The Chatsfield Collection Books 1-8. Annie West

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СКАЧАТЬ bought, and went over to the bed. He was lying on his stomach with just a cotton sheet covering him from the hips down. She could see the outline of his splayed legs, one hitched a little higher than the other, the taut curve of his buttocks making something in her belly feel wobbly.

      She reached out and gently brushed the damp hair back off his forehead. He didn’t seem to register the contact. His breathing was deep and even, his mouth relaxed in sleep.

      She waited a moment and then trailed her fingers down his cheek to see if his stubble was as prickly as it looked. It was. It scraped against the pads of her fingertips like sandpaper, making her insides give another little quiver.

      She curled her fingers into a ball to stop them exploring any further and moved away from the bed. She let out a sigh as she looked at the chaos of the suite. She could call housekeeping but that would mean disturbing him. She could just as easily grab fresh towels and sheets from one of the housemaids and do a quiet tidy up and keep an eye on him while she was at it.

      She gathered up the balls of paper and placed them in the wastepaper basket. But then her curiosity got the better of her and she bent down and took one out again and unfurled it. It was a rough sketch of one of the villas they had walked by the previous day.

      She picked up another ball of paper and found another sketch of one of the cafés on the harbourfront. She knitted her brows as she took out yet another ball of paper. Each unfinished sketch seemed to tell her more and more about Lucca rather than the sketch itself. It was like peeling back the layers of an onion to find a treasure buried inside. She had never thought of him as an artist, and a remarkably talented one at that. The sketches might be rough but she knew enough about art to know he knew what he was doing with each stroke of the pencil against the paper. The detail and perspective were amazing. It was as if he was looking at the world with an intense focus, narrowed down to a minute degree to capture the hidden secrets of his subject.

      But there was one more drawing.

      Not scrunched up in a discarded ball on the floor, but on a sketchpad on the walnut desk over by the window. The pencil he had been using was lying crosswise on the pad, and an eraser was next to it surrounded by little rubber shavings. The antique chair was pushed back at a skewed angle as if he had got up in a hurry and hadn’t had time to straighten it.

      Lottie looked down at the drawing, her heart doing a little skip of recognition when she saw an image of herself picking flowers in the palace gardens. It was a work in progress, but even so, Lucca had captured something about that frozen moment in time, built it into a story that made her look ethereal, even beautiful.

      She had posed for official portraits before and had hated the stiff, formal results. She had always looked stuck-up and starchy.

      No one had captured her.

      She glanced at the bed. He was still soundly asleep, his chest rising and falling in slow deep breaths. Something prickly and tight in her chest loosened. Smoothed out. Flowed.

       Escaped.

      Lottie drew in a ragged breath and moved away from the desk. She set about briskly putting the rest of the suite to order. Work was a great panacea for wild imaginings that should not be allowed free. Ever. She was not to think of Lucca Chatsfield as anything other than an outrageous flirt, a layabout libertine who was only here to make trouble for her because that’s what he did best. He courted trouble. He relished in it. The press documented it in colourful, lurid detail.

      He was one big flashing human headline.

      He wasn’t the sort of man she should be thinking about. He certainly wasn’t the sort of man she should be kissing, or touching, or sharing a continent with, let alone a penthouse suite, even if it had a hundred separate rooms.

      And he definitely wasn’t the sort of man she should be fantasising about making love with, even though her body reacted to him like a magnet to metal.

      Even now her gaze was drawn to him. He had rolled onto his back and the sheet had dipped lower, revealing a tantalising trail of black hair that arrowed down from his belly button. His abdomen was superbly defined, gorgeously lean and tautly muscled.

      She swallowed as his hand absently started scratching at his lower stomach. She felt like a voyeur, getting off on watching him. Was there a man alive who looked more outrageously delicious? He had been wearing dark blue underpants when she’d found him earlier but she suspected he was naked now because she’d found a pair of underpants in the shower stall along with a used towel. She could see the contour of his penis, the way it seemed to swell before her eyes, as if he were dreaming of something richly erotic.

      His hand went lower and Lottie abruptly cleared her throat, her face so hot it felt like it was on fire. ‘Ahem. You’ve got company. Might want to keep that for when you’re alone.’

      His eyes opened and he blinked a couple of times as if trying to place her. ‘Lottie?’

      ‘At your service—I mean, not in that sense.’ She waved her hands about the room, her blush deepening. ‘I was just tidying up … a bit….’

      He propped himself up on one elbow, his brow frowning. ‘Did you get the painting?’

      ‘I did.’ She brandished it proudly. ‘I had a ball—er, I mean, heaps of fun.’ What was wrong with her mind that it kept sinking into the gutter?

      ‘Good girl.’ He lay back down with a sigh and closed his eyes again.

      She gnawed at her lip for a moment. ‘Are you okay?’

      ‘Marvellous.’

      ‘You don’t look it.’

      ‘Thanks. Appreciate it.’

      ‘I mean, your colour’s not right.’ Lottie tentatively approached the bed. ‘Have you had anything to eat or drink?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘What about if I get you something? Some light broth or one of those rehydrating drinks. I could call up room service if you—’

      He cracked open one eye and gave her a wry look. ‘Might as well tip it straight down the toilet and cut out the middleman.’

      ‘That bad, huh?’

      ‘Get me an eye of a needle and I’ll prove it.’

      She winced in sympathy. ‘It’s okay, I get the picture.’

      There was a little silence.

      ‘Thanks for getting the painting for me.’

      Lottie felt a warm glow come over her. ‘It was heaps of fun. There was this old guy there who was pretty determined to outbid me. I dug my heels in. I didn’t care how much I had to pay, I was not leaving without that painting. It was such an adrenaline rush when it was over. I felt like I’d won a race or something. Can you get an endorphin rush from an auction, do you think?’

      He gave her another one-eyed look. ‘How much did you pay for it?’

      ‘Um …’ She pulled at her lower lip again. ‘I can chip in if you think I overdid it.’

      His mouth came up in a weak СКАЧАТЬ