He felt his body tightening, felt the tide that had been running stronger and stronger all evening reach that point non plus that was unbearable to endure—all courtesy of one, single word.
No.
The lift doors sliced open as the lift arrived, and he stepped forward.
And halted.
He frowned, struck by a memory.
‘No’ had not been the word she had used. She had used a quite different word.
Slowly his hand came up to halt the doors closing again, forcing them back with unnoticed strength so that they juddered apart. Then he stepped back onto the marble floor.
Lissa Stephens hadn’t said no to him. She had said, ‘I can’t.’
He stilled. Slowly, the white rage of frustration and denial and the fury born of something he knew he had to push aside drained from him.
All logic, all reason had left him—swept away on that tide. He took a harsh, heavy breath, standing immobile by the lift. That tide which had swept away everything else except the single, overriding imperative of the evening.
But that hadn’t been the purpose of this evening. This evening had been about something quite different.
Emotion drained from him to be replaced by bleak, belated recognition. In his head sounded yet again the low, strained sound of her voice.
‘I can’t …’
And she had said exactly why that was so. Because of the existence of ‘someone very important to me.’
Like a squad of booted soldiers the words marched back inside his head from which that swirling, overpowering tide had swept them. But they were back now, with their heavy, booted tread that trampled on anything and everything in their way.
Logic, reason, sense.
With bleak, controlled acquiescence he let them in.
Lissa Stephens had turned him down. Turned him down because she had commitments elsewhere to someone ‘very important’ to her. And that someone was Armand. And that she had turned him, Xavier, down tonight meant only one thing—Lissa Stephens’s loyalty was to his brother.
Did she love Armand? Was her commitment to him out of love, or because a rich man was offering her marriage? Offering her an escape from the casino, from that squalid place she lived, from the poverty of her life?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t know.
For all that he had found out about her, for all the time he had spent with her, talked with her, she was still a mystery—a contradiction. A woman possessed of rare beauty, as well as—so his conversation with her this evening had amply demonstrated—clear intelligence. And yet she chose to work where she did. Was prepared to make herself look like a tart night after night, and yet had walked out of her job when she was required to do anything more than look like one. A woman who accepted an invitation to dine with him, a wealthy man—and yet who refused to let him buy her a dress to go with the invitation. A woman who gazed deep into his eyes as if she were prepared to drown herself in them—and yet who said ‘I can’t’ when it came to anything more.
Well, he thought, with a bitter, bleak weariness, it was his turn to say I can’t.
He could do no more. He accepted it. He had done everything in his power to discover the true worth, or lack thereof, of the woman his brother said he wanted to marry.
A hollowing, savage humour stabbed through him. But it had no humour in it—only a bleak, bitter irony that cut to the very quick of him. In the end he had discovered only one thing about her that he knew to be true. And it was a knowledge that mocked him.
Cursed him.
As it would curse any man who shared his fate, a fate he would wish on no man, but which had fallen upon himself.
Because the one, overwhelming truth that he knew about Lissa Stephens was that he desired her. Wanted her.
For himself.
The woman his brother wanted to marry.
Forbidden desire.
A curse from hell itself.
CHAPTER SIX
LISSA sat at the table, very still. The champagne, the wine, all the magic of the evening had drained out of her, emptying out of her like water down a well.
She hadn’t thought it would be like this. So brutal.
But then—she gave a twist to her mouth—she hadn’t thought at all, had she?
She’d sat here, floating on air, entranced by the magic of the evening, and had never thought of how it must end.
Because she hadn’t wanted it to end. She knew that this was all there could be, and she hadn’t wanted it to end, had wanted it to go on for ever and ever.
But it hadn’t. Of course it hadn’t. This had been a time out, that was all, a brief, magical time out. A gift that would at the stroke of midnight dissolve, leaving nothing behind but memories.
She felt her throat tighten. She had known the evening would end, but not like this.
She heard again, felt again, the savage civility of his voice, felt his absolute repudiation of her, dropping her hand as if it were rotting meat.
Did he have to be so brutal?
She felt tears prick in the back of her eyes and blinked, angry with herself.
Oh, come on. Wise up. Why the Little Miss Sensitive act suddenly? she berated herself. He’d said ‘dinner’, but obviously he’d had more in mind than that, and he hadn’t liked being turned down. Men never liked being turned down—and a man like him probably never had been. That was why he’d stormed off like that. She’d caught him in the most delicate part of male anatomy: his ego.
Her face puckered. But he wasn’t like that. He hadn’t been all evening. He had been wonderful. Attentive, charming, engaging, with that dry, ironic humour that brought a glint to his eye and a smile to her mouth. He had been the perfect dinner companion, and as for everything else—well, that had just been magic, the only word for it.
Until that brutal departure. Her throat tightened again, and she took a jerky sip of cooling coffee, forcing it down to try and open her throat.
It had been so out of place, that flare of icy anger. She took a painful breath. Surely a man as sophisticated, as obviously experienced with women as he was, could have managed the scene more gracefully? Even if he’d smarted at her rebuff, he need not have shown it—he could have extricated himself with élan, with a smooth word, affecting regret, with sophistication and charm. But he hadn’t. Obviously when it came to bedtime, Xavier Lauran, for all his cool sophistication, all the seductive magic of his eyes, his voice, was just another man who thought the price of a meal included a woman for the night.
He’d promised her ‘just dinner’ and like a fool she’d believed him.
She slid out from her seat. Presumably the waiting staff would take care of petty concerns like the bill, and although there was someone instantly there to help pull the table back sufficiently and bid her good-night, she knew it was pretty obvious that her escort had stormed out on her. Well. She gave a silent, heavy sigh. What was that to her? Nothing. Just as it was nothing that Xavier Lauran had proved, after all, to be a man who for all his expensive packaging still operated on the same sordid, commercial premise that any of the punters at the casino did when they thought they could indulge in some ‘private hire’ with the hostesses.
The only difference was, they were more