Rival's Challenge. Эбби Грин

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СКАЧАТЬ was a tattoo high on the biceps of the arm nearest her. It looked like a coat of arms. He had the body of an elite athlete … or a warrior. Her impression of last night came back, even more forcibly in the light of dawn, gazing at his scarred body. Literally from neck to knee, there were all kinds of marks—healed cuts, stitch marks. Those mysterious circular shapes.

      There was a particularly ugly gash around one muscular thigh that looked as if it had healed badly.

      For the first time Orla had a very real sense of just how irresponsible she’d been. Maybe he was some kind of criminal? The thought sent shock waves through her body as she recalled how he’d been hidden in the shadows of the bar. How he’d come over and stopped her from leaving. How easily he’d enraptured her. She’d barely put up a modicum of resistance!

      She gazed around the room. Something cold went through her as she took in details. It looked lived in. Books. An old edition of Aesop’s Fables stood out oddly amongst them. Clothes. Paraphernalia. More than an overnight visitor like herself. She’d noticed it last night but hadn’t really taken it in.

      The assertion took root. He was living here.

      Who was this man? A sense of urgency gripped her now. She had to get away. She’d almost forgotten entirely why she was even in the Chatsfield Hotel. How could she have forgotten? She’d never allowed herself to get so sidetracked from work before.

      Ashamed and angry with herself for being so impetuous, so selfish, Orla slid off the bed as quietly as she could. To her intense relief, Marco didn’t move. She was terrified that he’d wake. That he’d open those dark compelling eyes and she’d be lost again. Orla picked up her dress and pulled it on with trembling hands.

      She found her bag. No matter how hard she searched though, she couldn’t find her panties. Marco moved minutely on the bed and Orla’s gaze froze on that huge rangy body. With sick fascination she couldn’t help looking at the most potently masculine part of him. Even in sleep he was awe-inspiring. He moved again and panic took her breath. She had to leave now before he woke. Wrenching her gaze away from the sleeping man, she turned and went to the bedroom door.

      Unable to help herself though, she stopped at the door and looked back. A fierce tug of something that felt awfully like regret made an emotion she didn’t like to name rise up within her. Before it could surface she clamped down on it and turned away again and left the suite. It was only as she was walking down the corridor that she realised she’d left her shoes and the belt of her dress behind, along with her missing panties.

      Exactly four hours later Orla was tapping her pen impatiently on the thick blotting paper pad that sat in front of her on the table. Her legs were crossed under the thick varnished oak table in the conference room and her leg jigged back and forth nervously. Even though the room was modestly sized, there any comparison to a normal hotel conference room ended. It exuded plush luxury. Everything one might require for a meeting was there, but discreetly tucked away so nothing jarred. Orla’s nose wrinkled. She’d noticed a scent in the air when she’d checked in yesterday but then had forgotten about it when she’d been so effectively distracted.

      But now she noticed it again and suspected waspishly that the Chatsfield Hotels must pump their signature scent throughout their premises, thereby increasing the whole Chatsfield experience. It was a smart strategy. Smell was well known to be one of the more powerfully evocative senses, and so by having a scent that linked people’s memories indelibly to you was prime subliminal advertising. She’d looked into it for their own hotels but it would have been too expensive.

      The Kennedy Group solicitor checked at his watch again and his counterpart across the table said smoothly, ‘I’m assured that Mr Chatsfield is on his way, and as I’ve said, he regrets keeping you waiting.’

      Orla huffed. She just bet he did. No doubt this was part of the strategy to let them know how weak they were and who was the power player here. It didn’t help, of course, that she felt woefully underprepared considering her very out of character sexual adventures last night with a complete stranger who could very well be some kind of underground criminal or a mercenary.

      When she thought of all those scars and markings on his body though, she didn’t feel scared so much as … hot.

      She imagined her wanton behaviour must be tattooed on her face like a beacon for all to see but she hoped that the effort she’d put into hiding the ravages of the night before had worked. She’d asked her assistant to buy her some shoes on her way over that morning, claiming some feeble excuse that the ones she’d brought wouldn’t go with the dark navy trouser suit she wore.

      So now she had brand-new shoes biting into her feet on top of everything else. She put down the pen and fiddled nervously with her white shirt and hoped that the frill detail down the centre where the buttons were didn’t appear too frivolous. She’d been more frivolous in the past twelve hours than in her entire life. And she was not frivolous. Her mother was frivolous. Flighty. Selfish. Orla was hard-working, serious. Frugal.

      She’d pulled her hair back into a sleek ponytail and her heavy fringe offered the faint illusion that she could hide behind it.

      Just then they heard voices out in the corridor and all the tiny hairs all over Orla’s body seemed to stand up on end for no apparent reason. The door opened slightly and a huge dark shape loomed just out of sight.

      Then the door opened fully and a man walked in with another man in tow. A cold seeping horror spread through Orla’s body. Shock knocked the breath out of her chest. She couldn’t believe her eyes. He was striding in now, clad in a pristine three-piece dark suit that hugged his huge muscular frame. His jaw was clean-shaven. He was stupendously gorgeous. Arresting. Sexual charisma was a tangible aura around him.

      Orla was dimly aware that her own assistant had straightened in the chair beside her. The unconscious action of a woman in the presence of a virile alpha male. In spite of being in her middle-aged years with a healthy brood of children and a loving husband.

      Orla felt a surge of something that made her want to turn to her assistant, one of her best friends, and snarl at her.

      And then the man’s eyes fell on the people waiting for him. And one in particular. Her. He stopped in his tracks on the other side of the table. That dark compelling gaze on hers. She saw the shock in their depths before it was quickly veiled.

      Her lungs burned because she hadn’t drawn a breath. A million things seemed to lodge in her throat and in her belly: mortification, embarrassment, anger. Shock. Desire.

      The Chatsfield solicitor was standing now and saying, ‘Antonio, I’d like you to meet Orla Kennedy of the Kennedy Group, her solicitor Tom Barry and her assistant, Susan White. Miss Kennedy, I’d like you to meet Antonio Chatsfield and his assistant, David Markusson.’

      Orla was dimly aware of the people either side of them both standing to reach across the table to shake one another’s hands. She was paralysed. Her mystery lover was Antonio Marco Chatsfield. The eldest son of the notorious Chatsfield family. She had read up on him prior to this meeting. Ironically he was almost the only one of whom there were no recent photos as he’d been in the army and then the secretive world of private security for years.

      If he’d joined the regular army Orla might have seen pictures. But he hadn’t. He’d joined the famed and mythic French Foreign Legion and had served with them for seven years. It was where one entered and assumed another identity. Highly secretive and closed to the outside world. Effectively Antonio Chatsfield had been a ghost until his recent return to the family fold.

      But СКАЧАТЬ