Passionate Fantasy. Sharon Kendrick

to her surprise, the front door opened immediately, and it was not some uniformed minion who came out but Darius Speed himself, running lightly down the steps with all the grace and stamina of the natural athlete.

      He was dressed in tennis whites: a short-sleeved T-shirt, slightly damp with sweat, and a pair of immaculate white shorts which came to mid-thigh, showing a long expanse of tanned and muscular leg. His hair was damp too, little tendrils dancing around the strong neck.

      She stared up at him, momentarily transfixed. The sun was behind him—and his eyes were full of a clear, bright light which rivalled its brilliance. He looked, she thought, like the very antithesis of a blond Greek god—with his dark hair and his shadowed, mysterious face in repose.

      But as he spoke her illusions fled. ‘Hello, Kitty,’ he said coolly. Then, as he saw her pull Out her purse and begin to open it, he shook his head. ‘I’ll get this,’ he said.

      She watched, while pretending not to, as he walked towards the car. He had bent down, and was grinning at something the taxi-driver had said. Kitty gulped in unwilling admiration. At that moment he looked so carefree and so relaxed—the very picture of health and strength—a man at the very peak of his vitality. She began to wonder how a woman might feel to have those strong brown arms around her waist, to feel that lean, hard body pressed against——

      ‘Such a pensive cook,’ came a soft voice beside her, and she snapped out of her reverie in horror to find Darius at her side, a heavy suitcase carried in either hand with ease. ‘And from the look on your face you were worrying about more than what equipment you’re going to find in my kitchen?’

      Hardly! And she certainly wasn’t going to tell him what she had been thinking! She fixed him with her sweetest smile. ‘I was imagining how you would react if my soufflé failed to rise,’ she lied quickly.

      His eyes glittered. ‘I allow everyone one mistake, Kitty—but only one. Come, I’ll show you inside.’

      She followed him up the marble steps. She must pull herself together—stop crediting him with powers of perception he couldn’t possibly have. He didn’t have the power to read her mind; he was just an ordinary man.

      No, she corrected herself silently, her eyes swinging automatically to watch the well-shaped line of his buttocks, revealed in all their muscular beauty in the white shorts. Not an ordinary man at all. He had something which would always mark him out in a crowd, and it wasn’t just the outstandingly good looks, or the superb physique, or even that cool, calculating mind. He seemed to radiate some inner strength, some steely quality at the very heart of him. He looked, she thought, more than a little apprehensively, as though he did not have one vulnerable bone in his entire body ...

      He led her into a large entrance hall. ‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘That door over there is my study. I don’t care to be disturbed when I’m in there working. Not for any reason. Understand?’

      She nodded, her eyes still taking in the vastness of the hall.

      ‘The main sitting-room is next door to the diningroom and over there——’ he pointed ‘—is the kitchen. I’ll get Simon to show you over properly later, once you’ve had a chance to settle in. I’d show you myself, but right now I’m a little tied up.’

      At that moment, the door of another room opened and an incredibly pretty woman in her late twenties came out.

      This was obviously what was tying him up, thought Kitty. His tennis partner. And what a stunner!

      The woman was also wearing tennis whites—a short, pleated white skirt which showed off her long, evenly tanned legs. And, even though they had obviously just finished playing, she was clearly one of those women who didn’t sweat. She looked as cool as a cucumber, with not a hair of the shiny brown ponytail out of place, not the merest hint of a shiny nose, nor the tell-tale sign of smudged mascara. Even her lipstick had remained unspoiled. Kitty loved sport herself, but her pale complexion inevitably flushed pink within the first ten minutes of playing.

      Darius’s partner turned her big brown eyes towards him, her hundred-megawatt smile for him alone.

      He smiled back, his eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘I won’t be long,’ he said. ‘My new chef has just arrived. Kitty, this is Julia Davies. Julia—Kitty Goodman.’

      ‘Hi,’ grinned Julia. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

      She gave Kitty the once-over, but the friendliness in her face didn’t waver.

      She doesn’t see me as a threat, thought Kitty suddenly. ‘Hello,’ she said, forcing herself to smile back and quell the sudden rush of regret that she hadn’t been born tall and lovely. That her gingery hair and accompanying freckles meant that breezily beautiful women like Julia considered her no threat, considered her safe to work around a man like Darius.

      ‘Don’t give him too many carbohydrates, will you?’ laughed Julia. ‘We don’t want him piling on the pounds.’ And she gave Darius a playful punch against a rock-hard torso which contained not a hint of spare flesh.

      ‘I’m just showing Kitty to her room,’ said Darius. ‘I’ll only be a few minutes.’

      ‘Fine. Mind if I take a shower?’

      ‘Go ahead.’

      And that, thought Kitty, spoke volumes about the intimacy of their relationship.

      ‘Bye, Kitty,’ said Julia. ‘I’ll look forward to sampling your cooking!’ She gave another megawatt smile and walked off with a wiggle, disappearing into a room at the end of the long passage. To his bedroom? wondered Kitty.

      There was a short pause as they watched her—Kitty was dying to ask who the confident woman who had eyed her so dismissively was, but Darius was already speaking to her.

      ‘Come with me and I’ll show you where you’ll be staying.’

      To her surprise, he walked straight through the house and out at the other side, into a beautifully informal garden whose vast size made her blink. He weaved his way down a winding path onto which a profusion of different-coloured flowers spilled, their hues like the contents of an artist’s palette. He stopped at last in front of a building painted in an ice-cream-pink colour. It was a single storey only, and looked so cosy that it reminded Kitty immediately of an olde-worlde English cottage—she half expected to see hollyhocks and delphiniums growing around the door!

      ‘I’ve put you in this annexe,’ he said. ‘I thought you might prefer it. It’s completely self-contained.’

      ‘The servant’s quarters?’ she murmured without thinking, then immediately wished she hadn’t, for he fixed her with a sharp look.

      ‘I thought that you might prefer the privacy. I have house guests staying sometimes—and as you’ll be serving them with food and drink for a lot of the time I thought you’d like your own particular escape-valve.’

      Her heart sank. The whole point of taking this job had been to give her access to his house. How on earth was she supposed to get to know the combination of his safe if she was situated miles away from the wretched thing? ‘But what happens if they want drinks or snacks, say, in the middle of the afternoon?’ she suggested brightly. ‘Surely it would be much easier to have me—on tap, so to speak?’

      His eyes narrowed at her unfortunate phrase, and she flushed scarlet to the roots of her hair.

      ‘If they want anything between meals I can fix it. Or they can. I don’t want you to be at my beck and call all day—that isn’t the way I operate. You’re employed to provide breakfast, lunch and dinner. And sometimes tea mid-afternoon. And if that sounds like slave-labour, then remember—the nature of my job means I may have to go off for two or three days at a time, and you’ll be completely free when I do.’

      What alternative did she have other than to smile politely? ‘That sounds very reasonable,’ she said. Too reasonable. She’d have preferred a touch of the tyrant—tyrants were easier to dislike