His words sounded protective—as if nothing could ever touch her or hurt her if Zak was looking out for her. And yet even she, with her laughable lack of experience, knew that thinking that way was dangerous. Really dangerous. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
Zak allowed himself to relax as he studied her. Tonight her nails were scarlet, contrasting vividly against her little black dress, and he imagined them scraping delicately over his heated flesh.
Suddenly, he found himself wishing that he’d just ordered in room service—except he recognised that he owed her more than that. He had little in the way of a conscience but he knew he needed to tread carefully with Emma. If th
is ended when she took that plane back to England—as he suspected it would—he didn’t want her feeling as if there had only been one thing on his mind. Even if it were true.
‘So what’s with the nails?’ he murmured.
She put the menu down and blinked at him. ‘The nails?’
He picked up her hand and caressed each scarlet-tipped finger. ‘I’ve noticed that you always paint your nails different colours—which is a little at odds with the fact that you don’t often wear make-up.’
Emma was surprised. He really did have a keen eye for detail. She looked down at her fingers, which were currently being dwarfed by his. ‘Because my job is all about presentation, and when you’re an interior designer, people always look at your hands—especially when you’re showing them fabrics or pointing at a book. Jeans and T-shirts can easily be overlooked as part of a working uniform, but if your hands look unkempt—well, you’ll be judged negatively.’
‘I see. And is the subliminal message you’re sending out tonight—that you’re a scarlet woman?’
Emma swallowed, loving the sensation of his hand holding hers but also feeling a little daunted by the sensual look he was slanting at her across the table. Intimacy in the bedroom was one thing, but here—in the middle of some chic restaurant? How on earth was she supposed to react? She felt like a learner driver who’d just been told she was about to compete in a Grand Prix event. ‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s just that red goes very well with black.’
‘What a pity.’ He let go of her hand as the waiter took their order and the sommelier offered them each a glass of champagne.
She wondered if she should have said that yes, she wanted to be a scarlet woman for the evening—was that what he expected of her? Were they supposed to be getting to know one another or were they supposed to be flirting? She thought about the way her mother used to act whenever any of her lovers were around. That way she’d had of fluttering her eyelashes and that stupid simpering thing she used to do. Well, Emma couldn’t and wouldn’t do that—and neither did she want to. What she wanted more than anything was to know what made Zak Constantinides tick—and surely their new intimacy meant that she could ask him stuff like that without coming over as intrusive?
‘You know quite a lot about me,’ she observed.
‘You’re angry that I hired a detective?’
She shrugged, because the truth was that she had almost forgotten about that. ‘Maybe if I had your degree of power and influence, I might have done the same. What I was trying to say is that the balance of knowledge between us isn’t very equal. You know stacks about me, while I don’t know much about you.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Only what Nat has told you, presumably.’
‘He gave me the bare bones.’
‘Such as?’
She picked up a heavy silver fork to toy with the Caesar salad which the waiter had placed before her. ‘He told me about your privileged childhood.’
‘Privileged?’ He gave a short laugh. Was that how Nat had portrayed it? ‘That’s one way of describing it, I suppose. And did he tell you about the woman who came to work for my family as a nanny?’
She heard the raw anger which had entered his voice and, cautiously, she nodded. ‘He mentioned something about your parents’ marriage ending and your father remarrying.’
Bitterly, Zak thought how easy it was for history to be precised into a few simple statements. How innocuous you could make the past sound if only you picked the right words. And it wasn’t innocuous at all, was it? It was as dark and as twisted as all relationships.
‘Did he tell you that the woman was much younger? All luscious curves and long blond hair.’ There was a heartbeat of a pause. ‘A bit like you.’
He saw her flinch and remembered the first time he’d seen her—thinking that he had been programmed to dislike women like her. And how wrong he had been. He’d been wrong about Emma in a lot of ways, he realised.
‘No, he didn’t tell me that.’
‘She was barely twenty years old,’ he continued, and he wondered if it was because he’d bottled up these words for so long that they now came spilling out. Or whether it had anything to do with the soft understanding in Emma Geary’s green eyes. ‘And my father was well into his fifties by then, so of course he was immensely flattered.’
For a moment, he faltered. ‘Perhaps I wouldn’t have blamed him for sleeping with her—I imagine that few men could have resisted the sight of that body wearing those tiny little bikinis around the pool. I know that my friends found plenty of reasons to come swimming that summer.’
He had been eaten up with shame and guilt that his friends—all on the heady brink of adolescence—should have so blatantly desired the woman who had helped to break his mother’s heart.
‘What happened?’ Emma whispered as she saw the ravaged look on his face.
He felt an acrid taste in his mouth. ‘What happens rather frequently nowadays, but which was rarer back then—especially in the circles in which we moved. My father announced that he was in love, that he wanted a divorce and that he intended to marry the girl. My mother never got over it.’ And now Zak realised that he was doing that thing himself. Of painting the past with a few brushstrokes which conveyed nothing but the barest facts. Because wasn’t it disloyal to his mother’s memory to recount the painful way she had crumbled? To recall how she’d wasted away, refusing to eat—as if that would bring back her errant husband.