A world where men wore linen and silk and paid you clever compliments—not criticising you and then eyeing you with a kind of lazy watchfulness which had the ability to make you feel as flustered as a gauche young girl, and moving their legs as if to draw attention to their hard, muscular definition.
Quickly, she looked into the fire instead. ‘Ironic, really,’ she said, and thought how loud her voice sounded in the big, echoing room. ‘A house designed for people to escape to, and we can’t get out of it!’
‘It could be a lot worse,’ he said grimly. ‘At least we’re inside.’
Yes, they were. Alone. And Keri had been right—there were no rules in situation like this; they had to make them up as they went along. ‘So what are we going to do?’
He sat up. ‘Well, first we need to eat.’
‘Eat?’ she echoed blankly.
‘You do eat, I suppose?’ He watched her in the firelight. She was all bones, he thought—angles and shadows and long, slender legs, like a highly strung racehorse. The leather skirt clung to hips which were as narrow as a boy’s, and although she did have breasts, they were tiny, like a young girl’s. Jay liked his women curvy, with firm flesh that you could mould beneath the palms of your hands and soft hips that you could hold onto as you drove into them and catapulted them to pleasure. ‘Though not a lot, by the look of you.’
‘Oddly enough, the well-fed look isn’t in vogue at the moment,’ she said drily.
‘I’ve never really understood why.’
‘Because clothes look better on slender figures and that’s a fact.’
Jay gave a half-smile. ‘But nakedness looks better on a curvy figure, and that’s a fact!’
‘Well, thanks for bringing the conversation downmarket!’
He shrugged. She thought that nakedness was downmarket? ‘That wasn’t my intention.’
‘You’re saying you don’t like thin women?’
His eyes narrowed. ‘Careful, Keri,’ he said softly. ‘That sounds awfully like you’re fishing for a compliment, and I’d guess you get more than the average quota of those.’
Yes, she did. It was part of the whole package which came with the way she looked. Men liked to look at her and to be seen with her—from her teen years she had been familiar with the phrase ‘trophy girlfriend’. Yet beauty could be a double-edged sword. She had learned that, too. She earned her living through capitalising on her looks, then sometimes found herself wishing that people would see through to the person beneath—a person with all the insecurities of the next woman.
Defensively, she raked her hand back through her hair. ‘Not a lot of danger of that at the moment, I imagine. I must look like I’ve been dragged through several hedges backwards.’
Her hair had been rumpled by the beanie and she hadn’t brushed it, so it fell in ebony disarray over the pale silky sweater she wore. Her pale cheeks were tinged with roses, a combination of heat from the fire and the exertion of her walk through the snow. Yet she looked far more touchable and desirable than the ice princess in the diamonds and silver gown, who had pouted and swirled for the camera earlier.
‘If you must know, you look a little…wild,’ he said softly. ‘Like a wood nymph who has just been woken out of a long sleep.’
Keri had never in her life been called ‘wild’, neither had she been compared to a wood nymph, and the poetic imagery of his words was so seductively powerful that for a moment she felt a slow, pulsing glow of pleasure. Until she reminded herself that this was madness.
Complete and utter madness.
Models had notoriously fragile egos—inevitable in a job in which you were judged so critically on physical attributes alone—but surely hers wasn’t so bad that she needed praise from a house-breaking driver with a dark and dangerous air about him?
Suddenly she felt like a baby fish, swimming around in uncharted waters. ‘Didn’t you say something about food?’
‘Sure.’ He rose to his feet and wondered if she knew how cute she looked when she lost the frost princess look and let her lips soften like that. ‘How about a fair division of labour? I’ll go and see if I can find more fuel for the fire, and you can fix us a meal.’
‘You’ll be lucky!’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s just that I don’t cook. Can’t cook,’ she amended hurriedly as she saw him frown.
‘I’m not expecting you to spit-roast a pig to impress me,’ he bit back. ‘Just rustle up any old thing.’
Impress him? In your dreams. ‘There wasn’t,’ said Keri deliberately, ‘anything much in the way of food, save for a few old tins.’
‘Then get opening,’ said Jay, and threw another log on the fire.
But Keri quickly discovered that this was easier said than done, because the tin-opener looked as though it should have been in a museum.
Jay walked out into the kitchen to find her slamming a tin frustratedly onto the table. Great, he thought! Have a tantrum, why don’t you?
‘Having problems?’ he questioned laconically.
‘You try using it!’
He picked up the tin and read the label. His voice was cool. ‘Tinned peaches?’
‘Well, obviously there’s no fresh fruit—’
‘That wasn’t,’ he exploded, ‘what I meant!’
‘Well, there was nothing much else to choose from.’
‘If you think I’m existing on tinned peaches, then you are very much mistaken!’
‘Well, would you mind opening them for me?’
He dealt with the can quickly, and thrust it away as if it had been contaminated, then bent to examine the contents of the cupboard, rummaging around until he produced a sealed pack of dried spaghetti and a solitary tin of meat sauce, which he slammed down onto the worktop. ‘What’s wrong with these?’
She suspected that it was going to be a mistake to try to explain her dietary requirements, but she forged ahead anyway. ‘I don’t eat wheat,’ she said.
Jay shuddered. Bloody women and their food fads! Well, I do,’ he said coolly. ‘So would you mind heating these up?’ He saw her open her mouth to protest. ‘Unless you’d rather tend to the fire?’
She could see the mocking look of challenge in his eyes, as if he knew perfectly well that she had never ‘tended’ a fire in her life. Lots of people she knew hadn’t—so why was he trying to make her feel as though she was in some way inadequate? Just because he was the original cave-dweller, that didn’t mean the rest of the world had to follow suit. Very well, she would heat his revolting food for him. ‘I’ll cook.’
‘Good.’ And he turned and walked out of the kitchen without another word, thinking that she was undeniably beautiful but about as much use as an igloo in a heatwave. He cast an assessing eye over the fuel. There were a couple of cupboards he’d noticed upstairs; they might yield an armful of blankets which they would need to see the night through. The strain of spending a night closeted with her made a tiny muscle work at the side of his temple, and then he remembered the only room they hadn’t explored. Maybe the cellar might come up trumps. Something to ease the tension.
When he returned to the kitchen it was with a look of triumph on his face and a bottle of dusty wine in his hand. He put it carefully on the table.
‘Look