In Christofides' Keeping Read Free Page A

then someone had jostled her, heaving her forward and straight into the man’s arms, into hands which held her protectively against his hard body.
    Instantaneous heat had exploded throughout Gypsy’sbody at the sheer physicality of him. She’d looked up, utterly perplexed, and had sensed real fear…Not fear for her safety, but an irrational fear for her sanity. On a rising wave of panic she’d used her hands to push against his chest and stepped back, answering tightly, ‘I was just leaving, actually…’
    His big hands had tightened on her arms—bare because she was wearing a sleeveless vest. Her light jacket was tied about her waist, her bag slung across her chest. ‘You just got here.’
    He’d been watching her from the moment she’d arrived. Gypsy had felt weakness pervade her limbs to think of how she’d been dancing: as if no one was watching.
    And then he’d said, ‘If you insist on leaving, then I’m coming with you.’
    Gypsy had gasped at his cool and arrogant nerve. ‘But you can’t—you don’t even know me.’
    His jaw had been hard and implacable. Stern. ‘Then dance with me and I’ll let you go…’ The fact that he hadn’t been cajoling, hadn’t been drunkenly flirting, had imbued his words with something too compelling to resist.
    Gypsy’s focus came back to grim and grey reality as she was forced to stop by the traffic lights. She didn’t need to recall the pitifully pathetic attempt she’d put up to resist before agreeing—ostensibly to make him let her go.
    But it had had completely the opposite effect. After dancing with her so closely that her body had been dewed with sweat and heat and lust, he’d bent low to whisper against her ear. ‘Do you still want to leave alone?’ To her ongoing shame and mortification, she’d shaken her head, slowly and fatefully, her eyes glued to his in somekind of sick fascination. She’d wanted him with a hunger the like of which she’d never experienced in her life.
    She’d let him take her by the hand and lead her out of the club, seeing him as somehow symbolic of the cataclysmic events of the day that had just passed, during which she’d finally let go of everything that had bound her to her father.
    She’d allowed herself to be seduced…and then summarily dumped like a piece of trash the following morning. She remembered seeing the curt note he’d left, and how cheap she’d felt—as if all that was missing was a bundle of cash on the dresser.
    With an inarticulate sound of disgust at herself to be thinking of this now , the fact that she’d let a man like him—a powerful man just like her father —seduce her, Gypsy strode on across the road once the traffic had stopped. With any luck Rico Christofides would have become distracted by the vision of perfection he’d been dining with last night and forgotten all about her. But he remembered you… She realised that any other woman would be feeling an intensely feminine satisfaction that a man like him hadn’t forgotten her, but she just felt panicky. Why on earth did a man like him remember someone like her?
    A familiar sense of despair gripped Gypsy as she turned into her road, full of boarded-up houses and disaffected-looking youths loitering on steps. As much as she’d relished her freedom after her father’s death, and as much as she wouldn’t have minded living somewhere like this if she’d only had herself to worry about, it did bother her that her daughter’s first home was in such a decrepit part of London. Even the nearby children’s playground was vandalised beyond use, with just one pathetic swing left.
    She sighed heavily, very aware of the irony that, but for her hot-headedness and determination to dissociate herself from her father, she might have been living in much more upmarket surroundings. But then she knew she could never have lived off her father’s money—and she’d never have dreamed that she’d become pregnant after a one-night stand with a