‘Couldn’t be better.’
‘How nice.’ She gave him a tight little smile, lifted her glass to her mouth and took a sip of champagne.
‘So how do you know each other?’ said Rosie, plucking a breadstick from the glass standing in the centre of the table and snapping it.
Bella jumped and spluttered and coughed, and Will felt a burst of satisfaction surge through him. She was rattled. Good. And then hot on the heels of the satisfaction came relief. Thank God he wasn’t the only one to be suffering from this. For a moment there her cool detachment had been highly unnerving. But then he remembered that she’d hidden her response to him behind icy aloofness once before, and relaxed a little.
‘Bella did some work for me,’ he said, toying with the stem of his own glass and watching as her eyes dipped to his fingers and darkened.
And then she’d done him.
At the thump of desire that struck him in the gut and then ricocheted around inside him Will’s fingers tightened around the stem of the glass and he swiftly removed them to break the far less fragile bread roll sitting on his side plate.
‘That’s right,’ she said calmly, although his senses, hyperalert where she seemed to be concerned, picked up on the fact that her breathing had quickened slightly and a faint flush was creeping into her face.
‘She’s very talented,’ said Sam, throwing an admiring smile in Bella’s direction that Will wanted to knock off his face.
‘She certainly is,’ Will murmured.
‘What do you do?’ asked Rosie.
Bella blinked, then smiled. ‘I’m a jeweller.’
‘Is the necklace you’re wearing one of your designs? It’s very beautiful.’
Will’s gaze dipped to the amber pendant that nestled in Bella’s cleavage and his mouth went dry.
Bella opened her mouth to answer and then Sam, damn him, was leaning forwards and smiling into her eyes and saying, ‘I gave it to her, didn’t I, darling?’
Darling? Will went so rigid he nearly shattered.
‘Oh—er—yes,’ said Bella, smiling right back and batting her eyelids up at him. ‘Sam’s so thoughtful like that.’
Will forced his jaw to relax and wished he were unscrupulous enough to use Rosie to wind Bella up as much as she was unknowingly winding him up. ‘I’m sure he is.’
‘I’d love something like that,’ said Rosie, her voice dreamy but her eyes shooting Will a pointed look that he chose to ignore, as he always did in the face of such not-very-subtly-dropped hints.
Instead he muttered something non-committal and watched through narrowed eyes as Sam stretched his arm along the back of Bella’s chair and began massaging her shoulder.
‘And what about you, Rosie?’ said Sam.
‘I’m a professor of astrophysics at Imperial College.’
Bella’s jaw nearly hit the floor and Will felt another stab of satisfactio
n.
‘Wow,’ she muttered. ‘That sounds fascinating.’
Rosie shrugged and smiled modestly. ‘I enjoy it. I specialise in stellar dynamics and galaxy formation. It’s kind of fun.’
‘And Will’s a duke,’ said Bella, turning to Sam.
Sam’s eyebrows lifted. ‘Really?’
She nodded. ‘He has houses all over the country but chooses to live in the Cayman Islands. He dives.’
Curiosity spiked through him. ‘You seem to know a lot about me.’ Had she checked him out?