‘Are you crazy?’ she demanded.
‘Yes, of course I am—crazy over you. Why else would I do such a stupidly juvenile thing? Fuller told me on Saturday he was intending to try and see you on Monday so I rang him last night at his hotel and asked him to tell you what I said.’
‘Why didn’t you just come over and tell me yourself?’ Anya was trying hard to be angry him, but it was difficult with so much joy in her heart.
He bowed his head against her shoulder. ‘I was ashamed,’ he confessed, his voice muffled in the curve of her neck. ‘You’d told me you loved me and I’d thrown it back in your face. I called you a prostitute, and then treated you like one. I used sex to try and show you that you meant nothing to me. I thought you might hate me for that and I was afraid to face you. I thought: How can she possibly love a man who treats her that way?’
She sniffed, shaken yet reassured by the depth of his anguished self-doubt. ‘It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.’
He lifted his head to receive her glowing smile of benediction. ‘And that someone has to be you,’ he vowed. ‘Only you.’
‘Hmmm.’ She spread her hands across his chest and looked up at him, her nose pink, her rain-washed grey eyes loving. ‘What are the pay and conditions?’
‘No pay, but plenty of rewards. As for the conditions: you have to marry me, come and live at The Pines, let me seduce you out of your scandalous underwear every night, have my babies, be a stepmother to my brilliant, smart-mouthed daughter and fill my house with all the love and laughter it can hold.’
‘And a puppy?’ she bargained slyly, plucking at a button on his waistcoat. ‘A family isn’t complete without a family pet.’
He hesitated, a secret smile in his voice as he conceded, ‘Maybe a puppy. But only if you’re good.’
She tilted up her face to him, her hands sliding down under his jacket to settle down around his hips as she insinuated the centre of her body against his, pushing him back against the edge of the desk. ‘Oh, I’m very, very good…’ she purred.
His eyes smouldered and his mouth came down on hers, and as she allowed herself to be swept up in his loving passion she blissfully contemplated just how very badly she was about to misbehave….