The Price of Scandal (7 page)

‘It was an emergency and I only meant to borrow it.’

‘I am not sure borrowing a stranger’s car is recognized, legally speaking, though I believe that the courts are generally fairly lenient with first-time offenders. Are you?’ he taunted.

‘This isn’t funny. It’s not a joke.’ Especially not if the police did become involved. ‘I’m very sorry about your car.’ Did this mean that her rescue had not been accidental?

Again he seemed to read her thoughts.

‘There were some valuable items in the car I wanted to retrieve.’

‘Sorry,’ she whispered, feeling guiltier than ever. ‘I didn’t think.’ The excuse sounded pretty lame even to her own ears. ‘I just panicked. I ran outside and my car was gone. I realised that Hannah must have taken it and your car was there and unlocked…which was pretty stupid if you had valuables in it.’

‘So it was actually my fault.’

The shamed colour flew to her cheeks. ‘No, of course not, it’s
my
fault.’

‘Your stepdaughter will never learn to take responsibility for her own actions if you constantly blame yourself.’

Neve’s blue eyes flew wide. ‘
Hannah!’
Shame washed over her like a dark tide. Until he had mentioned her she had momentarily forgotten her stepdaughter’s plight.

His dark eyes softened as he studied her face. ‘I assume you had a falling out?’

That, she thought, was like calling a nuclear explosion a loud bang.

A self-condemnatory frown formed on her smooth brow as she gnawed worriedly at her lower lip and admitted, ‘She was running away from me.’

Her tortured gaze was drawn to the window as she gulped and, embarrassed, turned away to hide the tears that sprang to her eyes.

Severo was conscious of some unidentifiable emotion swelling in his chest as he watched her reach out a finger and trace a pattern in the mist on the window.

He shook his head and told himself not to look for complications where there were none. This was not about spiritual connections; it was about scheduling and sex.

Work had been frantic for the last few months but this was clearly his body’s way of telling him he needed to make some time in his schedule to redress the balance.

All work and no play made Jack, or in this instance Severo, a man apt to become unhealthily fixated by blue eyes…As for fantasising about a woman’s skin or wanting to drive the sadness from her face, that was simply just not him!

‘I’m sure your Hannah is fine.’

They both remained motionless as their eyes met in the reflected image on the window.

The moment stretched, the heavy silence seething with unspoken words. Neve felt light-headed; awareness hummed in her blood and prickled hotly under her skin. She could feel the heavy throb of tension as it built and took on a presence that felt physical.

A log in the fire exploded with a soft hiss, breaking the spell. She gave a small gasp and, flushing, turned around to face him.

‘Not knowing,’ she said bleakly. ‘It’s awful. I…’

She stopped as his hand came down heavily on her shoulders.

‘Don’t think of it.’

Chapter Seven

T
HAT
was the problem: she hadn’t been.

The guilty knowledge of her selfishness ate away at Neve like acid. Until Severo had said her name she had not thought about Hannah.

She’d dreamt about him when she slept and from the moment she had woken her thoughts had revolved exclusively around this man.

Tucking the errant strands of hair behind her ears, she pulled away and eyed him with burning blue-eyed resentment.

‘You make it sound easy.’ It wasn’t meant to be this easy. I am just shallow and self-obsessed.

‘I don’t think it is easy, just necessary.’

Neve compressed her lips. He didn’t have a clue about the burden of responsibility she felt or the guilt or…the man was a damned computer! ‘I need my clothes.’

Severo swore under his breath, frustration stamped on his autocratic features as he watched her stalk stiff-backed from the room.

Neve squinted as her eyes adjusted to the darkness in the laundry room, but after carefully feeling her way along the counter top she located what she was looking for. Kneeling on the tiled floor, wincing a little because it was very cold, she opened the door of the drier and caught the garments that spilled out in her arms. They were dry but tangled.

She nodded encouragement to herself as she succeeded in detaching her jeans from a shirt—not hers. One second she was incuriously scanning the discreet hand-sewn designer label, the next she was responding to some inexplicable but strong impulse and pressing the fine cotton to her face. Her eyes closed as she inhaled the clean male scent that seemed impregnated into the creased fabric.

What am I doing?

Eyes wide in recognition of her truly bizarre behaviour, she stopped and dropped the offending garment. The other thing she had been doing was holding her breath; she released it now in a long shuddering sigh and, spotting some pink polka-dot fabric, reached for her sweater. The male sock it had wrapped itself around came with it.

On the plus side, she was not going to be tempted to sniff a sock.

‘Has it shrunk?’

Even had he possessed a working knowledge of care labels, Severo had had other things on his mind when he had piled the sodden garments into the machine earlier.

At the sound of his deep voice Neve released a startled gasp of shock and spun around, her bottom making contact with the floor with a thud as she lost her balance and tipped over backwards.

He grimaced, but all Neve could see from where she sat was a flash of white teeth bared, in her mind at least, in a heartless wolfish smirk.

‘That must have hurt.’

It had, and it was also very cold, but Neve was not about to admit it to the figure who was sitting on one of the bottom treads of the polished staircase in the adjoining room, his position offering him an excellent view of her furtive actions.

She held onto her sweater like a lifeline as she clutched it to her heaving chest and glared at him.

Her glittering electric-blue eyes reminded him of a Siamese cat an ex girlfriend had carried around in a designer bag, until the animal had scratched her.

Neve’s nails were neat and short and she wore no jewellery.

His ex had kept the jewelled collar she had made the poor animal wear, but got rid of the animal after the incident. It had scratched him too, displaying feline ingratitude when, saving it from the fate his girlfriend had in mind, Severo had gifted it to the cat-loving daughter of his secretary.

Neve found the contemplative smile that tugged at the corners of his sensual mouth unsettling. ‘What are you smiling at?’ she demanded spikily.

The image of a jewelled collar, sapphires to match her eyes set against her fair skin in his head, Severo produced one of his inimitable shrugs. ‘I’m a naturally smiley sort of guy.’

Neve snorted at this patent untruth and continued to view him with wary suspicion.

Just how long had he been there watching her anyhow?

She wasn’t aware she had voiced the question out loud until he leaned forward and, resting his elbows on his knees, propped his chin on one hand and drawled, ‘Long enough.’

Neve did not want to know if ‘long enough’ meant he had seen her breathing in the fragrance of his clothes like some demented bloodhound.

‘I got lonely.’ The mockery he had intended to inject into the statement failed to materialise as he was gripped by an urgent and compelling desire to hold, to touch, to taste.

A need that seemed to override every atom of common sense he possessed.

Neve, who was utterly oblivious to the strained edge in his cryptic response, lifted her chin, frowning as she struggled to stay focused and not allow herself to be fatally distracted by the aura of masculinity he projected.

She failed miserably. Just looking at him filled her with an inarticulate longing so intense that her bones ached with it.

Severo swallowed and, breathing through flared nostrils, exhaled slowly before asking quietly, ‘Are you going to tell me what is wrong now?’

She shrugged and, frustrated, he swore audibly in his native tongue as he moved to join her. ‘I don’t enjoy scenes, Neve.’

‘And you think I do?’ Over the past few months she had had a gut full of scenes; Hannah took delight in humiliating her, frequently venting her anger in public.

She was struggling to her feet when big hands closed around her waist and hauled her upright.

For the space of several seconds she was suspended two feet off the ground as if she weighed no more than a rag doll. While she was dangling in mid-air her eyes locked with his dark compelling stare.

She did not have time to either enjoy or reject the rush in her blood or the prickle under her skin before she was placed on her own feet. Earthbound at least physically, her head was still spinning, but then she had never had a head for heights or, as it turned out, tall, impossibly sexy Italians with dark fallen-angel faces. The faint buzzing in her head got louder as her glance slid to the sternly sensual outline of his mouth.

A dreamy expression filtered into her sapphire eyes as a dragging sensation low in her pelvis made her breath quicken. The thought popped fully formed into her head before she could stop it—with a mouth like that he had to be an excellent kisser.

Deeply ashamed that she could think such a thought when Hannah was out there hurt, or worse, she lowered her lashes in a protective sweep, feeling the heat climb up her neck until her cheeks burned with shame.

He gave a sigh and, studying her down-bent head, felt a sudden strong inclination to thread his fingers into that fiery mass and pull back her head to expose the lovely line of her smooth white throat.

She presented him her rigid back before bending to pick up the clothes from the drier.

Peachy was the most applicable word, he decided, studying the outline of her firm little bottom against the softly draped cloth. The knowledge she wore very little underneath drove him crazy.

She bent forward a little more and the fabric slid higher, revealing more of her slim, creamy smooth thighs. The pounding in his temples stepped up another notch as Severo watched the mental image of his fingers gliding across her soft warm belly, making his eyes darken to midnight black.

Having now reclaimed all her clothes, his lying on the floor in a crumpled heap, Neve turned with them bundled in her arms. She shot a look of anger up at him through her damp lashes.

Their glances connected and Neve, painfully conscious of things tightening and shifting deep inside her, swallowed.

‘If it was your child out there you wouldn’t say don’t think about her.’

He frowned, not understanding her reference. ‘I have no child.’

This was not a situation that Severo saw a need to alter any time soon. Call him old-fashioned but to his mind a man needed a wife to have a child, and to commit yourself to someone for the rest of your life was more than a leap in the dark; it was, to his way of thinking, a form of insanity!

He was not saying there were no happy marriages, but marriage was, when you viewed it logically, a lottery. The problem was that the participants rarely viewed it logically when they entered into it with all sorts of unreasonable and irrational expectations.

His dark features swam, blurred by tears, as Neve lifted her gaze to his face. ‘I know you were trying to help.’

The anger that had drawn the skin taut across his strong-boned features faded at the husky admission.

‘I’m not angry with you, I’m angry…actually,’ she corrected with a shudder of distaste, ‘I’m
disgusted
with me.’

His brows lifted at her choice of words. ‘I doubt very much that you have done anything so very disgusting,
cara
.’

Neve shook her head, too ashamed to look at him as she pleaded, ‘Don’t be nice to me!’ She swallowed and added in a small voice, ‘I don’t deserve it.’

‘I will not be nice to you,’ Severo agreed, contemplating her down-bent head with narrowed eyes as he added coolly, ‘But I will shake you if you don’t stop all this hair-shirt nonsense.’

This brought her head up with a jerk. It was not a threat of retribution she saw in his dark eyes, but something that approached tenderness.

‘You’re being nice!’ she accused.

Severo’s jaw tightened as he struggled to contain his growing frustration. ‘I could be a lot nicer if you allowed me.’

Too caught up in her orgy of self-recrimination Neve, barely registering his throaty comment, cut across him.

‘No, you don’t understand. I made that big song and dance about finding Hannah, and then I forgot her.’

‘Cut yourself some slack. You’re exhausted.’

Neve shook her head. ‘I forgot her because I can’t stop…’ She swallowed and lifted her tragically swimming blue eyes to his. ‘I was thinking about you,’ she revealed.

After a moment’s shock—this was the last thing he had expected to hear her say—Severo felt a surge of savage satisfaction.

Neve shook her head, dropped her head into her hands and let out a self-recriminatory growl of disgust. ‘And I don’t even like you.’

His dark, thickly lashed eyes glittered. ‘Liking is not necessary for what we are feeling,
cara
.’

Neve’s head slowly lifted. She sniffed and searched his face warily. What she saw there made her heart skip several beats. ‘
We?’

‘
Per amor di Dio
, you are not going to tell me that you do not know I badly want to get you into bed?’

The sexual buzz in the air hummed as their glances connected, blue on smouldering sloe black.

‘I was…I’m not, I don’t do one-night stands.’ Just looking at him made her bones ache with desire. ‘I shouldn’t even be thinking about it, not with Hannah out—’

He touched a silencing finger to her lips. ‘Thinking about sex does not mean you have stopped caring, or that you have become some selfish monster.’

Neve envied his confidence on this subject.

‘Thinking about sex,’ he confided huskily, ‘is as natural as having sex.’ But not nearly as satisfying.

Neve did not feel qualified to offer an opinion on a subject on which she was totally ignorant.

‘But I—’

‘I know.’

‘You do?’ she said, staring up into his face. He really was the most incredible-looking man, she thought, her gaze sliding over the carved planes and angles, fascinated by the length of his eyelashes, the razor-edged perfection of his cheekbones.

A man like this wants me?

‘You still feel married, but the fact is you are not. How long ago…six months, did you say?’

Neve, who had
never felt
married, nodded.

She wondered what he would say if she told him she had felt trapped.

Trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience.

‘And during that time there have been no men?’

Indignant colour rushed to her face. ‘Of course not!’ She was about to add ‘no men full stop ever’ when he spoke.

‘I too have had no sex for a similar period.’

‘
You!’

He accepted her amazement with a shrug of his magnificent shoulders. ‘It is not usual,’ he admitted. ‘And celibacy suits me no more than it does you. But there were reasons, which I will not bore you with,’ he added, giving just enough information to arouse her curiosity.

‘We have appetites, we find ourselves here alone, isolated—it is hardly surprising that we have been drawn to each other.’

‘You’re drawn to me?’

‘I want sex with you.’ A nerve clenched beside his jaw as he added starkly, ‘Badly.’

Did that mean he wanted bad sex or he wanted sex badly? The sound of his gravelly voice pitched low, almost a whisper, made the downy hairs on her skin stand on end, or was that the stroking movement of his thumb on her cheek?

‘This is wrong,’ she whispered, struggling with the last dregs of her strength to drag herself clear of the sensual vortex she felt herself being sucked into. ‘Hannah is out there somewhere and I can’t just—’

‘How will this hurt Hannah?’

‘It won’t, but—’

He pressed a finger to her mouth. ‘No buts. You do know you have the most incredible eyes.’ His big body was curved over her in an almost possessive manner, so close that she could feel the heat from his lean body, smell the soap he must have used earlier and, overlying that citrusy tang, the male musky scent of his body.

Neve knew her knees were shaking but she felt strangely disconnected from her body; she couldn’t tear her gaze free of the hypnotic stare of his heavy lidded eyes.

‘Nothing is going to happen if you don’t want it to,
cara
.’

She closed her eyes and shook her head. Hannah was her responsibility. James had asked her to look after his daughter and after all the things he had done for her it was not such a big ask. She had promised James she’d look after her and she had failed.

Severo felt her stiffen and swore softly under his breath. ‘Stop thinking.’

‘I c…can’t.’

‘Then think about my mouth,’ he said, still looking at her eyes.

‘
Your mouth?’
she echoed, her wide eyes automatically zeroing in on the sculpted sensual curve. They refused to move on. She just carried on staring. There was a distant buzzing in her head and the sound of someone breathing hard.