The Dark Side of Desire Read Free

him.
    Tautly, she returned her gaze to the people she was with, and haltingly resumed her conversation. But her mind was in tumult, and when, some indeterminate time later, she heard her father’s voice directed at her, she welcomed the interruption to her mental consternation.
    ‘Flavia, my darling, over here a moment!’ he called in the doting, caressing voice he always used to her in public.
    Dutifully she made her way towards him, trying to put out of her head the image engraved on her retinas of the darkly disturbing man who had so riveted her. She could feel agitation increasing her heart-rate.
    As she approached her father the shifting pattern of guests moved, showing that there was someone standing beside him. Her agitation spiked erratically and her eyes flared involuntarily.
    It was the man who had drawn her eye—more than her eye—a moment ago. Numbly, she walked up to her father, who was smiling with a benign air. ‘Darling.’ Her father’shand reached for her arm and closed over it. ‘I’d like to introduce you—’
    Flavia let herself be pulled forward. Her mouth had gone dry again. She could hear her father saying something, but it was like a buzz in her ears. All she could focus on was the man standing with her father. The same tall, broad-shouldered, confident-stanced man she’d seen in the doorway.
    ‘Leon Maranz. And this is my daughter, Flavia.’
    Her father’s voice was affectionate and indulgent, but Flavia didn’t care. All she could do right now was gather her composure, which had no reason—
no reason
, she echoed vehemently—to go all to pieces like this.
    With palpable effort she made herself speak, forcing herself to say what was socially required. ‘How do you do, Mr Maranz?’ she said. Her tone was clipped, distant. Her acknowledging glance at him was the merest flicker, the barest minimum that social courtesy demanded.
    She wanted urgently to take a step back, to move away, keep her distance. Up close like this, the impression he’d made on her that she’d found so disturbing even from halfway across the room was a hundred times stronger. Just as before she took in height, easily topping six feet, and shoulders sheathed, like the rest of his lean body, with the material of a bespoke handmade suit that, like the pristine white shirt he wore, stretched across a torso that was honed and taut. He might scream ‘filthy rich’, but fat cat he was not …
    More like a sleek-coated jaguar …
    That strange, disturbing, subliminal shiver seemed to go through her again as the thought passed across the surface of her mind.
    ‘Ms Lassiter …’
    The voice acknowledging her clipped greeting was deep, almost a drawl. There was an accent to it, but not an identifiable one. She didn’t need a foreign name, or a foreign accent, to know that the last thing this lean, powerful, disturbing man was British. The natural olive hue of his tannedskin, the sloe-darkness of his eyes, the sable of his hair and the strong, striking features all told her that—had told her so right from the moment she’d set eyes on him.
    Her eyes flickered over him again, trying not to see him, trying to shut him out. She saw something glint briefly, swiftly gone, in his dark, black-lashed eyes—something that exacerbated the strange shiver that was still going through her.
    She fought for control.
Self
-control. This was ridiculous! Absurd to be so affected by a complete stranger—some rich, foreign business acquaintance of her father that she neither knew nor cared about, nor had any reason at all to be so … so …
reactive
to!
    Her spine stiffened and she could feel the motion drawing her body slightly away from Leon Maranz’s powerful orbit. Withdrawing a fraction—an essential fraction. Again, just for a barest moment, she thought she saw that dark glint in his eyes come again, and vanish.
    She took a breath, instinctively knowing she was being less than courteous but feeling an almost atavistic urge