At His Convenience Bundle (6 page)

The sensation of his body beginning to strain against the constriction of his clothes had him ceasing his search to question what on earth his body thought it was doing.

Suzy, her toiletries packed, emerged from the bathroom and froze at the sight of Luke standing in front of the chest, one of her bras in his hand.

‘What are you doing? How dare you touch my…my clothes?'

Like a small whirlwind, Suzy dropped her toiletries bag on the bed and snatched her bra from Luke's grasp, bundling it and as much of the other contents of the drawer as she could manage into her open case.

He had sent her into the bathroom deliberately so that he could go through her things! What in hell's name was happening to him? Luke wondered in disbelief as her angry, almost anguished movements caused an unexpected and fierce resurgence of the erection he thought he had tamed.

Furious with himself for his physical response to her, he told her sharply, ‘Forget the shocked virgin act—it doesn't work. It stopped working for any woman over eighteen years ago, and when it comes to a woman like you…'

What would he do if she turned round now and told him just how wrong he was? Suzy wondered bitterly as her hands trembled over her final packing. But of course she already knew, didn't she? He simply would not believe her. He would not accept that her experience was limited to one fumbling incident whilst at university, in which she and her partner had both lost their virginity. Their relationship had ended with no regrets on either part when she had decided to give up her studies to nurse her mother…

‘Time's up,' Luke announced tersely.

Another minute in this room, with its huge bed and her scent lying on the warm afternoon air, and he was not sure…

He was not sure what? Luke questioned himself brutally.

His body gave him an answer his professionalism wanted to deny.

He wasn't sure he wouldn't be able to stop himself from spreading her on that bed and…

Ignoring the savage ache in his groin, Luke searched the room silently, checking every drawer and cupboard and even looking under the bed and on top of the wardrobe before reaching for Suzy's suitcase.

‘C
OME
on—and remember I shall be watching your every step and your every word. One move out of line and you'll be in an Italian prison faster than you can take another breath,' Luke warned Suzy as they stood in the late-afternoon sunshine of the villa's impressive forecourt, with the villa itself behind them and Suzy's case at Luke's feet. Any chance she might have had of escaping disappeared, as their taxi drove away.

‘You will never be able to get away with this,' Suzy warned him angrily. ‘Someone is bound to suspect…'

‘If by “someone” you mean Sir Peter Verey, then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. He's far too busy trying to cope with his children,' Luke told her grimly.

‘What do you mean “cope with his children”?' Suzy demanded.

Luke's comment had all the hallmarks of the kind of old-fashioned attitude towards parenting which she personally deplored.

‘Why shouldn't he look after them? If his wife—'

Luke looked at her, well aware of her antagonism.

‘Their mother is actually his ex-wife. She left him for someone much richer! And as for looking after his children…They are probably more capable of looking after him than the other way around,' Luke announced dryly. ‘Peter is the product of a typical upper-class upbringing and totally incapable of any kind of hands-on parenting.'

Luke's grim words evoked Suzy's immediate sympathy on behalf of the two children. She too had had a parent—her mother, in her case—who had not been able to provide her with strong and loving parenting.

Suzy's eyes darkened as she became lost in her thoughts. Her mother had never really got over being widowed, and even before her health had begun to fail Suzy had found herself as a very young girl taking on the role of ‘mothering' her own mother.

Her sympathies aroused on behalf of the children, she demanded, ‘Why are they here, then? Or can I guess?' she asked angrily. ‘I suppose you organised it for some machiavellian reason of your own. Have you no feelings? Don't you realise how much harm it could do them, to be here under such circumstances? Doesn't their mother—'

Luke listened to her passionate outburst in silence. What would she say if he were to tell her that he himself had been orphaned at a young age? Would that fiercely passionate championship he could see in her eyes for Peter Verey's children be there for the child he had been?

‘Children are so vulnerable,' Suzy railed furiously.

‘Surely their mother…'

Children are so vulnerable. Luke looked away from her, momentarily forgetting who she was. There was a bitter taste in his mouth and his gaze was clouded by painful memories.

Some children—as he had good cause to know—were more vulnerable than others. Abruptly inside his head images he didn't want to relive were starting to form. He banished them. They belonged to the past, and right now he needed to concentrate on the present.

‘Their mother is more interested in scoring points against their father than concerning herself about the children they created together. She has a new partner now, who has no intention of playing happy families with them, so the children have become both a means of remaining a thorn in her ex-husband's side, and a punishment, because she now sees them as a burden she is forced to bear. She's put them both into boarding school, and it seems that the summer holidays and the departure of the girl she employed to take charge of them means their presence is a nuisance. Hence her decision to send them to their father. Conveniently, the day she informed Sir Peter he had to take charge of them was also the day she left on an extended holiday with her second husband.'

As she saw the anger in Luke's eyes Suzy immediately jumped to the wrong conclusion. It was obvious that he too considered the poor children to be an unwanted nuisance, she decided angrily—an inconvenience to mar his plans, just like her!

‘Of course you don't want them here any more than their father,' she accused him.

‘I don't want them here,' Luke agreed grimly.

He didn't want any child ever again to be anywhere it might be in danger, no matter how small that risk might be.

If he closed his eyes now Luke knew he would see the most terrible images of carnage and destruction etched in fire and blood. Images he would never be able to forget.

The situation here was dangerously volatile. The African President had a reputation for seeing threats round every corner and reacting punishingly to them. Violence was a way of life to him, and to his followers.

A simple mission, MI5 had called it. But how could it possibly be simple with a woman like Suzy Roberts and two innocent children involved?

‘Come on,' Luke commanded, picking up Suzy's case. ‘And remember, take one step just one centimetre over the line and you'll be locked up in jail before you can take another.'

He meant it Suzy recognised apprehensively, and she fought not to back away from him and let him know how much he was intimidating her.

‘We're lovers, remember?' Luke warned her, closing the gap between them.

Ignoring the lynx-eyed look he was giving her, Suzy took a deep breath. Lovers! Panic shot through her as she recognised that her instinctive response to the thought was not one of abhorrence and rejection. Why wasn't it? She wasn't still holding onto that idiotic thing about them being soul mates, was she?

Lovers! Inside her head images were forming. Dangerous, wanton and tormenting images that made her body ache and burn.

Beneath her thin top Suzy could feel her nipples stiffening and peaking. Her heart thudding erratically, she turned away from him to look up at the villa. It was awesomely elegant and magnificent.

‘Built by an Italian prince for his favourite mistress and the children she had by him,' Lucas informed her. ‘The frescoes around the hall and staircase include images of both her and their sons. Come on.'

The visually gentle clasp of his hand around hers was in reality anything but, Suzy recognised and she flinched beneath his tight grip.

‘My things—' she began, but Luke shook his head.

‘I'll get someone to come out for them.'

The supposed butler who opened the door to them exchanged a look with Luke which made her suspect that the man was more than just a servant. One of Luke's men? Suzy suspected so, but before she could voice her suspicions one of the doors off the hallway opened and a young boy of around six came running out, hotly pursued by a pre-teenage girl who was protesting crossly,

‘That's mine, Charlie, give it back to me now.'

‘Children! Oh—Luke.'

This must be the children's father, Suzy guessed, and she waited to be introduced to her unsuspecting host.

He was tall and good-looking, with crinkly blue eyes and a nice smile, but Suzy still recognised that of the two of them it was obvious that Luke was the one in charge.

‘Peter, I am delighted to tell you that you have an additional guest,' Luke announced. ‘My partner, Suzy Roberts. Darling, this is Sir Peter Verey,'

‘Luke, I applaud your taste.' Peter Verey smiled warmly, his words for Luke but his admiring gaze fixed very firmly on Suzy.

There was something almost endearing about Peter Verey, Suzy decided as she tried rebelliously to move away from Luke, but then tensed as his fingers closed around her wrist in steely warning.

‘I'm going to take Suzy up to my room. It's almost dinnertime…'

Suzy opened her mouth to say something, but Luke took immediate action to forestall her by the simple expedient of silencing her protest with the pressure of his mouth on her own.

Caught like a rabbit in a car's headlights, she stared up into his eyes and saw the warning glinting there. But the warning certainly didn't match the soft, sensual pressure of his mouth as it moved on hers, Suzy recognised as her heart thumped painfully. He was holding her, kissing her as though…

A huge lump formed in her throat and she had to close her eyes against the sharp pain that speared her heart. As she did so she felt him lifting his mouth from hers.

They were alone in the vast hallway, Sir Peter having discreetly disappeared.

‘This way,' Luke announced curtly.

He had released her wrist and Suzy noticed that he made no attempt to re-imprison her. In fact as she walked numbly towards the stairs he seemed to deliberately hang back a little from her. The lump in her throat turned to icy panic as she realised how bereft her body felt at its lack of contact with him.

He was a monster. She ought to hate and loathe him. She
did
hate and loathe him. It was just her body that was vulnerable to him. That was all.

Stopping mid-step, she turned on the stair and looked at Luke. He was two stairs below her and their eyes were on the same level. As she looked into his her heart gave a funny little kick-beat before flinging itself at the wall of her chest.

‘Do we really have to share a room?' she asked, anxiety thickening her voice to a husky whisper.

Something in the soft timbre of her voice was touching a nerve he didn't want to have touched, Luke recognised angrily—arousing a reaction he didn't want to have aroused. What the devil was the matter with him?

‘Yes, because that will ensure that I can keep a very close eye on you, and it will reinforce the necessary fiction I've had to create that we are lovers,' Luke said to her prosaically, adding scathingly, ‘I should have thought you could have worked that out for yourself. I assure you there's no other reason for it.'

Mutely Suzy looked at him, then turned away and began to climb the remaining stairs.

What was it about those eyes that made him want to take hold of her?

Infuriated by the effect Suzy was having on him, Luke followed her up the stairs.

‘This way.' Tensing beneath Luke's brief touch on her bare arm, Suzy willed herself not to betray how emotionally vulnerable he was making her feel.

He had come to a halt outside a door which he unlocked and pushed open.

Warily Suzy stepped inside, her eyes widening as she took in the magnificence of her surroundings.

What she was standing in wasn't just a room but a suite. Almost an apartment, she decided, and she gazed around in awe, recognising wryly that her own small flat would have fitted easily into the elegant and spaciously proportioned sitting room in which she was now standing. Through the three tall windows she could see the grounds of the villa, but it wasn't the view from the windows that caught and held her attention. As she stared through the double doors which opened into what was obviously the bedroom Suzy felt her throat constrict.

Because she could see that the bedroom did in fact possess only one bed. A very large bed, admittedly, but still only one.

‘I am not sleeping in that bed with you,' she announced flatly.

She looked and sounded shocked and outraged, Luke recognised. Pink flags of apparent distress were flying in her cheeks and her eyes were glittering with emotion. Even her body language, her tightly balled fists and tensely held body, was perfect for the part she had chosen to play.

She was good, he told himself angrily. She was very, very good. But he wasn't fooled!

‘Well, you certainly won't be doing anything other than sleeping!' he told her emphatically. ‘So you can disabuse yourself of any ideas you might be entertaining of favouring me with your sexual expertise. Because I'm not in the market for it.'

Somewhere inside her a small, sensible voice was trying to make itself heard, to tell her that she ought to be relieved by his words and the message of safety they held for her. But it was being drowned out by the outraged protests of her emotions, Suzy knew, and she recoiled from the rejection in Luke's words.

‘I am not going to sleep with you!'

Could he hear the panic in her voice? Suzy no longer cared. All she cared about was saving herself from the humiliation of having to share a bed with a man she already knew had the most dangerous effect on her body—especially when he had made it so clear how he felt about her. She could not,
would
not share Luke's bed!

Was it because she was afraid that if she did she might somehow forget herself and…?

And what? Suzy derided herself mirthlessly. Seduce him? Her? Seduce a man like Luke?

‘I'll sleep in the sitting room on one of the sofas,' she announced shakily.

‘No!' Luke checked her immediately.

The cool word offered no hope of a compromise.

Uncertainly Suzy looked at him.

‘Didn't you listen to what I told you?' he asked softly. ‘I am not going to let you out of my sight! Night and day, wherever I go, you come with me. Besides, we are supposed to be lovers. I don't want the maids gossiping that we aren't sleeping together. Of course, if you prefer to spend the next few weeks in prison…' he offered cordially.

There was a cold look in his eyes that told her he wasn't joking. Wildly Suzy contemplated telling him that she
would
prefer the option of prison. Surely anything was better than having to share his bed! Than lying there beside him, terrified that she might somehow be overwhelmed by temptation and reach out to him and be rejected.