Page 49 of The Tycoon's Ultimate Conquest
‘Way too rich.’ Art drew a chair up close to hers, as if to stop her from somehow fleeing the room. She didn’t like his positioning and automatically drew back into herself, freezing him out as her defences came down. When he leaned forward, elbows resting loosely on his thighs, he was practically touching her.
‘Too rich to think about whether putting up a hundred houses is going to net me more money than putting up ten.’ He sighed heavily, caught her eye and held her gaze. ‘But you’re right. I haven’t been entirely honest with you.’
‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘And normally that would work for me,’ Art returned. ‘Normally justifying myself in any way, shape or form isn’t something I would see the need to do, but in this instance...’
‘Am I supposed to think that you have a conscience?’ Rose questioned painfully.
‘I don’t suppose I’ve given you a lot of reason to trust anything I have to say.’
‘Spot on.’
‘But...’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll try to start at the beginning. I... You’ll have to bear with me. I don’t...know how this is done.’
‘How what is done?’
‘This talking business.’
‘Thistalking business? What does that evenmean?’ But there was an air of vulnerability about him that she’d never seen before and it did something to her even though she fought hard to resist the pull and tried to remember that this wasn’t going to end up in a good place.
‘I... I’ve never had much time for talking, Rose. Not when it came to women. When it came to women, things were very clear-cut. It was all about mutual pleasure. Nothing lasted and nothing was meant to. It was the way I liked it. When I met you, I had an agenda, but in no way was sleeping with you part of that agenda, and of course that should have set the alarm bells ringing. The fact that sleeping with you made no sense and yet I had to do it, had to get you into bed. It was as though something bigger and stronger than me had taken charge and was dictating how I behaved when it came to you.’
Rose looked at him with a jaundiced expression and wondered whether she was supposed to melt at that admission. She wished he’d back away a bit. His proximity was suffocating her.
‘You need to just tell me what else you’ve been hiding from me,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t want to hear about...how much you wanted me...’
Art sat back and half closed his eyes, then he looked at her for a while in silence.
‘There was always an agenda for that land. I had to have it. Had to make sure that everything went through and I had to get the residents of the village onside. Yes, for the expensive houses that were going to be built but also, in due course, for more building work that I had planned.’
‘I thought as much.’ Rose looked away, heart pounding, bile in her mouth.
‘You really don’t.’ He turned her face to his, finger lightly under her chin, compelling them to lock eyes, and Rose gazed helplessly at him.
‘I can’t bear the thought of being used, Art. All my life, the one thing I’ve taken away from what happened to my mum is that I would never allow myself to be used by any man. She abandoned me for a man she met and knew for five seconds! Yes, she came back but I’d lost a lot in that time that she’d been away and I’d grown up and learned lessons. Lesson one was that when it came to my heart, common sense was always going to be more valuable than stupid, crazylust.’
‘We’re singing from the same song sheet,’ Art murmured. ‘We both had lessons ingrained into us thanks to our backgrounds. Rich or poor, our experiences made us the cautious people we ended up being. I was happy to be ruled by lust. I just resisted anything more than that. Until you. Until you came along.’
‘What do you mean?’ Rose found that she was holding her breath and she exhaled slowly, hoping that her calm, detached exterior was still in place, making no assumptions even though her heart was beating fast now but with forbidden excitement.
‘I told myself that it was a mistake to sleep with you. I didn’t want the waters to be muddied. I had come for a specific reason and I naturally assumed that a minor temptation wasn’t going to confuse the issue. How wrong I was. I decided where was the harm? There wouldn’t be any fallout because I was always, had always been and always would be, in control of my choices. We were both consenting adults and, if anything, getting you into bed would give me an added advantage in persuading you to listen to reason when it came to the protest.’ She looked away sharply and Art tilted her stubborn face back to his.
‘The truth of the matter was that I couldn’t resist you. You did something to me and you carried on doing it even when I left and returned to London. I couldn’t get you out of my mind. I kept drifting off into inappropriate fantasies at inappropriate times. In the middle of conversations, in the thick of an important meeting, just as I was about to sink my teeth into the finest food money could buy. And yet I still didn’t wake up to what should have been blindingly obvious.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Somewhere along the line I fell in love with you. Please don’t say anything because I need to tell you about the land. After you’ve heard what I have to say I’ll leave, but I felt you needed to know...how I felt.’
‘Art...’
He’d fallen in love with her? Did he really mean that?
Her heart had migrated to her mouth so when she spoke her voice was muffled and she had to clear her throat. ‘Do you mean that?’
‘I wasn’t looking for love. I’ve never been looking for love. My father had so many ex-wives that so-calledlovewas always in plentiful supply and always, without fail, ended up in the divorce courts, where each and every one would wrangle until they went blue in the face for a slice of his money. I was jaded beyond belief by the time I left my teens behind. Love was for idiots and I was never going to be an idiot. The truth is that I just never fell in love and I never realised that love makes idiots of us all.’
‘Why didn’t you say something?’ Rose whispered.
