They’d started early—cross-examining each other again and again until the answers felt automatic. Or that had been the plan. A muscle tightened in his jaw. Only instead of knuckling down, Daisy was acting like a teenager doing a detention.
‘Oh, yeah. I remember now.’ Stifling a yawn, she met his gaze, her brown eyes challenging him. ‘Sorry.’
She didn’t seem sorry. On the contrary, she sounded both unrepentant and bored.
Watching her shoulders slump in an exaggerated gesture of exhaustion, Rollo gritted his teeth but didn’t reply. Instead, leaning back against the leather of the armchair, he studied her in silence, trying to decide just how to manage this new, modified version of Daisy.
Since yesterday, when he’d more or less ordered her to go shopping, she had stopped fighting him openly, choosing instead to treat him with the sort of fo
rced politeness normally reserved for teachers or dull acquaintances.
It was driving him mad.
Yet, despite his irritation, there was something about her that got under his skin. He could feel himself responding to her defiance, her stubbornness...her beauty. Shifting against the cushions, he felt his pulse twitch. She was beautiful, but it was more than that. He’d dated a lot of women—models, actresses, socialites—all of them as beautiful and desirable as Daisy. And yet none of them had ever made him feel this way—so off balance, as though his calm, disciplined world had been tipped upside down. As though his life were not his own.
Which, of course, it wasn’t any more.
Running his hand through his short, blonde hair, Rollo pressed his fingers into the base of his skull, where an ache was starting to form. In truth, it wouldn’t be his life for the next twelve months—until after his marriage had ended in a quick, uncontested divorce. A marriage that hadn’t even happened yet.
He breathed in sharply. Having always vowed to stay single, the fact that he was not only going to be married but divorced too blew his mind.
But there was no other way. He wanted that building, and he was going to keep his promise to his father—no matter what the cost to his sexual and mental health.
He frowned. Usually in life, and in business, he got what he wanted through a combination of persistence and money. But he’d been trying to buy this building for nearly ten years, and James Dunmore had made it clear that money wasn’t the issue. He would only do business with a man who shared his values—a man who truly believed that family and marriage was the cornerstone of life.
It was easy for Dunmore to believe—he wasn’t the one having to put his life on hold. Nor was he having to cohabit with a stubborn, sexy minx like Daisy Maddox, he thought irritably. Everything would be so much simpler and smoother if she were like every other woman he’d ever met. Eager, accommodating, flirty. But the woman he’d picked to be his first—his only—wife seemed determined to challenge him at every opportunity.
Even when he kissed her.
Especially when he kissed her.
His breath swelled in his throat, and just like that he could remember how it had felt when her lips had touched his. How she’d come alive in his arms, her body melting into his, hands tangling through his hair, her feverish response matching his desperate desire—
He let out a shallow breath. It was an image he needed little effort to remember, having spent the night replaying it inside his head, his frustration magnified by the fact that the cause of his discomfort was on the other side of the wall, no doubt sleeping peacefully.
Unable to sleep himself, he had lain in the darkness, trying to piece together the fragments of nakedness that she had inadvertently revealed to him. The pale length of her neck and throat, gleaming beneath the harsh lights in his office, the curve of her bare shoulder when she had fallen asleep on the sofa. To that he’d added the scab on her knee she’d got breaking into his office—glimpsed as she’d slid past him on the landing in the T-shirt she wore as a nightie.
He’d picked at those memories until just before dawn when, finally, he had fallen asleep.
Feeling her gaze on the side of his face, he pushed aside the burn of frustration in his groin and forced himself to concentrate instead on the thankfully fully clothed Daisy sitting opposite him.
‘This is boring for both of us,’ he said slowly. ‘But the more committed you are to getting it right, the quicker we can move on.’
Daisy’s brown eyes focused on Rollo’s face. He was speaking to her as though she were a child. She felt her cheeks grow hot.
She shrugged. ‘So I forgot? Big deal. It’s not like anyone’s going to be testing us.’
Last night, after his snooty remarks about her clothing, she had expended so much energy on hating him that she had instantly fallen into a heavy, dreamless sleep. Waking, she had felt calmer, determined to find a better way of managing him. Given that so far every confrontation had ended badly—for her—she’d resolved not to lose her temper. But it was going to be a hard challenge if he carried on being so aggravating.
‘I’m an actress,’ she said stiffly. ‘I know what I have to do to get into character.’
‘Then stop sulking and do it. It was you, after all, who told me that I had to commit to the role. Perhaps you should follow your own advice.’
He gave her a patronising smile that made her want to smother him with one of the sofa cushions. But instead she took a shallow breath and in her calmest voice said, ‘It just feels so soulless and scripted. Couldn’t we just hang out together and talk? That way we’d still get to know each other, only it would be more...’ she searched for the right word ‘...more organic.’
It was a reasonable request. More reasonable, say, than demanding someone replace their entire wardrobe of clothes. But clearly being reasonable was not a concept that was familiar to Rollo.
Fuming silently, she watched him shake his head.