She hadn’t needed to be in this man’s company for two minutes to know that she should have heeded Kim’s warning earlier. To know that Darius would eat her alive. Totally possess her. Devour her. Inch by fleshly inch. Bit by arousing bit!
The shiver that now coursed down Andy’s spine was one of pleasurable anticipation. A longing, a yearning, for whatever Darius wanted to give her.
She couldn’t do this.
No doubt other woman, so many other women, would be flattered just to have attracted the attention of a man like Darius. Even more so, to know that he had deliberately engineered her presence in the Midas club tonight, before he had swooped down on her, his arousal now unmistakeable as he danced so close against her.
Other women would be flattered.
Andy couldn’t have the luxury of allowing herself to be flattered by the attentions of a man as dangerous as she considered Darius to be. Not when she knew it could ultimately lead nowhere.
Four years ago her dreams had been shattered. The dream she’d had since the age of five, of being a world-class ballerina, had come crashing down about her ears. Just as surely as she had come crashing down off the stage, shattering her hip and thigh bones.
It had taken over a year of operations and physical therapy for Andy to even be able to walk again, let alone be strong enough to rise up from beneath the misery threatening to bury her. But she had finally done it, had known she had no choice, that she needed to seriously consider her options for the future, now that she could no longer pursue her longed for career.
In the end she had realised that ballet was all she knew; she had won a scholarship to ballet school when she was eleven, had lived, eaten and breathed that world for so long, she couldn’t imagine ever cutting herself off from it completely.
Opening up her own dance studio, while making her painfully aware of her own inadequacies, had seemed the natural solution.
Even that had taken hard work, and Andy had studied hard to take her teaching certificate, before just six months ago finally managing to open her own dance studio. She still had a long way to go for it to be as successful as she wanted it to be.
She certainly didn’t have the time, or the emotional energy, to indulge in even a flirtation with a man like Darius. A man who she had no doubts broke women’s hearts on a regular basis. A man who would have made no secret of the fact that none of those women had meant any more to him than just another conquest, a beautiful body to be enjoyed in his bed, and totally forgotten about the following morning.
Except Andy’s body was no longer beautiful; how could it be, when it bore the physical scars from those many operations?
She pulled out of his arms the moment the song came to an end. ‘As I said, thank you for inviting us all up here, and for the champagne and the dance.’ She made her voice deliberately light, her smile bright and meaningless. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I see that my sister and brother-in-law are waiting for me at the table, no doubt so that we can all leave,’ she added wryly. Kim, at least, was glaring accusingly across the room at Darius.
He frowned. ‘It’s still early.’
‘Maybe for you.’ Andy nodded. ‘Some of us have to get up for work in the morning.’
‘Doing what?’
Her chin rose. ‘I now own my own dance studio, teaching ballet to children. Yes,’ she snapped as she saw his eyebrows rise, ‘a typical example of “those that can’t, teach”! Now, if you’ll excuse me?’
‘No!’
Andy looked up at him uncertainly as she heard vehemence in his tone. ‘No?’
It was one thing for Darius to have decided he couldn’t take his attraction towards this woman any further than he already had, and quite another for Miranda to decide to walk away from him.
Damn it, had he really become so arrogant that he couldn’t accept a woman’s lack of interest in him for what it was?
Hell, yes, he was that arrogant!
Most especially when he knew that Miranda wasn’t uninterested in him at all.
The sexual tension between the two of them had been palpable downstairs in the restaurant earlier, and it was even deeper now that they had actually talked, and then danced together.
‘Have dinner with me tomorrow night,’ Darius prompted abruptly as he turned to place a restraining hand on her arm before they could reach the table where her sister and brother-in-law were waiting for her.
‘I— What—? No!’ Miranda looked totally flustered by the invitation.
‘Why on earth not?’ He scowled darkly.
She gave an impatient shake of her head. ‘As I said, I’m grateful to you for inviting us up to your club, and—and everything else. It’s made my birthday even more special. I just— This— You and me— It isn’t going anywhere.’
‘I only invited you out to dinner, Miranda, not to become the mother of my children,’ he pointed out dryly.
The colour had first drained and then deepened in her cheeks. ‘And when was the last time you invited a woman out to dinner without the expectation of taking her to bed at the end of the evening?’ Her pointed chin rose challengingly as she looked up at him.
‘And what makes you so sure that isn’t going to happen?’ he purred.
Andy wasn’t sure of anything in regard to her undeniable and unexpected attraction to this man; that was the problem!
It would be too easy to become completely caught up in Darius, in his mesmerising attractiveness, in that arrogance and certainty, only to have all of that crash down about her ears when he realised, when he saw, her physical imperfections.
Physical imperfections, scars, which she had no doubts would illicit either pity or disgust. And Andy wanted neither of those things from Darius.
‘I said no, I won’t have dinner with you tomorrow, Mr Sterne. Or any other time,’ Andy added as she pointedly removed her arm from his grasp. ‘Excuse me.’ She didn’t wait for a response from him this time as she turned and walked away determinedly.
As she turned and walked away from the man she knew, instinctively, was capable of capturing her heart before just as quickly breaking it.
‘I THOUGHT I WOULD wait for your students to leave before I came in.’
Andy froze as Darius Sterne’s voice echoed across her otherwise empty dance studio, her gaze now riveted on the mirrored wall in front of her as she saw his reflection in the doorway behind her.
It had been a week since she had left him at Midas, and he looked as tall and darkly forbidding as ever. Today he wore a charcoal-coloured suit and paler grey shirt and tie, beneath a dark overcoat. The darkness of his hair was even longer than a week ago, and more tousled about those harshly patrician features, his topaz gaze fixed on her intently.
Andy’s last class of the afternoon had just left and she was currently standing beside the barre on the wall going through the routine of exercises and stretches that she did at the end of each day, before going up to her apartment to shower and change.
What on earth was Darius even doing here?
How was he here at all? Andy didn’t remember telling him where her dance studio was located, only that she had one.
He was Darius Sterne, and if he wanted to find out exactly where that dance studio was situated, then no doubt he could just instruct one of his employees to find out for him.
The real question was: why had he?
Andy