Page 34 of Cipriani's Innocent Captive
‘Have you stopped to consider that I might actually have wanted to kiss you?’
Katy blushed and said with genuine honesty, ‘I thought it was more of a tactical gesture.’
‘Then you obviously underestimated the impact of your dress,’ Lucas delivered huskily. ‘When I saw you get out of the back of my limo, my basic instinct was to get in with you, slam the door and get my driver to take us back to my apartment.’
‘I don’t think your guests would have been too impressed.’ But every word sent a powerful charge of awareness racing through her already heated body. He was just talking about sex, she told herself weakly. Okay, so he was looking at her as though she was a feast for the eyes, but that had nothing to do with anything other than desire.
Lucas was excellent when it came to sex. He was just lousy when it came to emotion. Not only was he uninterested in exploring anything at all beyond the physical, but he was proud of his control in that arena. If he had foresworn involvement on an emotional level because of one bad experience with a woman, then Katy knew that somehow she would have tried to find a way of making herself indispensable to him. A bad experience left scars, just as Duncan had left her with scars, but scars healed over, because time moved on and one poor experience would always end up buried under layers of day-to-day life.
But Lucas wasn’t like that. He wasn’t a guy who had had one bad experience but was essentially still interested in having a meaningful relationship with a woman. He wasn’t a guy who, even deep down, had faith in the power of love.
Lucas’s cynicism stemmed from a darker place and it had been formed at so young an age that it was now an embedded part of his personality.
‘Do I look like the kind of man who lives his life to impress other people?’ he asked, libido kicking fast into gear as his eyes drifted down to her breasts. Knowing what those breasts looked like and tasted like added to the pulsing ache in his groin. ‘Quite honestly, I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than leave this room right now and head back to my apartment. Failing that, rent a bloody room in the hotel and use it for an hour.’
‘That would be rude.’ But her eyes were slumberous as she looked at him from under her lashes. ‘We should dance instead.’
‘You think that dancing is a good substitute for having mind-blowing sex?’
‘Stop that!’ She pulled him onto the dance floor. The music’s tempo had slowed and the couples who were dancing in the half-light were entwined with one another.
It was almost midnight. Where on earth had the time gone? Lucas pulled Katy onto the dance floor and then held her so close to him that she could feel the steady beat of his heart and the pressure of his body, warm and so, so tempting.
She rested her head on his chest and he curled his fingers into her hair and leant into her.
This was heaven. For the duration of this dance, with his arms around her, she could forget that she wasn’t living the dream.
Lucas looked down and saw the glitter of the diamond on her finger. The ring had fitted her perfectly, no need to be altered. He had slipped it onto her finger and it had belonged there.
Except, it didn’t. Did it?
They had started something in full knowledge of how and when it would end. Katy had proposed a course of action that had been beneficial to them both and at the time, which was only a matter of days ago, Lucas had admired the utter practicality of the proposal.
She had assured him that involvement was not an issue for either of them because they were little more than two people from different planets who had collided because of the peculiar circumstances that had hurled them into the same orbit.
They had an arrangement and it was an arrangement that both of them had under control.
Except, was it?
Lucas didn’t want to give house room to doubt, but that ring quietly glittering on her finger was posing questions that left him feeling uneasy and a little panicked, if truth be known.
The song came to an end and he drew away from her.
‘We should go and say goodbye to Huang and his family. I’ve spotted them out of the corner of my eye and they’ve gathered by the exit. Mission accomplished, I think.’
Katy blinked, abruptly yanked out of the pleasant little cloud in which she had been nestled.
For all that common sense was telling her to be wary of this beautiful man who had stolen her heart like a thief in the night, her heart was rebelling at every practical step forward she tried to take.
She should pull back, yet here she was, wanting nothing more than to linger in his arms and for the music to never end.
She should remember Duncan and the hurt he had caused because, however upset she had been—and she now realised it had been on the mild end of the scale—whatever she had thought at the time, it would be nothing compared to what she would suffer when Lucas walked away from her. But nothing could have been less important in that moment than her cheating ex. In fact, she could barely remember what he looked like, and it had been that way for ages.
She had weeks of this farce to go through! She should steel herself against her own cowardly emotions and do what her head was telling her made sense—which was appreciate him while she could; which was gorge herself on everything he had to offer and look for no more than that.
But her own silly romanticism undermined her at every turn.
She gazed up at him helplessly. ‘Mission accomplished?’
