The Colorado Countess. Stephanie Howard

gorgeous he was, he would have no luck with her. She wasn’t here to provide entertainment for any playboy count!

      He was accepting her invitation and crossing the veranda to seat himself in the cane chair where she had been sitting earlier, the one next to the little table with the bowl of peaches. He stretched out his long legs. ‘You asked what I’m doing here.’ Then he held her eyes and smiled. ‘We have unfinished business.’

      ‘Unfinished business?’

      What on earth did he mean by that? Carrie crossed to seat herself on one of the chairs opposite him, careful to arrange her legs at a safe distance from his, her feet crossed neatly at the ankles.

      She looked him straight in the eye and raised one questioning eyebrow. ‘I wasn’t aware that you and I had any business to finish.’

      ‘Perhaps not, strictly speaking, business.’ He simply smiled at her reaction. I’m going to enjoy this, he was thinking. This one’s definitely no pushover. It would make a pleasant change from the easy victories he was used to.

      He stretched his legs a little further and leaned back in his seat and watched her. ‘The other evening, you may remember, as I was leaving the restaurant, you came running after me, rather anxious to tell me something. I couldn’t stop at the time, but perhaps you’d like to tell me about it now?’

      ‘Is that why you’ve come here?’ Carrie frowned as she looked back at him. ‘Just to find out why I came running after you?’

      She wasn’t sure if she believed him. At the time, she’d been quite certain that he’d heard perfectly well her angry protests about the bill.

      But perhaps not, after all, and perhaps that really was why he’d come—to find out what she’d been saying and, possibly, to chastise her for her rudeness. Perhaps she’d been totally wrong about the seduction bit. Oh, well, she thought, thank heavens for that.

      Another thought struck her. He must have gone to a fair bit of trouble in order to track her down like this. She delivered him a dry look. ‘How extraordinarily fastidious of you.’

      ‘I’m an extraordinarily fastidious chap.’ He smiled a lazy smile and cast a glance at the bowl of peaches at his elbow. ‘What lovely-looking peaches. Do you mind if I have one?’

      Then, as she nodded and said, ‘Help yourself,’ he reached out and took one.

      Carrie found herself watching his every move with fascination. He had the most beautiful tanned hands, with shapely, sensuous fingers, and there was something about the way he took hold of the peach and held it in the palm of his hand for a moment that made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Somehow, it was all too easy to imagine how it would feel to have those sensuous fingers caressing your naked flesh.

      With a flash of horror at herself—what the devil was coming over her?—she pushed that thought away as he returned to their interrupted discourse and elaborated, ‘I like conclusions. I hate to leave things hanging in the air.’

      Carrie took a deep breath. ‘Then I’ll tell you why I came running after you.’ Suddenly, she too was rather keen to reach a conclusion, and preferably one that involved him exiting with some rapidity. His presence was doing the most peculiar things to her brain!

      Squaring her shoulders, she told him, ‘I was objecting to you paying my bill. There was no need for that. I’m capable of paying my own bills.’

      Leone narrowed his eyes. ‘I thought that’s what you were saying. But you seemed so het up I wondered if I was mistaken.’

      ‘Of course I was het up. You had no business paying my bill for me.’

      ‘It was a gesture of reparation. Because you lost your table.’

      ‘Well, it was a gesture I didn’t appreciate. It simply added insult to injury.’ Carrie flushed in remembrance as she said it. For it really was true. She really had felt insulted. ‘I came after you to complain and to insist on paying you back.’

      As she spoke she sat forward, intending to stand up. ‘In fact, I’ll take the opportunity to pay you back now.’ Over the past couple of days, the incident had continued to trouble her. How did you pay back a debt to the heir to the throne? Did you just stick some money in an envelope and send it off to the palace? How could you be certain he’d actually received it? She’d been planning on asking someone at the bank what she should do, but now the problem could be easily resolved.

      She told him, ‘I’ll go and get the money right this minute.’

      But Leone was waving to her to sit down. ‘You can give it to me before I leave.’ He took a bite of his peach. ‘That is, if you insist, which I’d rather you didn’t.’

      ‘Well, I’m afraid I definitely do.’

      Carrie was half out of her chair and half in it. It went against the grain to obey that imperious little wave, for he was clearly far too used to people obeying him, but she had suddenly realised that to go indoors for her purse she would have to step over his outstretched legs. Unless, of course, he moved them, but she couldn’t bank on that.

      Feeling a little cowardly, she sat back stiffly in her seat again. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘I’ll pay you before you leave.’ That surely shouldn’t be long now, she was silently praying. And there was definitely no danger that she might forget.

      There was silence for a moment as Leone sat back and looked at her. The more he discovered about this girl, the more intriguing she became to him. She was different, a type he came across rarely.

      ‘You’re the independent sort, I see.’ His tone was light as he challenged her. ‘Is this how they teach you to be over in Colorado?’

      ‘I suppose it must be. It’s certainly how I was taught.’

      Carrie wondered if he was laughing at her and decided he probably was. The sort of personal integrity her parents had instilled in her ever since she was very little was something he would find petty and bourgeois and boring. People of his social rank operated differently. They were the sort of people, after all, who went through life thinking nothing of commandeering other people’s restaurant tables!

      She tilted her chin at him. ‘I was brought up to respect people, to respect their rights, not to take advantage.’ And as she looked into his eyes she could see quite clearly that he had understood the unspoken message. ‘I was also taught to pay my way and to honour my debts. In short, not to take anything that wasn’t my due.’

      Leone regarded her with interest. ‘So, what do you consider to be your due?’

      ‘What I work for. What I earn by my own efforts.’

      She paused and dropped her eyes to her lap for a moment. Was she overdoing it just a little? she wondered, suddenly guilty. She was talking, after all, to one of the idle aristocracy and she had also been taught never to give gratuitous offence.

      But Leone did not appear to be offended in the slightest. Instead, he took another bite of his peach and commented, ‘An extremely worthy philosophy of life.’

      Not that he meant it, of course, and he could afford to smile indulgently and not care a damn what people like her thought of him. This thought went through Carrie’s head as she looked into the blue eyes, observing to herself what different worlds they came from. Surely neither could ever truly understand the other?

      She said, ‘It’s what I was taught and it’s what I believe.’

      Leone continued to watch her, the blue eyes oddly unsettling. They had this quality of seeming to pierce beneath her skin. At times he seemed to be laughing at her, at others studying her closely, and somehow the two just didn’t add up.

      What was going on in his head and why had he come? For she still wasn’t convinced by the reason he’d given her. But the thing that was making her most uncomfortable of all was the fact that there seemed to be no sign of him leaving!

      He crossed his feet at