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‘Engaged?’ Cleo queried incredulously, twisting her head round to focus on Ari’s granite-hard profile.
‘So, you see, I’m notplayingwith Cleo. This is the real thing,’ Ari breathed curtly, closing a taut hand over Cleo’s and urging her away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘HAVEYOUGONECRAZY?’ Cleo hissed at Ari as he led her round the corner of the crowded street and into the comfort of the limousine.
‘No. Hopefully I’ve got him off your back nowandwithout having to brawl with him in the street,’ Ari parried without an ounce of regret. ‘You shouldn’t see him again on Saturday when he can behave like that. I don’t trust him—’
‘You shouldn’t have told him we’re engaged, and you can’t tell me who I can and cannot see!’ Cleo slung back at him sharply.
‘He was drunk. You couldn’t handle him,’ Ari countered.
‘He was drunk because he’s landed a job and he was celebrating,’ Cleo retorted. ‘Believe me, that’s not the norm for him. He wouldn’t last long in the bar trade if it were.’
‘I don’t trust him with you,’ Ari responded with finality. ‘He lacks boundaries. Although you’ve never been with the guy, he’s already making you very uncomfortable. It’s none of his business if you choose to be with me. It’s time someonemadehim back off.’
‘Notyou!’ Cleo lanced back. ‘That’s just salting the wound. You’re rich, you’re good-looking, you’re successful, everything most men want to be. Have some compassion.’
Ari’s beautifully shaped mouth quirked and he studied her with glittering tawny eyes full of naked appreciation. ‘“Everything most men want to be”?Really?’ he queried with amusement.
Cleo flushed to the roots of her hair and punched his shoulder in mock retaliation. ‘You know what I mean... What the heck possessed you to tell him that we were engaged?’
Ari lifted his chin. ‘It struck me as a good idea.’
‘Well, it was the worst idea imaginable! Liam will tell my mother and then I’ll have to come up with a whole story about how we broke up and everyone will feel sorry for me and assume you did the dumping,’ she complained bitterly.
‘But what if we don’t break up? What if wemakeit real?’ Ari murmured silkily just as the limo drew up outside the town house.
Cleo frowned and fell silent as she preceded him into the house. ‘What were you trying to say in the car?’ she prompted.
Ari pressed open a door into a room obviously used as an office. Lined with pale bookshelves and dominated by a desk, it had a contemporary aspect very different from the rest of the house and she suspected that Ari must already have had it redecorated. Now he leant back against the solid desk, his lean muscular body taut, sunlight behind him gleaming over his blue-black hair and bronzed skin, his spectacular eyes vibrant.
‘Close the door,’ he instructed.
‘Ari...’ she began impatiently.
‘I’m asking you to marry me. No more pretending, no need for us to fake or lie about anything.’
Cleo was stunned by the concept. Her upper lip lifted as though she was about to speak and then met with her lower again as she thought better of the hasty refusal ready to tumble off her tongue. ‘But you’re not in love with me... Why would you ask me to marry you?’ she asked stiffly, as though she were afraid that he could be pranking her for some nefarious reason of his own.
‘I don’t do the love thing...orthe love thing doesn’t do me,’ Ari murmured calmly. ‘I’m almost twenty-nine and I’ve never been in love. I’ve met women I like more than others, but I’ve never wanted to keep one of them. But you’re different.’
‘How am I different?’ Cleo pressed tightly, and she felt as if her world were riding on his response. His opinion shouldn’t matter that much to her, but she was discovering that it did—indeed, that his opinion mattered very much.
Ari had grown up expecting to fall in love, but it had never happened to him. He had decided that possibly he was too grounded to focus that amount of emotion on another human being. Or perhaps it was because he had never witnessed that kind of love in his adolescence. His parents had not been demonstrative with each other, although he had read love in the looks they often exchanged. Now he was asking Cleo to marry him, and even as he did it he was shocked that he was doing it. Yet the commitment he was suggesting didn’t scare him in the slightest, which he marvelled at because he had always thought that even thinking about marriage would condemn him to sleepless nights worrying that he was making a mistake. But then Cleowasdifferent in his eyes from other women.
‘You get on great with Lucy and she needs you. I can be a lot of things for her benefit, but I can’t be a mother,’ Ari intoned wryly. ‘She deserves a mother after her poor start in life, and even though she’s not your child, I believe you are capable of loving her. Not every woman could offer that to a little girl who is not her own. The minute I decided that I wanted to adopt Lucy, I realised that I would have to be very careful about any woman I brought into her life.’
Cleo focused her attention on a corner of the desk to the far side of him and her eyes prickled with stinging tears. He was giving her the truth, but it was a truth that could only hurt. He was asking her to marry him for his niece’s benefit. He needed a wife, whom he could trust to be kind to Lucy. And on one score he was correct. She was very capable of loving that little girl and would be eager to take up the opportunity, if only it didn’t entail marrying a man who didn’t loveher.
‘I’m quite sure that there are other women who would be equally caring with Lucy,’ Cleo declared, striving to rise above her instincts. Instincts that cruelly told her to immediately accept Ari’s proposal because she wasn’t likely to get him any other way. And she was realising for the first time that she wanted Ari, like really, really,reallywanted Ari for much more than a casual affair. When had that happened? When had feelings crept in to weaken her objectivity? Why had she kidded herself that she could stay uninvolved when every scrap of evidence had indicated the opposite?
‘No doubt there are other women, but I doubt if any of them would attract me to the extent that you do. We share dynamite chemistry—’
‘And you would marry me just for that?’ Cleo questioned in disbelief.
‘Sexual compatibility is pretty high up my list of non-negotiable necessities,’ Ari acknowledged without embarrassment. ‘I have no plans to play away outside my marriage like my father did. No child of mine will ever have to deal with the situation I’ve found myself in.’
