Any Man Of Mine: A Waiting Game / A Loving Arrangement. Diana Palmer

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СКАЧАТЬ memory. She was used to Mandy getting the phone, making coffee, serving meals, but this was Mandy’s day off, and it took her five rings to realize it. She dragged herself to the end table and picked up the receiver.

      “Hello?” she murmured, stifling a yawn.

      “That kind of day, was it?” came a deeply amused voice from the other end of the line. “Get on something pretty and I’ll treat you to dinner at The Palace.” She felt her spirits revive. “Oh, Nicholas, we haven’t gone there in months! And they make the most marvelous chocolate mousse.”

      “Can you make it in half an hour?” he asked impatiently. “I’ve got to catch the eleven o’clock plane to Paris, and we won’t have much time.”

      “Has anyone ever told you that people who don’t slow down get ulcers?” she asked, exasperated.

      “They would have to catch up with me first,” he told her. “Half an hour.”

      She stared at the dead receiver. “Nicholas is an enigma,” she muttered as she slipped into a long green velvet gown with a deep V neckline and a side slit. He was every inch the high-powered executive, and he had millions, but he wouldn’t delegate any responsibilities. If a deal had to be closed, he’d close it. If there was a labor relations problem at one of his plants, he’d negotiate it. If there was an innovative process being presented, he’d go to see it. He pushed himself relentlessly even now, a habit left over from those first horrible weeks after Misty’s death. He wouldn’t slow down; he wouldn’t take time off. It was as if he was afraid to stop, because if he did, he’d have to think and that wouldn’t please him. He had too much that he wanted to forget.

      Keena was dressed and waiting when the doorbell rang. She opened the door and mentally caught her breath at the sight of Nicholas in evening clothes, as she always did. With his dark hair and eyes, his bronzed complexion in that leonine face, his towering, wrestler’s physique, he was the stuff of which feminine dreams were made. And perhaps if Keena hadn’t been so wary of men, so unforgetting of that humiliating adolescent romance and the humiliating incident that had followed it, she might have fallen head over heels in love with him. But she’d seen Nicholas in action, and she knew the effect his dark charm had on women. She’d seen his occasional conquest swoon, fall, succumb and be heartlessly discarded too many times to risk joining that queue herself. Nicholas had found safety in numbers since Misty’s death, and he was apparently risking no emotional involvement by confining himself to one woman. Keena preferred the position of being just Nicholas’s friend and confidante. It was much safer than being added to the notches on his bedpost.

      His own eyes were busy, sliding up and down her body with his usual careless appraisal.

      “Delightful,” he said with a cool smile. “Shall we go?”

      “I’m starved,” she told him as they got into the empty elevator and Nicholas pressed the main floor button. “I feel as if I haven’t eaten for days.”

      “You look it, too,” he growled, eyeing her from his lounging position against the rail. “Why the hell don’t you give up that diet and put some meat on your bones?”

      “Look who’s talking!” She glared. “It would take a forklift to get you up a hill!”

      He moved toward her with a dark look in his eyes under that jutting brow. “Think it’s fat, do you?” he taunted. He caught her hands and dragged them to his shoulders. “Feel. Show me any flab.”

      It was like discovering fine wine where she had expected to taste water. She’d never noticed just how broad Nicholas’s chest and shoulders really were, or how the scent of tobacco and expensive cologne clung to him. She’d never noticed how chiseled his mouth was, or how exciting it could be to look into his dark eyes at close range. It had been safer not to notice. But her hands touched him through the smooth fabric of his evening jacket and lingered there when she felt the hard muscles under it.

      “Well?” he asked, a strange huskiness in his deep voice as he looked down at her.

      “You... I never realized how strong you were,” she stammered. She looked up into his eyes and time seemed to stand still for a space of seconds while they looked at each other, discovering facial features, textures, expressions, in an unfamiliar intimacy, in the quiet confines of the elevator.

      It took several seconds for them to realize that the elevator had stopped and the door had opened. Self-conscious and a little clumsy, Keena managed to get out a little ahead of him and lead the way to the front of the building where his white Rolls-Royce waited with Jimson at the wheel, staring straight ahead stoically.

      “Doesn’t Jimson ever get a day off?” she asked Nicholas when they were inside the car with the glass partition up, giving them total privacy.

      “Not lately. I’ve been working twenty-five-hour days,” he replied.

      “I’ll never get used to this car,” she sighed, leaning her dark head contentedly back against the leather as he was doing.

      “What’s wrong with it?” he asked curtly.

      “Nothing! It’s just that few people ever get to ride around in a Rolls—white, no less.” She laughed.

      He half turned in the seat, one big arm over the back of it, his eyes gleaming, though his smile had not completely disappeared. “And what’s wrong with that?” he asked with deliberate slowness.

      She braved his glittering eyes. Why did he look so suddenly predatory to her? So dark and menacing? “Nothing—except that I feel as if I were on display every time I ride in it. That’s all.”

      “You should be on display, Keena.” Something in the way he fairly growled her name sent a warm, unfamiliar tingle up her spine.

      “Because I’m rich and famous now, you mean, and everyone back in Ashton would hardly recognize this Keena Whitman?” She laughed shortly, her words underscored with a note of self-derision.

      Her answer hadn’t pleased him. It was in the hard lines of his face, the narrowing of his eyes. “No, not at all, though you needn’t take that little-Miss-Nobody-from-Ashton tone with me. You know what you are and what you’ve accomplished. And that you’re a very beautiful woman,” he said in that hard, matter-of-fact way of his.

      If he had been looking at her, then he would have seen the shock register on every feature. Keena was suddenly thankful for the darkness between them and the sudden blare of a horn that had broken Nicholas’s steady gaze for just that instant.

      “Damn city traffic,” he muttered half to himself. When he turned back to her, it was with a faintly puzzled expression. “Surely, you’ve had men tell you that before, that you’re beautiful? Scores of them, I’m afraid.” His words broke off abruptly, his gaze dropping to her slender body, outlining it with a masculine approval that was new and frightening.

      “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked in a faint whisper.

      His dark, quiet eyes eased back up to meet hers. “I was wondering what it would feel like to make love to you.”

       CHAPTER TWO

      HER TOES TINGLED. She’d never felt such a wild surge of emotion СКАЧАТЬ