Could she be more obvious? Melodie liked Ingrid, but at this moment she wanted to push her into the pool. Don’t leave me alone with him.
But the customer was always right, she reminded herself.
Scanning her gaze across the table, she looked for her phone and realized all she had was her credit card in the pocket of her sweater—which was dry, at least. Thank goodness she had that much.
“Sure,” Melodie said with a stiff smile, as if she was still wearing her conservative suit and had this situation fully under control.
“Bye!” Ingrid blew a kiss, grabbed her fiancé’s sleeve and hauled him away.
Blushing with embarrassed annoyance, Melodie contemplated whether to head into the kitchen and ask the chef to call her a cab or stick around to see if Roman wanted to finish kissing the daylights out of her.
Okay, her hormones cried excitedly.
She had to get out of the sun. She was blistering.
Moving to the bottom of the outside stairs, she wavered, but told herself she couldn’t leave without at least saying goodbye.
Yes, wanting to see him again is all about good manners, she mocked herself.
She climbed with trepidation, heart pounding as though she was descending the basement stairs in a thriller movie. So silly. He wasn’t going to attack her. That kiss had been a surprise, but invited and totally mutual. She had wallowed in it.
The part of her that wanted it to happen again and maybe go further was what scared the daylights out of her. She wasn’t that girl. She wasn’t blasé about intimacy. She wasn’t desperate or angry or deluding herself into love at first sight.
She was just really, really enticed by everything about him.
As she reached the top of the stairs, she grew cautious, feeling like a burglar, afraid she’d catch him indisposed.
“Roman?” she tried.
A very deliberate noise sounded, like someone striking a single key on a keyboard, hard. “Yes,” he said from his office.
“I’m afraid I have to ask you to call me a cab.” She tried to act casual as she moved forward. “I didn’t bring my phone and...”
She came even with the open doors of the office and discovered him standing before his clear screens. He had changed, dispensing with a shirt altogether, and now wore only a pair of drawstring linen pants that hung with rakish sexiness off his hips, accentuating his smooth, powerful back and the curve of his buttocks.
“I’d ask Ingrid for hers, but she and Huxley just left...” She could hardly speak. Her throat had gone dry.
He turned. His flat abs and nicely developed chest fixated her. Animal attraction gripped her.
Why? She didn’t understand it, and lifted her gaze to his, trying to work out where this attack of sexual craving was coming from.
He was scanning down her low neckline, taking in the outline of tiny triangles that barely covered her nipples beneath the translucent cotton, eyeballing the towel that she gripped around her hips.
His Adam’s apple worked. “Why are you here, Melodie?” His tone was graveled with intolerance and something almost erotic. Desire?
“I— What do you mean?”
“Here, in my home.” He joined her on the balcony, confrontational and ominous, arms and shoulders tanned and powerful, bare feet planted firmly. “Why are you here?”
“The wedding,” she stated, nerves strummed by the suspicion in his tone.
“Be honest.”
“What do you mean? I didn’t plan this,” she said, waving at her borrowed garb, suddenly realizing how it could look. But she hadn’t made this happen. She wasn’t using it as an excuse to stick around and throw herself at him. Not really. Okay, maybe she was throwing herself at him a little, but—
Oh, good grief. Could this get any worse?
“I didn’t bump you,” he bit out, eyes narrowing. “I didn’t even touch you.”
“No, I know. I was just...nervous,” she stammered, attacked by the same hit of discomfiture that had made her avoid him by the pool. She’d instinctively known his touch would have a devastating effect on her. She’d leaped back from his reaching hand as though he could have burned her. He had burned her. When he’d kissed her in the cabana, the contact had seared all the way to her soul.
“Nervous,” he charged, brows elevating as if he’d caught her out. “Why?”
Because he was a force, not a man. Her reaction to him was so strong it petrified her.
“You’re different,” she hazarded, but couldn’t explain it even to herself.
“How?”
Boy, he was like an extension of his technology with those robotic commands for more information.
She crossed her arms, annoyed, but Ingrid’s words were ringing in her ears. Was he reacting to her and feeling as out of sorts by this situation as she was?
The thought brought a soaring of buoyancy that she quickly tried to tame. A million things were running through her head, all her thoughts coming back to the fact that she was finally meeting a man who made her feel alive. She was interested and excited. Running away like a teenage girl too shy to speak to him would be silly. She’d kick herself forever if she did that. They were grown-ups. She was, by nature, an honest person.
“I find you attractive,” she admitted, and immediately blushed. It was as if she’d deliberately stepped onto a gangplank high over the concrete. Her footing seemed wobbly and threatened to drop her into a hard fall.
“Do you,” he disparaged.
His tone peeled a layer off her composure. She told herself she was being mature and didn’t have enough invested to have anything to lose, but her self-respect grew thin and strained. Bug eyes. Don’t talk to my friends. They all think you’re ugly anyway.
At the same time, she put herself into Roman’s shoes and thought she knew the source of his cynicism. “If you think I’m making some kind of awkward play for the rich guy, that’s not true.”
“You’d think I was just as attractive if I lived in a cardboard shack in a back alley?” he scoffed, arms folding and chin coming up with arrogant challenge.
Dear Lord, he was attractive. Like a Greek god with all that burnished skin over toned muscle, his aura one of superiority and might.
She almost blurted out how she’d walked away from the sort of wealth and education that would have made any job unnecessary for the rest of her life. If he only knew how much contempt she reserved for powerful men and how sorry she felt for the women who loved them...
But all that was behind her, and this moment was only about her and him. Who they were in this moment.
“I might,” she allowed with a weak shrug. This was a physical thing. She suspected no matter where she had encountered him, she would still be unable to control her response to him.
“You don’t even know me,” Roman derided. “Why—?” He bit off the word, looking out to the water, gripped by an angry frustration that went beyond his response to her. He closed his hand on the rail, trying to retain his grip on the situation.
But his gaze tracked unerringly back to Melodie. The low neckline of her shirt accentuated her slender neck and delicate collarbone, offering a teasing glimpse of the upper swells of her breasts. Her damp hair fell in waves