Australia: In Bed with the Playboy. Emma Darcy

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      On the fourth Saturday morning after Ivy had walked out of Jordan Powell’s life, she decided she had to meet him and give him a piece of her mind—an angry, outraged, totally damning piece which would rock him back on his billionaire-playboy socks and make him leave her alone!

      She braided her hair back into one thick plait, minimising its impact. Blue jeans, a royal-blue T-shirt and navy sandals helped give her a fairly nondescript appearance. Without any make-up she was satisfied that Jordan would not find her particularly attractive today. It had to be impressed upon him that he was wasting his time with her.

      She drove to Sydney and used the parking station under the Queen Victoria Building, which was expensive but handy for a quick getaway. The big clock inside the shopping mall was showing ten minutes past midday as she kept herself inconspicuous amongst the crowd of shoppers passing by the tables belonging to the Bacio Coffee Shop. They were set out in open view, most of them occupied by people wanting a lunch break.

      Her heart kicked into a gallop when she spotted Jordan at one of them, a pen in hand, apparently working on a crossword in the newspaper spread out on his table. He wasn’t looking out for her, but he was there all right, all set up to wait patiently for her arrival. The relentless pressure for this meeting sent a bolt of panic through Ivy, quickening her pace as she walked straight past where he was sitting, too agitated by the sight of him to be in control of this encounter. Her righteous anger had just been swallowed up by a scary sense of vulnerability.

      She stopped at a safe distance and turned to watch him surreptitiously. The back view of him was not so nerve-joltingly handsome, but it was impossible to set aside the fact she had gone to bed with this man, knew his body intimately, had run her fingers through his thick black hair, nestled her face contentedly into the curve of his neck and shoulder—sharp memories raising a terribly acute sexual awareness, both of him and herself. The moment she looked into his bedroom-blue eyes she would see them there, too, and how was she going to ignore or dismiss that once she sat down with him?

      Ivy dithered, the need to stop Jordan from inserting himself into her life losing all its furious momentum in the power of his presence. She saw other women glancing at him from nearby tables, probably wishing they could catch his attention. Even though he seemed oblivious of their interest, he still had the charismatic magnetism to draw theirs. It kept tugging at her, too. Coming here had been a mistake—a big mistake.

      He would stop sending the roses eventually.

      She didn’t have to say or do anything.

      Except tear her gaze away from him and go back home.

      So go, she told herself, but before she could bring herself to act, Jordan’s head jerked up as though reacting to something. He rose swiftly to his feet, turned, shooting a questioning gaze around his vicinity. Ivy froze, couldn’t move a muscle, the certainty of no escape now seizing her mind, making another encounter with him inevitable.

      He saw her. The smile that instantly spread across his face turned her insides to mush. It wasn’t a smile of triumph, more one of sparkling pleasure, inviting her to share it—share all the things that had pleasured them both. He lifted a hand in an open gesture of welcome, encouraging her to join him at his table.

      Her heart started pumping again. Hard. She wondered if he would chase her if she turned and ran. But there was no dignity in that. Besides, she wasn’t sure her wobbly legs were capable of racing anywhere. Somehow she had to firm up her mind—as well as the rest of her body—and directly address the situation with Jordan Powell.

      She concentrated on forcing her feet forward and putting a glowering expression of reproach on her face, smiting his treacherous smile as she made her way to his table. He held out a chair for her. She sat down. He quickly folded the newspaper and slipped it under his chair as he resumed his seat, the blue eyes more serious now, appealing for her patience.

      ‘It’s good to see you, Ivy,’ he rolled out in his deep, sexy voice.

      ‘I only came to stop you from pestering my mother,’ she declared, keeping her face tight with disapproval.

      He leaned forward, elbows on the table, speaking with quiet urgency. ‘I had to talk to you. The night we spent together…I didn’t use any protection and I didn’t ask if you were on the pill. I’ve been worried that you might have fallen pregnant.’

      ‘Oh!’ Her chest loosened up as her lungs expelled a gush of air in a sigh of relief. This was reasonable. It wasn’t a mad pursuit of her. In fact, it was really nice of him to care about serious consequences from their mutual recklessness. ‘It’s okay,’ she assured him. ‘That was a safe time for me. You don’t have to worry any more.’

      ‘A safe time?’ he queried, frowning as though he didn’t quite understand.

      ‘In my monthly cycle,’ she explained.

      ‘You don’t normally use any contraceptive device?’

      He sounded incredulous, as though any woman in her right mind shouldn’t be protecting herself against accidents. Undoubtedly the women he mixed with did.

      She leaned forward to make her position very plain, flushing with the violence of her feelings on his fly-by-night attitude. ‘I told you I wasn’t your type. I told you I wouldn’t fit into your scene. I don’t do sex on a casual basis and I haven’t been in a relationship for over two years so I have no reason to be always ready.’

      ‘Ah!’ A smile of satisfaction tugged at the corners of his mouth. ‘Then I’m glad you found me as irresistible as I found you. Which is the second thing I want to talk to you about.’

      Ivy rolled her eyes and sagged back in her chair, feeling under attack again. ‘Haven’t I made my point, Jordan?’ she cried in exasperation.

      ‘No. Because it’s based on assumptions about me which I don’t think are fair,’ he argued.

      They weren’t assumptions. His orders to the rose farm provided hard evidence of how he conducted his sexual affairs. However, she couldn’t lay that out to him without revealing how she had such inside knowledge and she didn’t want to give him any more information about herself. ‘You’re a notorious playboy,’ she said accusingly, folding her arms in defensive belligerence.

      He grimaced. ‘Because of what I am, who I am, a lot of women throw themselves at me, Ivy. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t find some of them attractive. Unlike you, they’re intent on making themselves attractive to me, but the effort wears thin after a while. Their real selves emerge.’ He shook his head as he ruefully added, ‘And it’s never what I want.’

      ‘What do you want?’ she asked, privately conceding what he said could be true. A handsome billionaire would be a target for most women.

      The blue eyes burned into hers. ‘Honesty,’ he said, which he’d previously told her was the rarest commodity in his world.

      Maybe it was. The more Ivy thought about it, the more she could see this could be a real downside in being obscenely wealthy…people cosying up to him for what they could get out of being close to big money. She didn’t need what he had. Being happy in her own world, she didn’t covet his kind of life at all. The only thing missing for her was…a loving husband, family, a shared future.

      She couldn’t see Jordan Powell in that picture.

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