‘No coffee?’ He raised his dark brows in question as he joined her in the kitchen to find her just standing there. ‘Never mind, we’ll make some in a minute,’ he dismissed. ‘Perhaps you would like to have a look at the swimming pool first?’
Somewhere in this big, beautiful house was a swimming pool?
Well, why not? Dominick might not have made anywhere his permanent home the last twenty years, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t have every comfort in the numerous houses he did own.
‘Why not?’ She shrugged, needing time to collect her scattered thoughts, and a tour around the swimming pool was as good a way to spend them as any.
‘The rose garden,’ Dominick told her economically as they went outside. ‘The stables.’ He pointed over to the buildings some distance away from the house. ‘The swimming pool,’ he said with satisfaction as he took a key from his pocket and unlocked a door.
Surely swimming pool was too mundane a description of the domed building he took her into, she thought, gazing at the huge windows along each side, the big glass doors at the end wall that opened out onto a terrace, and the full-length pool lined with white and blue mosaics. The pool was surrounded by alabaster pillers, and Greek statues of partially dressed women, set amongst huge urns of overflowing flowers.
‘Someone else’s fantasy, not mine,’ Dominick drawled dryly as Kenzie turned slowly to look at him.
She could have guessed that; she didn’t think this romantic setting was Dominick’s taste at all.
But it was hers, she realized, the warm enchantment of the place definitely appealing to her. So much so that she longed to get her costume from her bag upstairs and immerse herself in the lovely cool water.
But not if that was going to mean Dominick joining her!
She was already aware of Dominick enough as it was, and had been so since the moment she had joined him in the car earlier. The darkness of his hair had still been damp from the shower he must have taken, his jaw clean-shaven, his muscled arms bare beneath the black polo shirt he wore, and his legs long in the black fitted denims.
Just looking at him had been enough to put all her senses on alert.
And that awareness had only deepened during the journey down here, an emotion she had hopefully kept hidden behind her dark sunglasses.
She drew in a ragged breath. ‘Perhaps we should go and have that coffee now?’ she prompted quietly, finding this setting far too—intimate, for comfort.
Dominick deliberately put his hand beneath her elbow on the pretext of helping her up the steps as they walked back to the house, and was rewarded by her huskily indrawn breath and the sudden stiffness of her arm before she pulled sharply away from him to walk several feet away.
He smiled to himself as her actions told him that, although Kenzie might try to deny it, even to herself, she still obviously desired him …
‘Only trying to be helpful,’ he said with a shrug.
He set about preparing the coffee himself once they reached the kitchen, and Kenzie was no longer able to hide her eyes behind dark glasses now that they were back inside the house. Her green eyes looked at him beneath her long, lowered lashes as she sat at the kitchen table watching him fill the coffee machine and set it on to percolate.
‘I hope you’re going to be more helpful when it comes to preparing dinner,’ he rebuked mockingly as he got out the mugs. ‘As I’m sure you remember, making coffee and warming ready-prepared meals in a microwave is as far as my culinary talents go!’
Kenzie did remember. She also knew that was because until the two of them had married Dominick had either eaten out or had a live-in cook who had prepared his meals when he had been at home. Any of his homes.
‘Where’s the staff, Dominick?’ she probed warily.
‘There isn’t any,’ he said, sounding unconcerned by her enquiry. ‘A woman from the village comes in to check on the place, and she put some flowers in vases and brought in some food for this weekend, but other than that there isn’t anyone.’
Meaning they were going to be completely alone here this weekend.
Surely flowers in vases and food for the weekend weren’t the details Dominick had told her he still had to finalize before confirming this weekend away?
And what were the two of them doing alone here for the weekend, anyway? What—
‘Why don’t you stop thinking so much and go and take a swim instead, Kenzie?’ Dominick cut into her thoughts harshly, his brown eyes hard and glittering. ‘And you accused me of having an overactive imagination!’ he added with obvious disgust. ‘I thought I had assured you I don’t take unwilling women to my bed!’
What about willing ones?
Kenzie was fast coming to the conclusion she wasn’t unwilling, and that she never would be where Dominick, the man she loved, was concerned.
Dominick had been her husband, the only man she had shared every intimacy with, and the more time she spent in his company, the harder she was finding it to separate that man she’d fallen for from the stranger he should be to her now.
Was this how all the other women she’d read about felt when they had been married to a man and were thinking about sleeping with him again? A certain curiosity? To see if there really was no last vestige of feeling, no hope, left between them?
She stood up abruptly. ‘I think I will go and take that swim, if you don’t mind.’ A plunge into cold water was probably exactly what she needed!
‘I was the one to suggest it, so why should I mind?’ Dominick shrugged, obviously still deeply annoyed. ‘The bedroom is the first door on the left at the top of the stairs,’ he called out to her as she turned and hurried from the room.
She was a fool, Kenzie berated herself as she ran up the stairs as if pursued.
Dominick was deliberately tangling her emotions up in knots and enjoying every moment of it, no doubt.
Although she wasn’t so sure that was all he was doing when she got to the bedroom and saw the huge four-poster bed that dominated the room. A huge king-size four-poster bed, with both their weekend bags sitting on top of the brocade cover!
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN Dominick entered the pool-house almost an hour later it was to find Kenzie floating on the water on one of the Lilos, her eyes closed as if in sleep, and her hands trailing gracefully in the water.
She had left her hair loose and it drifted in the water behind the Lilo, her body long and lithe in the red bathing costume that was somehow more tantalizing to the senses than a brief bikini could ever have been.
Dominick felt his body harden and pulse just looking at her.
She was beautiful, exquisitely beautiful, and his four months of celibacy only increased the ache he had to explore every inch of that beauty.
He stripped his clothes off with unhurried ease, dropping them to the floor before letting himself noiselessly down into the water. Then he swam across to where Kenzie floated in the deeper end of the pool.
Kenzie was dozing slightly, the calmness of the pool having soothed her, and her dreams were full of Dominick. Memories of being made love to by him, of making love to him in return, of the sure caresses of his hands on her body and on her breasts, trailing down to her ribcage to touch—
She wasn’t dreaming!
Her eyes opened wide in alarm as she realized the massaging hand was a reality, and she turned sharply to find Dominick in the water beside her, her sudden movement stilling his hand.
The emotion in the darkness of his eyes was unmistakable.
It