‘I never saw it in London,’ she said after a moment, remembering that while he’d been in London he had driven himself.
He turned his head to look at her, dark eyes glowing through the dimness of the car’s interior. ‘It was there. You just did not bother to look for it.’
Maybe she didn’t, but… ‘It can’t have been as obvious there,’ Natasha insisted. ‘I was used to some measure of security when Cindy was performing but never anything like this—and none at all with Rico.’ She then added with a frown, ‘Though that seems odd now when I think about who Rico is and—’
He moved, it was barely a shift of his body but it brought Natasha’s face around to catch the flash to hit his eyes.
‘What?’ she demanded.
‘Don’t ever compare me with him,’ he iced out.
Her blue eyes widened. ‘But I wasn’t—’
‘You were about to,’ he cut in. ‘I am Leo Christakis, and this is my life you are entering into with all its restrictions and privileges. Rico was nothing.’ He flicked a long-fingered hand as if swatting his stepbrother away. ‘Merely a freeloader who liked to ride on my coat-tails—’
Natasha went perfectly pale. ‘Don’t say that,’ she whispered.
‘Why not when it is the truth?’ he declared with no idea how he had just devastated her by using the same withering words to describe Rico as her sister had used to describe her. ‘His name is Rico Giannetti, though he prefers to think of himself as a Christakis, but he has no Christakis blood to back it up and no Christakis money to call his own,’ he laid out with contempt. ‘He held an office in every Christakis building because it was good for his image to appear as if he was worthy of his place there, but he never worked in it—not in the true meaning of the word anyway.’ The cynical bite to his voice sent Natasha even paler as his implication hit home. ‘He drew a salary he did little to earn and spent it on whatever took his fancy while robbing me blind behind my back as I picked up the real tabs on his extravagant tastes,’ he continued on. ‘He is a hard-drinking, hard-playing liar to himself and to everyone connected to him, including you, his betrayed, play-acting betrothed.’
Shaken by his contemptuous barrage, ‘Ex-betrothed,’ Natasha husked out unsteadily.
‘Ex-everything as far as you are concerned,’ he pronounced. ‘From this day on he is out of the picture and I am the only man that matters to you.’
He had demanded that she put her family out of her head, now he was insisting she put Rico out of her head. ‘Yes, sir,’ she snapped out impulsively, wishing she could put him out of her head, too!
A black frown scored his hard features at her mocking tone. ‘I thought a few home truths at this point will help to keep this relationship honest.’
‘Honest?’ Natasha almost hyperventilated on the breath she took. ‘What you’re really doing here is letting me know that you expect to control even my thoughts!’
Impatience hit his eyes. ‘I do not expect that—’
‘You do expect that!’
Leo raked out an angry sigh. ‘I will not have Rico’s name thrown in my face by you every five minutes!’
Natasha swung round on him in full choking fury. ‘I did not throw his name at you—you battered me with it!’
‘That was not my intention,’ he returned stiffly.
Twisting on the seat, she glared at the glazed partition. ‘You’re no better than Rico, just different than Rico in the way you treat people—women!’ she shook out with a withering glance across the width of the seat. ‘Since we are driving along here like a presidential cavalcade, your loathsome arrogance is one fault I will let you have, but your—’
‘Loathsome—again?’ he mocked lazily.
It blew the lid off what was left of her temper. ‘And utterly, pathetically jealous of Rico!’
Silence clattered down all around them with the same effect as crashing cymbals hitting the crescendo note and making Natasha’s heart begin to race. She could not believe she had just said that. Daring another glance at Leo, she could see him looking back at her like a man-eating shark about to go on the attack, and now she couldn’t even breathe because the tension between them was sucking what was left of the oxygen out of the luxury confines of the car.
He reacted with a lightning strike. For such a big man he moved with a lithe, silent stealth and the next thing she knew she was being hauled through the space separating them to land in an inelegant sprawl of body and limbs across his lap. Their eyes clashed, his glittering with golden sparks of anger she hadn’t seen in them before. Hers were too wide and too blue and—scared of what was suddenly fizzing in her blood.
She had to lick her suddenly very dry lips just to manage a husky, ‘I didn’t really m-mean—’
Then came the kiss—the hot and passionate ambush that silenced her attempt to retract what she’d said, and flung her instead into fight with lips and tongues and hands that did not know how to stay still. His breath seared her mouth and a set of long fingers was clamped to the rounded shape of her hip, her own fingers applying digging pressure to whatever part of his anatomy they could reach as their mouths strained and fought. The motion of the car and the fact that they were even in one became lost in the uneven fight. She wriggled against him. His hand maintained its controlling clamp. She felt her fingernails clawing at his nape and the rock-solid moulding of his chest so firmly imprinted against his shirt.
He loved it. She caught his tense hiss of pleasure in her mouth and felt a tight, pleasurable shudder attack his front, the powerful surge of his response making itself felt against the thigh he held pressed into his lap. Then his hand was sliding beneath her skirt and stroking the pale skin at the top of her thigh where her stockings did not reach. If he stroked any higher, he was going to discover that she was wearing a thong and she increased her struggle to get free before he reached there, lost the fight, and a quiver of agonising embarrassment sent her kiss-fighting mouth very still.
‘Well, what do we have here?’ he paused to murmur slowly, long fingers stroking over a smoothly rounded, satin-skinned buttock and crippling Natasha’s ability to breathe. ‘The prim disguise is really beginning to wear very thin the more I dig beneath it.’
‘Shut up,’ she choked, eyes squeezed tight shut now. She was never going to wear a thong ever again, she vowed hectically.
He removed his hand and her eyes shot open because she needed to know what he was going to do next, and found herself staring into his mockingly smiling face. The anger had gone and his lazily, sensual male confidence was firmly back in place.
‘Any more hidden treasures left for me to discover?’ He arched a sleek, dark, quizzing eyebrow.
‘No,’ Natasha mumbled, which made him release a dark, husky laugh that shimmered right through her as potently as everything else about him did.
Then he wasn’t smiling. ‘OK, so I am jealous of Rico where you are concerned.’ He really shocked her by admitting it. ‘So take my advice and don’t bring him into our bed or I will not be responsible for the way I react.’
Before she could respond to that totally unexpected back-down, he was lowering his head again and crushing her mouth. How long this kiss went on Natasha had no idea, because she just lost herself in the warm, slow, heady promise it was offering.
The car began to slow.
Both felt the change in speed