Lucy Ellis - The Man She Shouldn't Crave

Rose forgot about the Sazanov brothers. Forgot about the embarrassment of him reading her silly blog. She even—almost—forgot about how he had bossed her around in her own home, in her underwear. Was he saying he was attracted to her? He’d wanted to see her again?

‘You wanted to see me,’ she said, hoping the thrill that gave her didn’t show—or her subsequent embarrassment.

‘Da.’ He didn’t look embarrassed at all. ‘I meet beautiful women all the time. Many give me their contact details. You did so in an unusual way.’

Rose’s excitement dimmed. So much for being special.

‘Then, of course, I learned you had done the same with each and every member of the team. I was—disappointed.’

‘Right.’ She struggled to find something amusing to quip back at him, but she was feeling her own disappointment.

‘I was concerned as to your motives, and when Security located you I decided to handle it myself.’ A half-smile tugged at that firm mouth of his. ‘As I said, my judgement was somewhat clouded by other considerations. The main one being I wanted to see you again.’

Rose gripped her champagne flute. ‘Well, there is that,’ she said faintly.

‘It’s fortunate I did,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have liked a member of my security team coming to your door tonight, finding you in that—what do you call it?’

Rose’s mouth felt dry and her head a little light.

‘Nightie,’ she said airlessly.

‘You wear that to bed? Alone?’

Someone had turned up the temperature in the room. Rose jerked her glass to her lips. ‘Mmm …’ She fudged her answer and swallowed.

‘Such a waste.’ He was watching her with obvious interest, his eyes dark and moving over her flushed face.

Rose almost dropped her glass. Liquid splashed. She looked about for a cloth but Plato was already reaching across, blotting the tablecloth, his eyes never leaving hers.

‘I didn’t ask you,’ he said, in that deep accented voice that thrilled her to her toes. ‘Are you unattached? Is there someone?’

For almost two years she had been the most unattached woman in Toronto, and right up until this very moment she had been happy to keep it that way. ‘No, there’s no one.’ Why was her voice all breathless and girly? It made her sound like such a push-over.

For this man I could very well be a pushover .

‘I celebrate that news,’ he said with a slight smile.

He was so foreign . So dangerous to her equilibrium. One moment they were having a business dinner, and suddenly it was all sex. Yes, it was definitely about sex.

She told herself she hoped she wasn’t such a ninny that she was going to fall for all that macho bunkum about her nightie and being alone in her bed and needing a man …

But she was very much afraid she was.

Oh, for land sakes pull yourself together, Rose .

‘The reason you’re here isn’t because I wrote my cell number on your hand,’ she said defensively. ‘You got ticked off because I did the same for each and every one of your precious players.’

He chuckled, and the sound was a lovely rumble in his chest that had Rose tilting forward to be closer to it. Self-preservation should have seen her putting some space between them, because right about now she was becoming aware she felt a little out of control with this man. It was as if she kept slip-sliding towards him, and she didn’t really understand why this was so.

‘I’m here for the same reason why every one of those players was given strict instructions not to use that number,’ he replied easily. ‘You’re an incredibly beautiful woman.’

She was? Rose struggled to find something to answer that, but her mind was spinning like a wheel without grip on incredibly beautiful . Trying to focus, she felt her brain slowly start to function again, and she … Hang on, what did he mean the players had been instructed not to use her number?

‘You use your femininity to your advantage,’ he observed lazily, as if this pleased him. His lashes were at half-mast. Everything about him reeked sexual confidence. ‘I’m not complaining.’

Pushing through the dozens of messages the woman in her was reacting to, as if sexual switches were being thrown here, there and everywhere, Rose grasped onto the one thing she knew was true. She most certainly did not play the womanly wiles card! And if the players couldn’t use her number this afternoon had been a waste of time. She was back at square one.

‘You told the players not to call me?’

He shrugged. ‘This cannot come as a surprise, Rose.’

Yes, it did. It did come as a surprise. ‘Then what’s this supposed to be? Why did you bring me here?’

‘I came to your house tonight to warn you off.’ He spoke as if she were making him repeat the obvious. ‘When I discovered you were not what I imagined you to be I reconsidered my options. I chose not to waste the evening.’

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