Really, she was being ridiculous! Lizzy sat upright. This was an interview, not a date. She would be fine. All she had to do was be cool and professional, and let Tye know that as far as she was concerned the kiss had been no more than a mildly unusual interviewing technique.
‘Cool…professional…’ she muttered to herself, only to find her eyes drawn back to her shoes.
No, they weren’t the right image! She would have to go and change. If she hurried, she could get up to her room and back before he arrived.
Jumping to her feet, Lizzy turned towards the lifts, but she had only taken three steps before the glass doors hissed open and Tye strode into the lobby.
The air leaked out of Lizzy’s lungs at the sight of him, and she stopped dead, conscious of a sense of recognition so sharp that it was almost a shock. It wasn’t that she hadn’t expected to recognise Tye, it was just that she hadn’t been prepared for him to seem quite so…familiar. It was as if she had always known that dark, guarded face, the watchful eyes, that air of barely leashed power.
Pausing in the middle of the lobby, Tye let his piercing gaze sweep round until he found Lizzy. Skewered by his eyes, she could only stand frozen by the fountain, her heart beating frantically in her throat as he came towards her.
‘Hi!’ She smiled nervously, wincing inwardly as she heard her own voice. Cool and professional? Yeah, sure!
Clearing her throat, Lizzy held out her hand. ‘Thank you for seeing me.’
An improvement. Composed, competent, in control. Well, fairly.
There was an odd look in Tye’s eyes as he inspected her, subjecting her to an intense but strangely impersonal scrutiny. His gaze travelled from the soft mass of blonde hair framing her face, with its tilting blue eyes and wide, humorous mouth, skimming over the vivid dress and down the long, slender legs, ending at the shoes with their jaunty feathers and gaudy jewels.
One corner of his mouth quirked, and he lifted his eyes to Lizzy’s. ‘It’s a pleasure,’ he said.
He took her hand, and the moment his fingers closed around hers Lizzy felt her composure wobble. His clasp was warm and firm, and the touch of his palm sent little tingles down her arm. All he had to do was shake her hand and she was drowning in giddying sensation, as if they’d kissed all over again. It wasn’t fair.
‘You’re very formal,’ said Tye, and his eyes glinted. ‘We kissed last time we met,’ he reminded her.
As if she would have forgotten. As if she couldn’t still feel his jacket beneath her fingers, his lips on hers, the deep, dangerous twist of excitement. As if she hadn’t relived every second of that kiss and how it had felt as his arm came round her like an iron bar and lifted her effortlessly against him.
Lizzy moistened her lips surreptitiously. ‘That was just because I wanted an interview,’ she said, raising her voice above the bumping and thumping of her heart.
She wished he would let her hand go, but when she tried to pull it away Tye’s grip tightened. ‘It worked,’ he said, a glimmer of amusement in his eyes as he drew her inexorably towards him, ‘but this time let’s kiss because we’re pleased to see each other.’
It was just like the wedding, only this time it was Tye who made the first move, Tye whose lips brushed the edge of her mouth and lingered against her cheek.
To anyone watching it must have seemed the coolest of kisses, but Lizzy’s senses were drumming beneath her skin, preternaturally alert to the smell of his hair, to the touch of his lips, to the feel of his cool, masculine skin, and she was suddenly overwhelmed by an inexplicable urge to lean into him, to turn her head and let their mouths meet, so that they could kiss just as they had kissed before.
For one dizzying moment she was sure that Tye was going to do just that, and she closed her eyes, bracing herself against the terrifying jolt of response, but after the tiniest of hesitations Tye lifted his head and let her go.
A polite kiss, a mere grazing of cheeks; that was all it had been. Lizzy’s eyes snapped open and her cheeks burned with a mixture of disappointment and fury at her own foolishness in thinking it might have been anything else.
Had Tye guessed how close she had come to making a complete idiot of herself? Lizzy slid a glance at him from under her lashes, but his expression was impossible to read. He looked as sardonic and indifferent as ever, she thought with a spurt of resentment. If the touch of their cheeks had set his senses spinning, he was giving absolutely no sign of it.
‘Come,’ said Tye, taking her arm. ‘We’ll have a drink before we go.’
He steered her towards a bar that was discreetly hidden behind lush potted palms, and Lizzy, burningly aware of the touch of his hand against her bare arm, let herself be led. Her legs felt ridiculously unsteady and she was glad to sink down into one of the plush armchairs.
A barman materialised in response to Tye’s barely lifted finger. ‘Champagne,’ ordered Tye without even looking at him.
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘Champagne?’ Lizzy made an enormous effort to pull herself together. Cool and professional, right?
Right.
‘What are we celebrating?’ she asked, hoping that she sounded like the kind of person who was only ever interviewed over a glass of champagne.
‘The fact that you came.’
Lizzy stared at him. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting him to say. Perhaps a billion-dollar deal closed, or a rival company crushed. Anything except what he had said.
Belatedly aware that her jaw was hanging open, Lizzy snapped her mouth shut. ‘Did you think that I wouldn’t?’ she asked cautiously.
Tye seemed to consider the matter. ‘I wasn’t sure,’ he said eventually.
‘I wouldn’t have kissed you if I hadn’t really wanted you to consider me for the job,’ Lizzy pointed out, and was then afraid that it might seem as if she was protesting just a little too much.
‘True.’ Tye was unperturbed by her unflattering motives. ‘But I did wonder if you might have changed your mind once I’d left. There must have been plenty of people there trying to persuade you that it would be a terrible mistake to have anything to do with me. Or are you going to tell me that nobody noticed the affectionate farewell you gave me?’
‘They noticed all right,’ said Lizzy with feeling, remembering the moment when she had turned from the woolshed doors to face the avid or outraged stares. ‘Mum wasn’t very pleased.’
That was understatement of the year. Her mother hadn’t actually seen the kiss, but she had heard plenty about it and she had been appalled.
‘It was bad enough him turning up at the wedding at all, without you kissing him! What on earth possessed you to make such an exhibition of yourself?’
‘I felt sorry for him,’ Lizzy had said.
She had been strangely reluctant to admit the truth about that kiss. If she’d told her mother that she had had to kiss Tye to get him to consider her for a job, it would only have added to his reputation, and that was bad enough as it was. Lizzy couldn’t think of any good reason why Tye’s reputation should matter to her; she just knew that she didn’t want to be responsible for blackening it any further.
‘Sorry for Tye Gibson? You must be the first person ever to feel that!’
That was probably true, Lizzy had thought wryly. It wasn’t easy to pity a man like Tye. He was too tough, too competent, too indifferent to what people thought of him.
‘He wasn’t exactly made to feel welcome,’ she’d tried to explain to her mother. ‘I felt as if I ought to make an effort to talk to him. We did