‘You sure about that, ma belle?’
Her small, neat chin came up. ‘Yes.’
Leandro gave her another slanted smile. ‘You’re a determined little thing, aren’t you?’
Miranda handed him the salad bowl. ‘You’d better believe it.’
CHAPTER SIX
MIRANDA HAD BEEN asleep for a couple of hours when she woke with a sudden start. Had she heard something? She lay there for a moment, wondering if she had been dreaming that plaintive cry. Her sleep had been somewhat restless. Her visit to Rosie’s room earlier that day, as well as seeing the mother with her baby and toddler, had made Miranda’s slumbering mind busy with nonsensical narratives. Had she imagined that pitiless cry? Was the villa haunted by Rosie’s ghost?
Miranda threw off the covers and padded to the door, listening with one ear for any further sound. Her heart was beating like a tattoo, the hairs on the back of her neck lifting as the old house creaked and groaned and resettled into the silence of the night.
It was impossible to go back to sleep. Even though in broad daylight she would swear she didn’t believe in anything paranormal, it was a tough call in the middle of the night with shadows and sounds she couldn’t account for. She pulled on a wrap, tied it about her waist and went out to the corridor. A shaft of pallid moonlight divided the passage. A branch of a tree scratched at the window nearest her, making her skeleton tingle inside the cage of her skin.
She tiptoed along the corridor but stopped when she got outside Leandro’s room. There was a thin band of light shining underneath the door, not bright enough to be the centre light, but more like that of a lamp. There was no sound from inside the room. No sound of a computer keyboard being tapped or the pages of a book being turned.
Just a thick cloak of silence.
‘Did you want something?’ Leandro said from behind her.
Miranda swung around with her heart hammering so loud she could hear it like a roaring in her ears. ‘Oh! I—I thought you were...someone else... I heard something. A cry. Did you hear it?’
‘It’s a cat.’
‘A c-cat?’
‘Yes, outside in the garden,’ he said. ‘There are a few strays around. I think my father must’ve been feeding them.’
Miranda rubbed her upper arms with her crossed-over hands. A cat. Of course it was a cat. How had she got herself so worked up? She didn’t even believe in ghosts and yet...and yet she had been so sure that cry had been a small child crying out. ‘Oh, right; well, then...’
Leandro looked at her keenly. ‘Are you okay?’
She forced a brief tight smile. ‘Of course.’
‘Sure?’
Miranda licked her dry lips. ‘I’d better get back to bed. Goodnight.’
He stalled her by placing a warm hand on her arm. She looked up into his shadowed face and felt her heart do another jerky somersault. She could smell the clean male scent of him, the wood and citrus blend and his own body heat that made her senses spin in dazed circles. His hair was ruffled, as if he had recently ploughed his fingers through it. It made her fingers ache to do the same, to feel those thick, silky strands against her fingertips.
His gaze was trained on her mouth. She felt the searing burn of it as if he had leaned down and pressed his sculptured lips to hers. Every nerve in her body was standing at attention, primed in anticipatory excitement.
‘I thought you might be coming to tell me you’ve changed your mind,’ he said.
She gave an involuntary swallow. ‘A-about what?’
His eyes gleamed in the darkness, the moon catching the light of desire that blazed there as surely as it did in hers. ‘About what you’ve been thinking from the moment I ran into you at that café in London.’
Miranda pulled a shutter down in her brain as she forced herself to hold his gaze. How could he possibly know what images her wayward mind kept conjuring up? How could he possibly sense the turmoil going on in her body? How could he know of the rampaging fire scorching through her veins at being this close to him? Or of the deep pulsating ache that was spreading through her thighs and pressing down between her legs? ‘I’m not thinking...that.’
His mouth took on a sardonic slant. ‘You’re a terrible liar.’
Miranda forgot to breathe as he upped her chin, stroking his thumb against the swell of her lower lip until her senses were reeling. The temptation of his tantalising touch, his alluring proximity and the needs she was desperately trying to control were like a tug of war inside her body. Every organ shifted and strained against the magnetic pull of his flesh but it was too much. It was too powerful to resist. She felt her resolve collapsing like a humpy in a hurricane.