‘Does she now?’ said Vanessa and Roxy wondered if she was imagining the knowing look on the housekeeper’s face.
‘So I think perhaps we might leave her in peace to study it, don’t you?’
He spoke in the kind of tone which nobody would dare question, least of all his housekeeper, but as he turned to leave he gave Roxy a faintly condescending nod. The type of farewell which a Duke would normally be expected to give to his most junior of servants. And she wondered if her face betrayed the guilt which was churning away inside her. Or the frustration.
‘Oh, look,’ he said, to no one in particular, his attention drawn to the enormous windows. ‘It’s started snowing.’
CHAPTER SIX
THE wind whipped up the snow like cream in a food processor and Roxy hugged her jacket closer as she stumbled through the fierce afternoon weather towards her cottage. The change to the flat Norfolk landscape had been dramatic since the storm had begun. Big, fat flakes had been tumbling incessantly from the sky and a few hours had seen enough snow falling to turn the estate into a winter wonderland. The wide parkland was now bleached white and Valeo Hall looked indescribably beautiful, with thick blankets of snow on every roof and chimney pot.
The older staff had moaned about the extra work but Roxy had been glad of nature’s intervention. Glad that the wintry transformation had distracted her from the infinitely more disturbing memory of what had happened in the picture gallery at lunchtime.
Despite the icy weather, she could feel her cheeks burning as she let herself into her cottage. She quickly shut the door on the inclement weather and could see from the lit fire and biscuit crumbs that Amy was at home.
‘Hello?’ she called loudly.
There was a thump from upstairs and then an answering voice. ‘I’m in the bath!”
Roxy was pleased not to have to face her housemate. She felt so shaken by her encounter with Titus that she wasn’t sure she’d be able to have a coherent conversation with anyone—let alone the bubbly Amy who still couldn’t quite believe she was sharing a cottage with an ex-member of The Lollipops.
Shaking the snow from her jacket and pulling off her boots, Roxy walked over to the fire and stood with her palms splayed out in front of the dancing flames.
Was she insane—to have been so eager and responsive when her aristocratic boss had seduced her? She grimaced. Not that he’d needed to do much actual seducing. She had launched herself into his arms like a heat-seeking missile and if Vanessa hadn’t suddenly appeared, she wondered if she would have let him do what he said he wanted to do.
Lay her right down there on that carpet and—
She felt the tension in her body as she remembered the harsh way he had bitten out those words. Yet she could hardly blame him for being so graphic when she’d been leading him on. Making those flippant little comments and smiling those knowing little smiles. But when he’d started kissing her … something had changed. It had stopped being a game and it had felt deadly serious. She’d gone up in flames—as if he’d put some kind of spell on her. She tried telling herself that it was because it had been so long since she’d made love that she’d responded to him so passionately. Wasn’t that an infinitely preferable reason for her behaviour? Because the alternative was that Titus Alexander had liberated emotions which up until now had been locked away.
A fierce pounding on the front door startled her, but not nearly as much as the muffled sound of an imperious voice.
‘Open the bloody door! ’
Heart racing, she pulled open the door and was almost knocked over by the fierce wind which gusted in. A tall figure, covered in white, stepped inside and despite her confused thoughts, Roxy started laughing.
‘What’s so funny?’ growled Titus as he shook the thick layer of snow from his dark overcoat.
‘You look like a snowman!’
‘And right now I feel like one. For God’s sake, let me in.’
‘You can’t come in!’ she muttered.
‘What do you mean, I can’t come in? I can do any damned thing I please.’ He walked straight past her and thrust a bottle of wine into her hand. ‘I come bearing gifts—so why don’t you go and open this, like a good girl?’
Roxy’s fingers automatically closed around the bottle but his breathtaking arrogance combined with somebody calling her a ‘good girl’ was enough to tempt her into telling him just what he could do with his wine. But her thoughts were far more focused on the very real fear that Amy would come bouncing downstairs at any moment, clad only in a towel.
She put the bottle of wine down on the dresser and turned to him. ‘Titus, I mean it. You can’t—’
‘It’s too late for that,’ he said savagely and pulled her into his arms to kiss her.
It was a hungry, almost brutal kiss which instantly drove all thoughts of Amy clean out of Roxy’s mind. It obliterated everything but the desire to have more. His face was icy but his lips were warm and she could feel snowflakes melting on her cheeks as they fell from his tawny hair. Unsteadily, she reached up to grip the broad lines of his shoulders, her fingers kneading luxuriously against their powerful musculature.
‘Titus,’ she breathed. ‘This is insane.’
‘Now that,’ he agreed unsteadily, ‘I would agree with. But you know something? It just feels too good to stop.’
His mouth came down on hers again, blotting out all her doubts and uncertainties. His hands moulded the shape of her body and now he was moving one of them down towards her belly and was rucking up her skirt. She could feel the grazing urgency of his fingers as they moved over her thigh and she moaned as they slipped aside the panel of her knickers to delve into her molten heat. ‘Oh, God, Titus. You can’t—’