The Dark Side of Desire (3 page)

No place!

Which meant it was time to stop this now. Right now.

Before it’s too late …

The disturbing words whispered in her head, and she knew she had to cut them out—decisively and sharply. Stop what must not start.

‘I don’t think so, Mr Maranz.’

Her voice was like a scalpel, severing the air between them. Severing the opportunity to negate the rudeness she knew he did not deserve, but which she was driven to deliver from a sense of urgent, primitive self-preservation.

Because if she didn’t—if she allowed him to get through to her, to smile at her … smile
with
her … get past her defences—then what would happen?

What would happen if she let him ‘start again’?

The question rang inside her head, demanding an answer. An answer she refused to give. Not now—not when the adrenaline was pumping in her veins and dominating her mind, urging her to do the only sensible, safe thing even if it meant being rude. She needed to minimise her exposure to this man by any means possible.

She gave a small smile, tight and insincere—dismissive. ‘Do please excuse me …’

She walked off, unbearable tension in her back, knowing with a cold burning in her body that she had behaved inexcusably rudely, but knowing she had had to do so. Because the alternative—the one that she’d thrust out of her head urgently, ruthlessly—was unthinkable.

Quite, quite unthinkable.

Behind her, as he watched her threading her way back into the crowded, opulent reception room, Leon Maranz stood, his face tight.

Anger was spiking in him. Yet again she’d blanked him! Cut him dead. Then walked off as if he didn’t exist!

His eyes, watching her stalk back into the main reception room, darkened to black slits. Emotion seethed in him as she disappeared from view. Her rudeness was breathtaking! Unbelievable!

Who the hell does she think she is to do that to me? To hand that out to me? Talk to me in that way?

Once again he felt that old, suffocating, burning sensation in his chest that he’d used to feel long years ago. He had thought it would never strike him again. Yet at Flavia Lassiter’s curt dismissiveness it had reared up in familiar, ugly fashion. Bringing with it memories he didn’t want. Memories he’d left far, far behind.

He fought it back, mastering the destructive, dark emotion, refusing to let it poison his mind. It was unnecessary to evoke it now—that burning sense of being looked down on, looked through, that had evoked his burst of anger at her. No, her rude rebuff of him was not for
that
reason. He forced control over his wayward reaction to her cutting rejection, subduing it. In its place he reached for an alternative—an explanation for her rudeness, her dismissal of him, that was far more palatable to him. One he could seize on.

Every masculine instinct told him there
was
another, quite different reason for her behaviour. One he should welcome, not resent. Her glacial attitude might have attempted to freeze him out, but all it had done was reinforce a quite different interpretation.

It was only a mask. A mask she had adopted in an attempt—however futile!—to conceal from him her true reaction to him. A reaction he had seen flare betrayingly in her eyes as he had smiled at her. It had told him exactly what he’d wanted to know, confirmed what he had felt with every
masculine instinct, with all his years of experience in feminine response—a reaction that mirrored his to her.

Desire
.

A simple, brief word, but it was the one he wanted—the only one he wanted. Nothing else. Because desire was the only emotion he wanted to associate with Flavia Lassiter. Everything else about her could be put aside as unnecessary for what he wanted. And pointless—and destructive.

The anger that had spiked in him as she’d stalked away ebbed away completely, the bunched tension in his muscles relaxing. There was no need for either anger or tension. No need at all. He was sure of it. Flavia Lassiter could be as dismissive of him as she liked, but it was only a mask—a futile attempt to deny what it was useless for her to deny. The fact that everything about her told him she was as responsive to him as he was to her.

Tension eased from his shoulders. His features lightened. He strolled back into the main reception room, a strategy forming rapidly in his mind. For now he would let her be. It was clear to him she was fighting his impact on her, and that she was resisting facing up to it. OK, it
was
sudden. He allowed that. And for a woman like her, clearly used to being in strict control of herself, adept at presenting an outwardly composed and indifferent front, that was understandable. For the moment, then, she could stay safely behind the crystalline shield she was holding him at bay with. When the time was right he would shatter it completely. And get from her exactly what he knew with complete certainty now he definitely wanted …

As did she …

It was just a matter of time before she accepted it. That was all. A slight smile started to play around Leon’s mouth. The prospect of persuading her was very, very enjoyable.

H
OW
Flavia got through the rest of the evening she didn’t know. It seemed to go on for ever. She kept a perpetual eye open for Leon Maranz, and was grateful he seemed to be keeping himself away from her. She could see her father with him and Anita sometimes—clearly more than happy to be so—but more often than that he was surrounded by any number of other guests. Especially female ones, she noticed without surprise and with a distinct tightening of her mouth. She avoided her father as well, because the last thing she wanted was to have him grill her on why she’d been so short to his favoured guest.

Her avoidance continued even when the endless party finally wound down, the guests all left, and her father and Anita headed off to a nightclub. Whether or not Leon Maranz had gone with them she didn’t know, and refused to care. She could feel only relief that he had gone, and that the ordeal of the evening was finally over.

The moment she could, Flavia disappeared into her bedroom. For the first time since her gaze had lighted on Leon Maranz that evening she started to feel the tension ebb out of her. Safe at last, she thought with relief.

But as she stood under the shower some minutes later she had cause to question that assumption. Leon Maranz might be out of the apartment but he was not out of her head. Far from it …

The water pouring over her naked body was not helping—running down her torso, between the valley of her breasts, down her flanks, her limbs … It was a sensuous experience that she was all too aware was the last thing she should be experiencing when trying to put out of her head the image of the man who had caught her attention, impacted upon her as no other man had.

As she massaged shower gel into her skin, its warm soapy suds laving her body, she could feel her breasts reacting, see in her mind’s eye those dark hooded eyes resting on her as if he were viewing her naked body …

No!

It was insane to let her mind conjure such things! Leon Maranz wasn’t going to see her again, let alone see her naked body, for heaven’s sake! Time to put him totally out of her mind.

With a sharp movement she switched the shower dial to cool and doused herself in chilly water, then snapped the flow off completely. Stepping out of the stall, she grabbed a bath-towel and rubbed herself dry with brisk, no-nonsense vigour. It was completely irrelevant that Leon Maranz had had the effect on her that he had! It was an effect every woman there had shared, so she was hardly unique. And even if—
if
, she instructed herself ruthlessly—he had made it clear in that brief, fraught exchange by the buffet that he was eyeing her up, that only made it
more
imperative that she put him completely out of her head!

Nothing can come of this and nothing is going to. That is that. End of
.

She dropped her towel, donned her nightdress, and climbed into bed. Then she reached for her mobile. Time to check with Mrs Stephens on how her grandmother had been this evening.

Familiar anxiety stabbed in her mind, displacing her troubling thoughts about Leon Maranz and his disturbing impact on her with even more troubled thoughts. The constant worry she felt about her grandmother surfaced again through the
layers of her ridiculous obsessing about a man who meant absolutely nothing to her, whom she’d only seen for a few hours, and exchanged only a few words with.

Angry with herself for the way she’d reacted that evening, when there were real worries and concerns for her to focus on about the one person she loved in this world, she settled herself into bed and phoned home. It was late, she knew, but Mrs Stephens would be awake, and these days her grandmother could be awake for hours into the night sometimes. It was one of the things that made it so wearing to care for her, Flavia admitted, labour of love though it was for her.

When she spoke to the carer Flavia was relieved to hear that her grandmother was quite soporific, and seemed not to have realised her granddaughter was not in the house. It was a blessing, Flavia knew, because it would have made these visits to London at her father’s behest even less endurable knowing that her grandmother was at home, fretting for her.

What did cause her grandmother unbearable distress, though, was being away from home herself. Flavia had discovered that when, some six months ago, her grandmother had had a fall and had had to spend a week in hospital being checked over and monitored. It had been dreadful to see how agitated and disturbed her grandmother had become, trying to get out of the hospital bed, her mental state anguished, tearful. Several times she’d been found wandering around the ward incoherent, visibly searching for something, distressed and flailing around.

Yet the moment she’d come back home to Harford the agitation had left her completely and she’d reverted to the much calmer, happier, and more contented person that her form of dementia allowed her to be. From then on Flavia had known that above all her grandmother had to remain in the familiar, reassuring surroundings where she had lived for over fifty years, since coming to Harford as a young bride. Whatever the dimness in her mind, she seemed to know that she was at home, and presumably it felt safe and familiar to her there,
wandering happily around, or just sitting quietly, gazing out over the gardens she had once loved to tend.

Flavia gave a sad smile. It still pained her to see her beloved grandmother so mentally and physically frail, but she knew that at the end of a long life her grandmother was starting to take her leave of it. Just when that would happen no one could say, except that it was coming ever closer. Flavia was determined that, come what may, if it was at all medically possible her grandmother would die in her own home, with her granddaughter at her side.

Her gaze grew distant as she stared blankly at the far wall opposite the bed. Just what she would do once her grandmother died was still uncertain, but she knew she would do her very best to hang on to Harford. She loved it far too much to let it go. Her plan was to run it as an upmarket holiday let, though it would require modernising for the bathrooms and kitchen, plus general refurbishment—all of which would require some kind of upfront financing, on top of coping with the inevitable death duties. One thing was certain, though—her father wouldn’t offer her a penny to help.

Not that she would take it. It was bad enough owing him for her grandmother’s hip operation, let alone anything else. Her father, she thought bitterly, was
not
a good man to be in hock to … Who knew how he might wield such power over her head?

She reached out to turn off the bedside light. There was no point thinking about anything other than her current concerns. Her grandmother’s needs were her priority, and that was that. There was no room in her life for anything else.

Any
one
else….

Yet as she slowly sank into slumber echoes seemed to be hazing in her memory—a deep, drawling voice, a strong-featured face, dark, unreadable eyes … holding hers …

Leon Maranz poured himself a brandy, swirling it absently in his hand. His face was shuttered.

He was alone in his apartment, though he might easily have had companionship. He knew enough women in London who would have rushed to his side at the merest hint of a request for their company. Even at Lassiter’s cocktail party he could have had his pick had he wanted to. Including—he gave an acid smile devoid of humour—Lassiter’s current
inamorata
, who had shown her interest and looked openly disappointed when he’d declined her pressing suggestion that he accompany them to a nightclub.

What would she have done, he thought cynically, had he decided to amuse himself by inviting her back here? Would she have played the affronted female and gone rushing back to her ageing lover’s side? Or would the temptation to gain a lover much, much richer than Lassiter—and so much closer to her in age have overcome whatever scruples she had left in life? And what would Lassiter himself have done? Tolerated the man he so badly wanted to do business with bedding his own mistress? His cynicism deepened.

Not that he would have put either of the pair to such a test. Anita’s bleached-blonde, over-made-up looks had no allure for him—nor the voluptuous figure so blatantly on display. When it came to women his tastes were far more selective compared to the likes of Lassiter.

An image flickered in his mind’s eye as he slowly swirled the brandy in its glass. Flavia Lassiter was cut from a quite different cloth than her father’s overdone mistress.

Contemplatively Leon let his mind delineate her figure, her fine-boned features that were of such exceptional quality. The very fact that she did not flaunt her beauty had only served to draw his eye to her the more. Did she not realise that? Did she not see that hers was a rare beauty that could not be concealed, could not be repressed or denied? Leon’s dark eyes glinted as he raised his brandy glass to his nose, savouring the heady bouquet. She could not repress or deny what she had betrayed when she’d met his gaze, what had been evident to him—blazingly so—in the flare of her pupils,
the slight but revealing parting of her lips. She had responded to him just as he to her. That had told him everything he needed to know …

His expression hardened. The curt disdain she had handed out, dismissing him, burned like a brand in his mind. Had it indeed been nothing more than an attempt to deny her response to his interest in her—for reasons he could not fathom? Since he did not intend that denial to persist he could afford to ignore it. An expression entered his eyes that had not been there for many, many years. Or had it been the result of something quite different? Something he had not encountered for a long time, but which could still slide like a knife through the synapses of his memory.

Like clips from an old movie, memories shaded through his mind, taking him far, far away from where he was now. To a world … a universe away from where he was standing in this five-star hotel suite, wearing a hand-tailored suit costing thousands, enjoying the finest vintage brandy and everything else that his wealth could give him effortlessly, in as much abundance as he wanted.

His life had not always been like that …

It was the cold he could remember. The bitter, biting cold of Europe in winter. Icy wind cutting through the thin material of his shabby clothes. The crowded, anonymous streets of the city where he was just one more homeless, desperate denizen, pushed aside, ignored, resented.

Making his way slowly and painfully in that harsh, bleak world, grabbing what jobs he could, however menial, however hard, however badly paid—jobs that the citizens of the country he had come to did not want to do, that were beneath them, but not beneath the desperate immigrants and refugees grateful to get them.

He had become used to being looked down on, looked through as if he did not exist, as if those looking through him didn’t
want
him to exist. He had got used to it—but he had never, even in his poorest days, swallowed it easily. It
had made him angry, had driven him ever onwards, helping to fire and fuel his determination to make something of himself, to ensure that one day no one would look through him, no one would think him invisible.

Yet even now, it seemed, his hand tightening unconsciously around the brandy glass, when he moved in a stratospheric world with ease and assurance, that anger, the cause of which was long, long gone, still possessed some power over him …

Why?
That was the question that circled in his mind now, as he stood in his luxurious hotel suite, savouring the vintage brandy, enjoying the bountiful fruits of his hard work, his determination and drive. Why should that anger still come? Why should it have a power over him?

And who was
she
to have the ability to revive that anger? Who was she, that upper-crust daughter of Alistair Lassiter, to look through him as if he were as invisible as the impoverished immigrant he had once been? Someone to serve drinks, clear tables, to wait hand and foot on wealthy women like her? Who was she to blank him, snub him, consign him to the ranks of those whose existence was barely acknowledged?

He could feel his anger stab like the fiery heat of the brandy in his throat. Then, forcing himself to lessen his grip on the glass, he inhaled deeply, taking back control of his emotions, subduing that bite of anger. The anger was unnecessary. Because surely, he argued, his first explanation of Flavia Lassiter’s coldness was the correct one—she was fighting her own response to him, and it was
that
that had made her avoid meeting his eyes, made her so curt towards him. That was the explanation he must adhere to. For reasons he as yet found unfathomable, but would not for very much longer, she was trying to hold him at bay.

A cynical glint gleamed in his eye. Alistair Lassiter would be overjoyed by his interest in his daughter. He would see it, Leon thought cynically, as an opportune way of keeping him close—something Lassiter was extremely keen to do.

The cynical glint deepened. Right now Maranz Finance was Lassiter’s best hope of saving his sinking, profligate business empire from complete collapse …