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‘Is this leading up to another criticism of my lack of presence on the scene?’
‘No!’
Sophie meant that, and her voice registered surprise. Their eyes tangled and she felt something disturbing flutter inside her, like soft butterfly wings, loosening the muscles between her thighs and making her nipples pinch.
It was a physical, sexual reaction, and for a few seconds she was so horrified and shocked by it that she struggled to get her thoughts together.
This was raw. This was different from objectively looking at him and acknowledging that he was stupidly beautiful.
This wasscary. Because it wreaked havoc with her self-control, and her self-control was something she took great pride in. She refused to be vulnerable to all those things that could hurt, refused to let go. And this squishy sensation rippling through her felt like letting go and she hated it.
‘Anyway,’ she said hurriedly, ‘I would say that he’s a lot less stressed that he was even a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Most people like to share their burdens with other people or, even better, have someone else take charge in difficult situations. My father might be opinionated, and he may resent the fact that I’ve taken over, but he’s human, and he’ll be relieved that I’m picking up the baton and running with it.’
‘I guess you’re right...’
Sophie’s thoughts drifted to her adolescence, and for a few seconds she tried to imagine what it might have been like if someone else had picked up the baton and run with it.
How different would her life have been?
Without the responsibilities she had shouldered, would she have had the chance to enjoy her teenage years free from gnawing anxiety?
Would that have made her a different person?
Or would she still have been the responsible, sensible one? Was that just the legacy of her birth order? She was the older of two siblings...the one who was always destined to be responsible, whatever the circumstances.
‘Penny for them.’
‘Sorry?’
Sophie surfaced to find Alessio’s dark eyes fixed thoughtfully on her. The overhead lights had been dimmed earlier, on Leonard’s orders. They were enjoying a very tasty meal indeed, he’d said. Not trying on clothes in a fitting room where you needed fluorescent lighting to spot every crease in a pair of badly made trousers.
Alessio had left them dimmed, and now the shadows and angles of his face seemed even more forbidding and outrageously sexy.
He was as bronzed as she was fair, and she wondered what their bodies would look like next to one another.
With no clothes on.
She so pale and he so much darker.
The very thought brought hectic colour to her cheeks, and for a couple of seconds she completely forgot what she’d been thinking, and what he had said to interrupt her thoughts.
Her heart sped up, pumping hot blood urgently through her veins, and that squishy feeling coalesced into a need that bloomed inside her. She felt her panties dampen and that itch between her thighs...the tingle there that made her want to pass out.
‘You’re a million miles away. What’s going through your head? Negative thoughts about me?’
‘It’s not all about you,’ Sophie said sharply—more sharply than she’d intended. Because her thoughts were all still over the place, making her uncomfortable and defensive with the man who had put them there. ‘As a matter of fact I was thinking... I was thinking...’
‘Yes? I’m all ears. Tell me what you were thinking.’
He sat forward, and just like that he closed the distance between them, so that she could almost feel the heat emanating from his long, muscular body.
She couldn’t escape the suffocating effect he was having on her.
If she kept her eyes on his face she was all too conscious of the depth of his eyes, the lush thickness of eyelashes any woman would have given her eye teeth for, the sensuous mould of his mouth, of the lips that had covered hers...
Looking just a bit lower and the strain of his jeans across his thighs made her feel giddy.
