London's Eligible Bachelors. Sharon Kendrick

simply because, to his intense exasperation, he realised that she had managed to turn him on. Had that been her bossiness or her presumption? he wondered achingly as he threw cold water onto his face like a man who had been burning up in the sun all day. Or maybe it had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t been with a woman since that amazing night with Sabrina in Venice. Hadn’t wanted to. Still didn’t want anyone. Except her.

      Now, that, he thought, was worrying.

      The meal began badly, with Guy frowning at the heap of prawns with mayonnaise which Sabrina had heaped on a plate.

      ‘You don’t like prawns?’ she asked him nervously.

      ‘Yeah, I love them, but you really shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.’

      ‘Oh, it was no trouble,’ she lied, thinking about the beef Wellington which was currently puffing up nicely in the oven. ‘Do you want to open the wine? I bought a bottle.’

      He shook his head, remembering last night, the way it had loosened him up so that he had spent a heated night tossing and turning and wondering what she would do if he walked just along the corridor and silently slipped into bed beside her. ‘Not for me thanks,’ he answered repressively. ‘You can have some, of course.’

      ‘I’m fine, thanks.’ As if she would sit there drinking her way through a bottle of wine while he looked down that haughty and patrician nose of his.

      Guy saw the beef Wellington being carried in on an ornate silver platter he’d forgotten he had and which she must have fished out from somewhere.

      ‘Sabrina,’ he groaned.

      Her fingers tightened on the knife. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t like beef Wellington,’ she said, the slight note of desperation making her voice sound edgy.

      ‘Who in their right mind wouldn’t?’ He sighed. ‘It’s just that you must have spent a fortune on this meal—’

      ‘It was supposed to be a way of saying thank you—’

      ‘And I’ve told you before not to thank me!’ he said savagely, feeling the sweet, inconvenient rush of desire as her lips trembled in rebuke at him. ‘Look, Sabrina, I don’t expect you earn very much, working in a bookshop—’

      ‘Certainly nowhere in your league, Guy,’ she retorted.

      ‘And I don’t want you spending it all on fancy food!’

      ‘I’m not here to accept charity—especially not yours!’

      ‘Sabrina—’

      ‘No, Guy,’ she said stubbornly. ‘I want to pay my way as much as possible.’

      He took the slice she offered him and he stared down at it with grudging reluctance. Pink and perfect. So she could cook, too. He scowled. ‘Do that,’ he clipped out. ‘But this is the last time you buy me steak! Understood?’

      That was enough to guarantee the complete loss of her appetite, and it was only pride which made Sabrina eat every single thing on her plate. But by the time they were drinking their coffee his forbidding expression seemed to have thawed a little.

      ‘That was delicious,’ he said.

      ‘The pleasure was all mine.’

      He heard the sarcasm in her voice, saw the little pout of accusation which hovered on her lips. Maybe he had been a little hard on her. ‘I’m not used to sharing,’ he shrugged.

      ‘It shows.’ She risked a question, even if the dark face didn’t look particularly forthcoming. ‘Have you got any brothers and sisters?’

      ‘One brother; he’s younger.’

      ‘And where is he now?’

      He sighed as he saw her patient look of interest. These heart-to-heart chats had never really been part of his scene. ‘He lives in Paris—he works for a newspaper.’

      ‘That sounds interesting.’

      He blanked the conversation with a bland smile. ‘Does it?’

      But Sabrina wasn’t giving up that easily. What were they supposed to talk about, night after night—the weather?

      ‘So, no live-in girlfriends?’ she asked.

      The eyes glittered. ‘Nope.’

      ‘Oh.’ She digested this.

      ‘You sound surprised,’ he observed.

      ‘I am, a little.’

      ‘You see me as so devastatingly eligible, do you, Sabrina?’

      Her smile stayed as enigmatic as his. ‘That’s a fairly egotistical conclusion to jump to, Guy—that wasn’t what I said at all. I just thought that a man in your position would yearn for all the comforts of having a resident girlfriend.’

      ‘You mean regular meals.’ His eyes fell to his empty plate. ‘And regular sex?’

      Sabrina went scarlet. ‘Something like that.’

      ‘The comfort and ease of the shared bed?’ he mused. ‘It’s tempting, I give you that. But sex is the easy bit—it’s communication that causes all the problems. Or rather the lack of it.’ His voice grew hard, almost bitter.

      Sabrina looked at him and wondered what he wasn’t telling her. ‘You mean you’ve never found anyone you could communicate with?’

      ‘Something like that.’ No one he’d ever really wanted to communicate with. ‘Or at least, not unless we both happened to be horizontal at the time.’ He looked at her thoughtfully as she blushed. ‘But I have a very low boredom threshold, princess,’ he added softly.

      He was telling her not to come too close—it was as plain as the day itself. And it was the most arrogant warning she had ever heard. ‘More coffee?’ she asked him coolly.

       CHAPTER TEN

      ‘SO HOW has your first week been?’

      Guy looked across the sitting room to where Sabrina was curled up like a kitten with a book on her lap—she was always reading, though he noticed that not many pages had been turned in the past hour. Snap, he thought with a grim kind of satisfaction. He hadn’t made many inroads into his own reading.

      Sabrina met the piercing grey gaze and repressed a guilty kind of longing. How could she possibly concentrate on her book when she had such a distraction sitting just across the room from her?

      ‘I’ve enjoyed it,’ she told him truthfully. Well, most of it, anyway. It wasn’t easy being around him, being plagued by memories of a time it was clear that both of them wished forgotten—but at least she had done her utmost not to show it. She forced a smile. ‘How do you rate me as a flatmate?’

      Guy thought about it. She was certainly less intrusive than he would have imagined. She kept out of his way in the mornings. She didn’t drift around the place in bits of provocative clothing—and she didn’t leave panties and tights draped over the radiator, which he understood was one of the major irritations when sharing with a woman.

      ‘Seven out of ten,’ he drawled, his smile not quite easy. ‘And how’s the bookshop surviving with its newest member of staff?’

      Sabrina wished he wouldn’t stretch his legs out like that. ‘The shop is f-fine,’ she stumbled. ‘In fact, it’s very similar to the Salisbury branch—’

      ‘So living in the big city doesn’t scare you, Miss Cooper?’ he mocked softly, cutting right through her stumbled reply.

      ‘I don’t scare easy,’ she said, raising a glittering blue gaze, and thinking that it was all too easy to be scared. Scared of her susceptibility