Stephanie Howard - The Colorado Countess

And it happened again, that jolt of sensation, that sense that suddenly her flesh was burning. Though she managed to control her reaction this time as she added, ‘Last time we met, I confess, I didn’t recognise you.’ She dropped her hand away, ignoring the fierce tingling. ‘The light in the restaurant wasn’t very good.’

Carrie wondered as she said it if that confession was good enough. Perhaps he would expect her to apologise more profusely, possibly even grovel a bit? But grovelling was out. She just wasn’t a groveller. And anyway, she reflected, she’d been perfectly entitled to make the comments she’d made the other night at the restaurant. He and his friends had behaved in a thoroughly arrogant manner.

‘Yes, the light was rather poor.’ Leone’s reaction was simply to smile. Then he let his eyes drift over her for a moment. ‘Now that I can see you properly I realise you’re twice as beautiful as I’d thought.’

‘Really?’ Carrie’s tone was flat and dismissive. Flattery will get you nowhere, it candidly told him. Whatever he’d come for, he wouldn’t butter her up that way—though privately she had to confess that she’d been having similar thoughts about him!

In the warm light of day he looked even more gorgeous, and he was immeasurably more attractive, though she would hardly have thought this possible, than in the photographs she had seen of him in various glossy magazines.

There was a wonderful raw vitality to him that, along with the wild black hair and the eyes that she could see now were the pefect blue of lapis lazuli, projected an aura of shimmering excitement. She felt a rush inside her and quickly suppressed it.

She said, turning away, waving at the group of cane chairs behind her, ‘Would you care to take a seat?’

Beware, she was thinking as a bell rang in her head. It had struck her in the restaurant that he was clearly a bit of a Romeo, but now that she knew who he was she knew also that she’d been right.

In those photographs one saw of him in the glossy magazines he was invariably accompanied by some pouting bimbette—always head-turningly beautiful and never the same one twice. And, though it seemed unlikely—what would he see in a girl like her who, after all, was definitely no bimbette, a very far cry from the type he went for?—it was possible that he had come here with seduction on his mind.

She darted a glance into the smoky blue eyes. Who could tell? Maybe His Highness felt like a change. Maybe he had grown a little bored with his habitual diet and fancied a working American girl instead. Perhaps he had come here to invite her to share the royal bed.

At that thought, to Carrie’s dismay, she felt another rush inside her, as though all her insides had turned to liquid honey. Shame on you, she told herself, and quickly suppressed it. No matter how gorgeous he was, he would have no luck with her. She wasn’t here to provide entertainment for any playboy count!

He was accepting her invitation and crossing the veranda to seat himself in the cane chair where she had been sitting earlier, the one next to the little table with the bowl of peaches. He stretched out his long legs. ‘You asked what I’m doing here.’ Then he held her eyes and smiled. ‘We have unfinished business.’

‘Unfinished business?’

What on earth did he mean by that? Carrie crossed to seat herself on one of the chairs opposite him, careful to arrange her legs at a safe distance from his, her feet crossed neatly at the ankles.

She looked him straight in the eye and raised one questioning eyebrow. ‘I wasn’t aware that you and I had any business to finish.’

‘Perhaps not, strictly speaking, business.’ He simply smiled at her reaction. I’m going to enjoy this, he was thinking. This one’s definitely no pushover. It would make a pleasant change from the easy victories he was used to.

He stretched his legs a little further and leaned back in his seat and watched her. ‘The other evening, you may remember, as I was leaving the restaurant, you came running after me, rather anxious to tell me something. I couldn’t stop at the time, but perhaps you’d like to tell me about it now?’

‘Is that why you’ve come here?’ Carrie frowned as she looked back at him. ‘Just to find out why I came running after you?’

She wasn’t sure if she believed him. At the time, she’d been quite certain that he’d heard perfectly well her angry protests about the bill.

But perhaps not, after all, and perhaps that really was why he’d come—to find out what she’d been saying and, possibly, to chastise her for her rudeness. Perhaps she’d been totally wrong about the seduction bit. Oh, well, she thought, thank heavens for that.

Another thought struck her. He must have gone to a fair bit of trouble in order to track her down like this. She delivered him a dry look. ‘How extraordinarily fastidious of you.’

‘I’m an extraordinarily fastidious chap.’ He smiled a lazy smile and cast a glance at the bowl of peaches at his elbow. ‘What lovely-looking peaches. Do you mind if I have one?’

Then, as she nodded and said, ‘Help yourself,’ he reached out and took one.

Carrie found herself watching his every move with fascination. He had the most beautiful tanned hands, with shapely, sensuous fingers, and there was something about the way he took hold of the peach and held it in the palm of his hand for a moment that made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Somehow, it was all too easy to imagine how it would feel to have those sensuous fingers caressing your naked flesh.

With a flash of horror at herself—what the devil was coming over her?—she pushed that thought away as he returned to their interrupted discourse and elaborated, ‘I like conclusions. I hate to leave things hanging in the air.’

Carrie took a deep breath. ‘Then I’ll tell you why I came running after you.’ Suddenly, she too was rather keen to reach a conclusion, and preferably one that involved him exiting with some rapidity. His presence was doing the most peculiar things to her brain!

Squaring her shoulders, she told him, ‘I was objecting to you paying my bill. There was no need for that. I’m capable of paying my own bills.’

Leone narrowed his eyes. ‘I thought that’s what you were saying. But you seemed so het up I wondered if I was mistaken.’

‘Of course I was het up. You had no business paying my bill for me.’

‘It was a gesture of reparation. Because you lost your table.’

‘Well, it was a gesture I didn’t appreciate. It simply added insult to injury.’ Carrie flushed in remembrance as she said it. For it really was true. She really had felt insulted. ‘I came after you to complain and to insist on paying you back.’

As she spoke she sat forward, intending to stand up. ‘In fact, I’ll take the opportunity to pay you back now.’ Over the past couple of days, the incident had continued to trouble her. How did you pay back a debt to the heir to the throne? Did you just stick some money in an envelope and send it off to the palace? How could you be certain he’d actually received it? She’d been planning on asking someone at the bank what she should do, but now the problem could be easily resolved.

She told him, ‘I’ll go and get the money right this minute.’

But Leone was waving to her to sit down. ‘You can give it to me before I leave.’ He took a bite of his peach. ‘That is, if you insist, which I’d rather you didn’t.’

‘Well, I’m afraid I definitely do.’

Carrie was half out of her chair and half in it. It went against the grain to obey that imperious little wave, for he was clearly far too used to people obeying him, but she had suddenly realised that to go indoors for her purse she would have to step over his outstretched legs. Unless, of course, he moved them, but she couldn’t bank on that.