crash out on a beach for a while.’
‘Lotus-eaters?’ she likened dryly.
‘When the mood take us,’ he agreed. ‘But, as for the rest of the time, we work hard, travel far, and live out of suitcases.’
‘In luxury penthouse suites, like the one in Exeter,’ she provided.
‘Perks of the job,’ he said.
‘Extravagant perks of the job.’
‘Great lifestyle, though. You love it,’ he added as a lazy tease.
‘Me?’ she turned to stare at him, not sure she liked the sound of the pampered, jet-setting person he was making her out to be.
The car slowed and made an abrupt right turn. Looking ahead of them again, she only had time to register a wide expanse of black wrought-iron railings flanked by a thick green neatly clipped hedge. Then they were coming to a stop in front of a pair of tall wrought-iron gates. Beyond the gates stood a house, a beautiful white rendered house that looked like a small Georgian mansion set in its own private grounds.
The gates began to open automatically. Tyres crunched on gravel as they drove through, then began passing between two beautifully kept lawns with neatly laid borders. He drew them to a stop directly in front of a shallow porch supported by two slender round pillars, either side of which stood two great stone urns, spilling with a shock of flame-red geraniums.
Opening her door, Samantha climbed out, then just stood there staring. In the grey and muggy half-light of a cloud-cast and damp summer evening it all looked very white, very pristine, very elegant, yet…
I don’t like this place, she thought suddenly. And went so icy cold that she shivered.
From the other side of the car, André was grimly observing her response, so he saw the stillness followed by the telling little shiver, knew exactly why it had happened and wondered tautly if she did.
Tension pulled like a vice across his shoulders while he waited for her to say something. He needed her to give him a clue as to what was happening so he could then decide how to respond. The house could be the key to unlock the holocaust. Certainly, there was good reason for it to do so.
But then, he had believed that seeing him for the first time would have done it, but it hadn’t.
Neither had the mention of the Bressingham.
‘You and I actually live here?’ she questioned unsteadily.
The vice gave way. He relaxed his shoulders. ‘Yes,’ he confirmed, amazed that his voice could sound so steady when really he was shaking with relief.
‘I’ll get the luggage later,’ he said and, without looking at her, he walked around the car and beneath the porch with his key at the ready. ‘Are you coming?’ he prompted lightly.