The Best Of The Year - Modern Romance 2016. Кейт Хьюит

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СКАЧАТЬ only ever passed with the windows of his chauffeur-driven car rolled up.

      ‘The shelter where I volunteer,’ Alexa told him.

      She pointed to a building next to a pawn shop. A grim concrete block fronted by a no-nonsense black door that would have deterred anyone but the most foolhardy.

      ‘I want you to come in and see it—meet some of the other volunteers I work with.’ She sprang out of the car, only realising that he hadn’t followed when she had slammed the door behind her, at which point she reopened her door and peered inside at him.

      ‘You’re not scared, are you?’ She smirked, because for the first time since she had boarded the rollercoaster ride that had become her life she felt as if she had the upper hand. ‘I promise I won’t let anything happen to you...’

      Theo looked at her, partly outraged because no one had ever dared accuse him of being scared of anything in his life before, partly amused because she had wrong-footed him and not many had done that either.

      ‘What do you think I might be scared of?’ he murmured as they headed into the shelter.

      ‘A new experience?’ She blushed, hearing the teasing tone in her voice.

      ‘You’ve broken the ice on that one,’ Theo pointed out drily. ‘When it comes to new experiences, you rank right up there as a first.’

      ‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ Alexa threw back at him, because she knew that a compliment it certainly hadn’t been meant to be.

      He smiled slowly, his amazing eyes skirting over her flushed face and doing a lazy inventory of everything else.

      ‘You should,’ he murmured. ‘I have a jaded palate, and new experiences are always welcome...’

      ‘Even unpleasant ones?’

      ‘What are we talking about, here? The shelter...or you...?’

      He was leaning against the door, towering over her, and she felt her heart begin to race. His voice was as smooth as the finest dark chocolate and his eyes were doing all sorts of weird things to her nervous system, muddling her thoughts and stripping her of that momentary feeling of triumph she’d had moments earlier.

      She rang the bell and turned away, although she could still feel him staring at her, and suddenly the memory of all those convenient kisses slammed into her, depriving her of breath.

      She didn’t like him, she reminded herself fiercely. Not only did she not like him—she didn’t like the situation she was in.

      But he was so sinfully good-looking. He had the sort of face that made her want to stare with helpless fixation and keep on staring. He had that effect on every woman. She had witnessed it for herself. And, whilst she had thought herself immune to that sort of thing, she had to accept the galling truth that she wasn’t as immune as she wanted to be.

      That was why she found it so unsettling whenever he got too close to her, and why the thought of those kisses kept her awake at night. She was human, and she lacked the necessary experience to deal with a man like Theo De Angelis. All her old-fashioned ideas about only ever being attracted to her soulmate had been turned on their head...

      Which didn’t mean that they had disappeared! No, it just meant that she responded to him on a purely physical level, and it was only now that she was accepting that unpalatable truth. She’d always assumed that, for her, physical attraction would only be possible when it was to the guy who had stolen her heart, but she’d been wrong. She could see that now.

      Which was a good thing.

      Once you knew your enemy, you knew how to arm yourself—and her enemy was her treacherous body. She would just have to make sure that she maintained as much distance as she could and never, ever repeated the mistake she had made at the restaurant, when she had initiated that kiss and totally lost herself in it.

      It was great that she was going to introduce him to what she did, because it was the one area in which he would be at sea—and that was something she would really enjoy watching.

      ‘You’re smiling...’ he leant in to whisper as footsteps were heard on the opposite side of the door. ‘Private joke or something you’d care to share?’

      ‘Private joke,’ she told him promptly.

      She looked away as the door was opened and felt a lump in her throat, because she knew that she was going to miss the shelter beyond words when she disappeared off to London.

      The prospect of the lifestyle awaiting her there made her want to burst into tears.

      Not that he would ever understand.

      She sneaked a sideways glance at him and, introductions made, took a background seat to watch the spectacle of the great Theo De Angelis fumbling awkwardly in a situation of which he would have had no experience.

      He didn’t fumble. He charmed all the women there, Franca and Louisa and Marie and Ndali. He introduced himself to some of the women who came to them for practical and emotional help. He pried and prodded into all the rooms and asked so many questions that anyone would have thought that he was an expert on women’s shelters.

      He talked finance with the guy who ran the place, and made a show of looking at the books. He even went so far as to make suggestions on how small improvements could be made!

      She had hoped to watch him squirm, and instead he had dumbfounded her with lots of phoney interest.

      ‘So what exactly is your role there?’ was the first thing he asked when they were back outside an hour and a half later.

      The work awaiting his attention would have to wait and he had resigned himself to that. Allowing work to take second place to anything was an alien concept to him, but he had watched her as they walked through the premises, watched her interaction with her colleagues, and the casual, friendly, concerned manner with which she had spoken to the some of the women waiting in queues to be seen or chatting to the other volunteers.

      Everything about her had breathed open sincerity. Her laughter with her colleagues had been rich and infectious. Frankly, it was the sort of laughter that had been conspicuously absent between them, and he had been irked by that.

      He had been tolerant of her hostility, even though he privately thought that she should have taken her cue from him and dealt with the whole unfortunate situation with a bit more aplomb—because why rail against the inevitable? And besides, it wasn’t destined to be a lifetime situation. He had gritted his teeth at the patently grudging reluctance in her responses to him and the ease with which she accepted as fact the thought that he was deplorable.

      But here he had glimpsed a side to her that he hadn’t seen before.

      It was rare for any woman not to respond to him. Even when he was uninterested in them they still tried hard around him. He had made exceptions for her because of the circumstances of their forced relationship, but only now was he accepting that her indifference was an offence to his pride.

      On a more basic level, he wanted what he had seen of her at that shelter. It was human nature to desire the things that are denied. Fact of life.

      Alexa was making sure to keep as much distance between them as was acceptable, considering СКАЧАТЬ