Chapter Three #4
Surprisingly, Nelios didn’t grill her over dinner. But she saw his gaze repeatedly linger on the phone she’d placed on the dining table. Etiquette-wise, it wasn’t strictly polite, but Vayle hadn’t wanted to miss a call.
He waited until she was done with her decadent dessert before he struck. ‘Have you been in touch with Agnes to report your progress?’
‘What progress? All you’ve done is threaten to have me thrown in jail.’ She bit the inside of her cheek, because that wasn’t strictly true. Yes he’d threatened her, but he’d also given her a choice. And she’d accepted. ‘What I mean is—’
‘I’m well aware of what you mean. You’re much more comfortable listing all the bad things perpetrated on you and blithely ignoring the good.’
She flushed, then was inexorably drawn to study him when she heard the underlying bleakness in his voice. But his face was shut tighter than Fort Knox. And, since she was swimming in a shallow pond of her own disingenuousness, she remained silent.
Until, ‘Answer the question, Vayle,’ he insisted firmly.
And, yes, this time she couldn’t deny that she shivered solely because of the way he said her name with a gravelly bite that seemed to rake over her jittery senses, sending waves of heat and awareness through her body.
‘No, I haven’t spoken to your…to Agnes. She texted. I tried calling back but there was no answer.’
His gaze bore into her. ‘What exactly did the text say?’
‘To find out how I am because she hadn’t heard from me and is worried,’ she answered unequivocally.
Something darted across his face, hot and fast as quicksilver. It was indecipherable then gone…but not forgotten. It was visceral enough to strike her hard in the middle.
‘That wasn’t all, though, was it?’ came the hard, sardonic rejoinder. As if he needed there to be more.
She lifted her eyebrows. ‘Because you want there to be? Something that justifies your beliefs?’
He didn’t rise to her bait, merely levelled his incisive gaze on her and waited until it wore her down, leaving her no choice but to respond.
‘Yes; she also asked if I had any updates.’
And then that mocking smile appeared. It was full-bodied, labelling her ten kinds of a fool for believing that the warmth and affection she’d treasured for years had been genuine.
That the surrogate mother—who’d kept her aloft when she’d thought she would drown in her father’s cruelty and disregard, both before and after his diagnosis—was not who Vayle believed her to be.
That his smile was devastatingly gorgeous shouldn’t have factored in at all.
And yet her runaway heartbeat howled and said otherwise—that her inability to look away from his magnificent face or to control the sizzling heat rising within her was a big problem.
Huge. Because she intensely disliked the narrative Nelios was attempting to force her to face.
And he warped her brain with this chemistry between them that she couldn’t deny.
Tossing her napkin on the table, she snatched up her phone and marched into the living room. There she stopped and spun round…to catch his fiery gaze on her backside.
Her heated demand dried up. What the hell had she been about to say?
So she stood there, caught in that insane vortex of awareness as he slowly rose and sauntered towards her.
A clutch of words peppered her sluggish brain as she tried to stop staring at his raw, masculine body. ‘Where do you want me?’ she blurted.
His stride hitched a tiny fraction, and he inhaled sharply. ‘What?’
Oh, yes. She truly wished for a lethal lightning bolt instantly to destroy her.
‘For your interrogation. Where should I…can I…sit?’ she amended.
‘Dangling you from the ceiling by your fingernails so soon after dinner is too tedious, so by all means, yes, sit down, Vayle.’ He gestured at the nearest group of sofas.
She chose the furthest sofa, ignoring the twitch of mockery on his face as he sat at the other end, suavely crossing one leg over the other.
The butler approached and Nelios turned to her. ‘Night cap?’
She started to shake her head, then at the last moment she nodded. ‘Please.’ Glancing at the butler, she smiled. ‘Surprise me.’ She’d learned very early that hospitality staff loved demonstrating their skills and, from the butler’s pleased nod, she’d guessed right.
He returned minutes later with an amber-coloured drink for Nelios and a bright-yellow drink for her. He hovered as she took a sip, blinked and took a larger sip.
‘This is lovely; thank you so much.’
His broader smile warmed her like the clementine-based alcoholic drink in her hand.
‘If you’re quite done?’ Nelios drawled.
She eyed him as the butler left. ‘Clearly you don’t believe that when you make people feel valued they repay you in ways you might not expect.’
He set his glass on his raised knee. ‘Another lesson from…those people?’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’
He looked poleaxed for a flash, then openly sceptical. ‘Next you’re going to tell me they hung the moon,’ he drawled in a voice coated with acid.
‘I’m not going to volunteer anything you don’t emphatically ask for, because I’ll be wasting my breath. So…’ she took another sip of her drink then cradled her glass in her palm ‘…fire away.’