Office Scandals
Why hadn’t she seen it coming? The too-good-to-be-true offer … why hadn’t she smelt a rat?
Possibly because she wasn’t twisted and sneaky. She wanted to laugh or throw something at him or both. Instead she stood like a rabbit caught in the headlights, thinking, Any moment now I’ll wake up and realise this was all a dream—a nightmare.
‘So what do you think?’ he asked, gesturing towards the building behind them, but looking at Izzy.
She shivered at his voice. The dictionary would sound like an indecent proposal when read in that deep, husky, dangerously seductive timbre.
‘This is your house.’
‘I knew you’d get there eventually, cara.’ He watched the two spots of angry colour appear on her smooth cheeks. ‘So, what’s your opinion … professionally speaking? Does it have potential?’
‘Professionally?’ she echoed, thinking very unprofessional thoughts as she fixed him with a murderous glare. Just how long was he going to insult her by pretending this job offer was anything but an elaborate hoax?
‘I realise it’s all subjective, but do you like the place? Could you see yourself—?’
‘I can see myself pushing you off a cliff!’
She sucked in a deep breath, causing Roman’s glance to drop. Having a baby changed a woman’s body and though Izzy was lighter and more fragile-looking than he recalled, her breasts were definitely fuller. His eyes darkened as he remembered how one had fitted perfectly in the palm of his hand. Now they would overflow, the soft, silky, milk-pale flesh … He took a deep breath and pushed away the tactile image, but not before his body had hardened helplessly.
His sculpted lips twisted in a smile of self-mockery. For some reason around this woman his normal iron self-control took a holiday. What was it about her? It wasn’t as if she were overtly sexual. She had a great body, as he knew only too well, but she didn’t flaunt it. Look at the way she was dressed today, the shirt buttoned up to the neck, baggy creased trousers, and not a scrap of make-up. It was something elusive and intangible about her that, like smoke, defied his attempts to pin it down, control it.
As he scanned her tense features he wondered why he looked at her and saw something different from everyone else … How many times at that damned wedding had he heard her referred to as serene?
She had not been serene that night they had spent together. He saw an image of her sitting astride him, her smooth thighs locked tight around his hips, her head thrown back and the sheen of sweat making her pale skin glisten in the darkness. She didn’t look serene right now either; she looked like an exhausted young mother who had just received a nasty shock.
A beautiful but exhausted young mother. It would take more than lines of exhaustion bracketing her soft full mouth and dark shadows under her stunning blue eyes to diminish her looks.
He was in part at least responsible for putting the shadows there, he thought, and pushed away the stab of unaccustomed guilt. This was a situation that needed resolving. He had already missed out on the first precious months of his daughter’s life and he was not going to miss out on the next while they bargained out a deal.
‘Sorry, no cliff, but you could always improvise.’ She liked to project the cool and calm image, but he had caught her off guard and people revealed more of themselves when they were off guard.
Izzy felt her anger drain away and with it her taste for this conversation. After all the heart racing she felt horribly flat. ‘You got me here, but what I don’t understand is why you went to all this effort. Did you really expect me to stay? I’m taking Lily home, but don’t think I won’t send you the bill for this wasted journey, because I will!’
Even while she was hating him, at another level she was noticing the shadow of purple-black growth on his jaw and lean cheeks, the air of restless male vitality he exuded and how incredibly sexy he looked in the black jeans that clung to the long, muscular lines of his powerful thighs.
‘Why not look around first? You might like what you see,’ he drawled.
Izzy, refusing to acknowledge his reference to her drooling contemplation of his lean, muscle-packed body, met his knowing gaze with a defiant glare.
‘Think of my home as your own.’
Home had a permanent sound and Roman had never actually had a home as such. He had over the years owned various properties because he liked the space and privacy and hotel suites gave little of either.
The only home he had known had been the town house near the university where his parents had worked and lived during term time, but his recollection of it was dim. Vacations had been spent on various digs in various far-flung corners of the globe, and when he was small he had been dragged along but usually left in the hotel room.
Then as he’d got older and bigger he had spent his summers either staying with friends’ families or with a distant aunt of his father’s in Tuscany.
‘I thought you lived in Italy.’
‘I do for a large part of the year, but recent developments make it necessary for me to have a British base, and I have never thought that the city is the best place to bring up a child.’
Izzy maintained her scepticism and filed away the statement to deal with later. Any spare energy she had was being used to stay upright. ‘So you just popped out yesterday and bought this place?’
‘Obviously not.’
A tiny gurgling sound quickly escaped Izzy’s throat. The surprises just kept coming. Roll with the punches, Izzy, she told herself. Tomorrow this will all be a memory.
‘I’ve owned it for …’ he screwed up his eyes and glanced back at the building as he made the mental calculations ‘… two, almost three years now?’
Her sapphire eyes regarded him with disbelief. ‘You’re asking me?’ How could a person own somewhere like this and not know how long they’d owned it for? If she had needed proof that Roman Petrelli lived in a different world than she did, she had it.
‘Is it important? It’s structurally sound and actually in better condition than I thought it would be.’
‘I’m really not interested in your …’ She stopped and directed an incredulous look at his face. ‘You make it sound like you’ve never seen it before.’
‘I haven’t.’
‘You bought it without seeing it?’ The idea seemed utterly preposterous to Izzy, who felt herself sinking back into a numb state of disbelief.
‘It’s what I do. It was a speculative purchase—the price was good.’
In other words, she thought scornfully, he had profited from the misfortunes of others.
‘And I could afford to sit on it until the market—’
She cut across him, her voice flat as she asked, ‘Why?’
‘The place was bought at the height of the property boom by a—’
‘I mean, why am I here?’ Not that she would be for long. If it weren’t for Lily being asleep, she would already have been trotting down that winding driveway, but if it weren’t for Lily she wouldn’t be here anyway.
She glanced towards her sleeping daughter cocooned in the baby carrier and experienced the familiar, almost suffocating swell of love, so intense that she felt light-headed. Although the light-headed feeling might have something to do with the fact that she hadn’t been able to force down more than a couple of bites of the unappetising sandwiches she had bought on the train, and breakfast—God, that seemed like a lifetime ago—had been a slice of toast. She lifted a hand to her head and tried to remember if she had actually swallowed any of the toast.
‘You look as if you’re about to fall down.’
Izzy read the concern in his rough tone as criticism and her chin came up. She might look awful but it was damned rude of him to point it out.
And to add insult to injury he looked incredible, as always. He didn’t seem capable of looking bad, no matter what the situation.
A deep visceral longing she refused to acknowledge twisted itself like a vine around her resentment as she made the journey from his booted feet to his glossy head … Somewhere around his taut middle her fingertips began to tingle.
By the time she reached his face other parts tingled too, her cheeks were flagged with rosy heat and she was having a problem regulating her breathing. Long, lean and hard, he was more male than any man she had ever encountered.
She had always been dubious of the theory that in some throwback to a time of hunter-gatherers women chose an alpha male to father their children, but maybe …? Not that she had been looking for a father, just a lover, someone who could make her forget. Her blue eyes glazed as her thoughts drifted back.
And he had.
He had made her forget her name. She had taken pleasure from his body, revelling in a sensuality that she had not known she possessed. As the buried memories surfaced the past and present collided and for a moment she was looking at Roman and hearing, not the words coming from his lips, but a deep animal moan of pleasure that had been wrenched from his throat when she had curled her fingers around his silky, throbbing shaft …
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘I SAID are you all right?’
Izzy blinked. This time there were no extenuating circumstances; this was simply unvarnished lust. She dodged Roman’s gaze, denying the feelings, ignoring them in order to stay sane, stay safe.
‘Fine.’ Other than the ripples of hot sensation spreading outwards from a core that lay low in her belly. ‘Will you stop looking at me like I’m some sort of specimen you want to dissect and pick apart?’
‘If you’ll stop undressing me with your eyes.’
Shame washed through her like icy water. Instead of remembering the sex between them, she should be remembering the awful hollow feeling she had felt the morning after. She was never, ever going to feel like that again; she had learnt the hard way.
‘I was not!’
He arched a brow and grinned. ‘My mistake.’
Only it wasn’t; he knew it and so did she.
‘You wouldn’t look so hot either if you’d just travelled on public transport with a small child. I suppose you think it’s easy?’ She slung him a belligerent glare just in case he thought she was canvassing the sympathy vote.
‘I hadn’t thought about it.’ But he was now.
‘You have no idea, do you?’
The mild contempt in her superior little smile would have irritated him had he not realised she was right. He glanced down at the sleeping child. Izzy was the one who had spent the sleepless nights with Lily, which made it doubly frustrating because she was resisting his attempts to make up for that now.
He put the carrier carefully down on the ground. ‘Then tell me,’ he suggested. ‘I want to know.’
His focus had been totally on what he had missed out on, and not how different her life must be as a single mother from how it had been as a single girl. She had once been able to walk into a bar late at night and see someone she liked and now she could not just act on impulse. Maybe this was not such a bad thing. He had always considered himself pretty broad-minded and not a possessive man, but the idea of the mother of his child spending a night with a man, any man, filled him with a violent revulsion.
So far he had been preoccupied with resenting the time he had missed with his daughter and planning for the future; now for the first time he was realising how much her unplanned pregnancy must have changed her life too.
‘I should have sent a car for you. Whoa, easy, let me …’
‘What are you doing?’ she snarled, backing away, dragging the handle of the folded buggy with her as the wheels gouged grooves in the thick gravel before it was removed from her grip.
‘I thought you were going to faint.’ He remained ready to step in because she had definitely swayed.
She narrowed her eyes. ‘I don’t faint.’
Roman controlled his growing irritation with her belligerent independence with difficulty. ‘Fine, you don’t faint,’ he said, sounding bored. ‘But wouldn’t you be more comfortable continuing this conversation indoors, in the warm?’
‘I’m not a child. You don’t have to humour me.’ Her eyes slid from his. She had no idea what it was about this man that brought out the very worst in her. She took a deep breath. ‘All right.’
It was the practical response because she would not be comfortable continuing this conversation anywhere, but the wind had picked up while they were standing there and the chill would soon start to penetrate Lily’s cosy padded jacket. She bent forward to pick up the baby carrier.
‘Let me.’ He paused, his hand above her own.
Izzy’s fingers tightened over the carrier handle. After a brief internal struggle she stepped back, tucking her hands into her pockets. After all, it was only the carrier she was relinquishing to him. To make a fuss would only serve to highlight the insecurities she was struggling to hide. Roman’s next comment suggested she wasn’t doing this very well.
‘I’m not trying to steal her, just helping.’
She knew he was looking at her but with her jaw set she stomped up the steps, her eyes trained on her feet. ‘Steal her over my dead body.’ She paused as she entered the hallway, unable to repress a startled admiring intake of breath.
‘This place must have quite a history. Is the panelling original?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ His taste ran to the modern, and convenient. If they had been talking a private up-to-date gym, and the latest in computer technology, both items that this place lacked, Roman would have been interested.
‘But just think about all the people who have lived here over the centuries.’
‘I’m more interested in the plumbing, which is a bit basic. This way—the library is the second door on the left.’ He nodded and stood to one side to let her go ahead of him.
Izzy, who would have liked to linger in this magnificent space, followed his directions and found herself in another equally pleasing room. It was being warmed by a fire burning in the massive stone grate and was lined with a row of south-facing mullioned windows that filled it with light.
‘I thought nobody lived here,’ she said, staring at the book-filled shelves.
‘They came with the house.’ His gaze moved over the book-lined walls. It was actually quite a pleasant room. ‘Sit down, before you fall down.’
‘I’m …’ She responded to the pressure only because she couldn’t stop her knees from trembling.
She sat there, her arms primly folded in her lap, and watched as he set the baby carrier down carefully and strolled across the room to the console table where a tray of coffee and sandwiches had been placed.
He pushed down the plunger of the cafetière, turning his head to enquire, ‘Black or white?’
‘White, no sugar.’
He piled a plate with some sandwiches and carried them across to where she was sitting, along with her coffee.
Her skin, dotted with freckles that stood out clear against the pallor, had an almost transparent quality. ‘I don’t want to get blamed if you pass out.’
‘Are you going to stand over me while I drink this?’
‘Yes.’
Pursing her lips she picked up the china cup. ‘Anything for a quiet life.’
He laughed. ‘Not so that you’d notice … and a sandwich,’ he added when she put the cup back down.
Izzy slung him an irritated look, but she actually had three sandwiches, discovering she was starving. ‘Satisfied?’ she asked sarcastically as she pushed the plate away and sat back in her seat, folding one leg under herself. ‘Do you have to stand there like some guard dog?’
She kept her expression neutral as his narrowed dark eyes moved over her face, but it was a struggle.
He didn’t respond to her question, but his mouth did lift up at the corners as he flopped with languid grace into an armchair. Izzy felt the tension in her shoulders lessen as he stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed one ankle over the other. It was easy to feel at a disadvantage when he was towering over her.
She began to tap her toe on the polished wood floor as he set his elbows on the aged leather armrests.
‘Some people would call this kidnapping.’
‘A bit over the top, don’t you think?’ he drawled.
Her fury shifted up several notches as she folded her arms across her heaving chest. She sketched a smile and gave him a flat look.
‘Oh, yes, I’m definitely overreacting.’ The man was unbelievable, as well as being totally unscrupulous and manipulative.
His dark brows lifted. ‘The job is genuine. I offered it to you and you could have refused, but you took it.’ He rose in a graceful fluid motion and angled a questioning look at her face. ‘There was no coercion involved.’
Izzy wished he would stay in one place or at least keep sitting down; the man was like some prowling jungle cat, all restless energy and unpredictability. In some ways she would have felt more relaxed with the animal he reminded her of in the room rather than the man himself!
‘Genuine!’ She almost choked over the description. ‘But I wouldn’t have taken it if I’d known … known …’
‘That you’d be living with me?’
The helpful insertion drew a gasp of horror from Izzy. ‘Live with you?’ she echoed.
Roman laughed.
‘Or have you realised that this is too big a job for you?’
She struggled not to rise to the taunt and failed miserably. ‘I’m up to the job.’ It was her dream job and he knew it. She eyed him with seething dislike before squeezing her eyes closed as she made an attempt to regain some control of the situation and herself.
‘This is a totally preposterous idea.’ The tingling on her exposed nape made her open her eyes with a snap. Her radar had not misled her. He was close, too close, and crazily as she stared up into his deep-set, mesmerising eyes with those impossibly long lashes she wanted to step into his lean, hard body.
The effort not to made her shake, though she couldn’t be sure that was the only thing making her shake. The fact was, physically he was like a narcotic to her and she had a terrible suspicion that, like any addict, one taste and she’d need a regular fix.
She dragged her gaze from his mouth, where it had drifted. Don’t taste, or look.
‘I hoped I’d be able to like you because you’re Lily’s father, but—’
‘It is not necessary that you like your employer, and, speaking of Lily, it might be a good idea to keep your voice down if you don’t want to wake her.’ His sardonic mocking smile was briefly genuine as his glance touched the sleeping baby.
He was right, not that she’d admit it, but she did lower her voice as she snapped, ‘I’m not working for you, end of story. And as for live with you, I’d prefer to live with a snake …’ Izzy stopped. ‘You’re a cold, manipulative—’
‘That’s the façade. Deep down I’m soft and fluffy.’
She flung up her hands in a gesture of frustration and, fighting an urge to smile, sprang impetuously to her feet. She took a couple of steps towards the baby carrier before twisting back and facing him, her head thrown back, her eyes darkened to emotional navy as she glared at him.
‘Do you take anything seriously?’
As if a switch had been flicked his sardonic smile was gone. He said nothing while he watched her chestnut hair bounce and settle silkily around her shoulders, then took a deliberate step towards her.
Her feet wanted to shadow the action, but she forced herself to step forward, not back, determined not to allow herself to show … fear? No, that was the wrong word. What was she feeling? What were the emotions swirling through her bloodstream? Excitement, loathing … She lifted a hand to her head, the contradictory mix making her feel light-headed. It would serve him right if she fainted. But in reality the idea of showing any weakness in front of him was terrifying.
Izzy shook her head, tuning out the distracting internal dialogue to think past the buzz in her head.
‘I take being a father very seriously.’
His voice was low, almost soft, but the lack of emphasis only intensified the emotion behind the statement, causing Izzy to feel an irrational stab of guilt.
‘And I will not be sidelined or fobbed off.’
‘And I will not be pressured,’ she threw back. ‘This isn’t about you and what you want. It’s about what is best for Lily.’
‘And that’s you?’
‘I’m her mother.’
‘And that automatically makes you the best carer for her?’ He elevated a dark brow and, shaking his head slowly from side to side, clicked his tongue in mock disapproval. ‘Isn’t that a rather sexist attitude, Isabel?’
‘I’m not being sexist, I’m stating a fact—’ She stopped abruptly mid-flow, the colour draining from her face so dramatically that he thought she was about to pass out. ‘Are you suggesting …?’ Her voice faded as jumbled images of lawyers and court hearings flashed through her head.
‘Are you talking about contesting custody?’ Legal battles did not come cheap and Roman had a lot of money. In theory she had faith in the legal system, but the thought of losing Lily made her feel hollow and more afraid than she ever had been in her life.
He opened his mouth to say he’d do whatever it took to have his daughter, then met with her stark blue gaze. Suddenly emotion kicked him hard in the chest; she looked so damned vulnerable. This situation combined with a chronic lack of sleep might have made his temper short, but Roman had never been a bully.
‘No, I’m not.’
He had seen custody battles from a spectator’s viewpoint and found them petty and distasteful. To use a child as a bargaining chip had always struck him as being abhorrent and in his new role as father he found the practice even more disagreeable.
‘But I don’t want my daughter raised to think a man’s contribution to the bringing up of a child ends at the moment of insemination.’
Unable to shake the images of court battles, despite his denial, Izzy blinked up at him still feeling physically sick. ‘Neither do I.’ Her confusion was genuine.
He arched a satiric brow. ‘Really? I’d assumed that you’d be carrying on the family tradition. You’ve got to hand it to your mother—she did at least practise what she preached.’
‘If you want to know what I think, I suggest you ask me, not base your assumptions on the snatches of my mother’s books you read.’
‘Actually I read the entire book.’ And having done so he had been amazed that her daughter was as relatively normal as she seemed. The woman had been a total zealot.
From his expression she was assuming Roman was not a fan. ‘She wrote twenty.’
His lips tightened in a spasm of impatience. ‘I think we both know which book I’m talking about. Did she actually believe all that drivel she wrote or did she just have a mortgage to pay off?’
Izzy took a deep breath and calmed her breathing. While she did not agree with a lot of what her mother had preached, she was not about to stand there while he sneered. ‘My mother’s book is considered a modern classic. She sparked debate, which can only be a good thing.’ There was nothing her mother had liked more than a good argument.
‘Do you make a habit of rubbishing people who are no longer here to defend themselves?’
The contempt in her voice made him flush, the colour running up dark under his golden-toned skin. ‘So what did your mother teach you?’
She tilted her chin to a proud angle. ‘My mother brought me up to make my own decisions.’
‘Like having unprotected sex with a total stranger?’ He clenched his teeth, recognising the utter hypocrisy of his below-the-belt jibe the moment it left his lips. He still could not believe that he had been so criminally reckless; the only time in his life he had had unprotected sex had resulted in a child.
Izzy sucked in a breath. ‘If you’re trying to make me feel ashamed, don’t waste your breath.’ Her voice quivered and she bit her lip before husking, ‘I already do.’ She moved her head slowly from side to side in an attitude of bewilderment. ‘I can’t believe it was me that night.’