When she’d walked in he’d taken in the slim, shapely legs. The very feminine swell of her hips. She was the perfect hourglass, all wrapped up in a petite, intoxicating package. Her hair was loose and wavy over her shoulders. Bright against the dark wood of his office. Against the darkness of the castillo. Something lanced him in
a place that was buried, deep and secret. He didn’t welcome it.
He didn’t like that he’d also noticed her beauty spot was gone. The artifice of make-up. It mocked him for believing himself to have been in some sort of a dream earlier. For thinking she was some sort of goddess siren straight out of a Greek myth.
But she was no less alluring now in modern clothes than she had been in a corset and petticoats. In fact, now that Cesar knew the flesh her clothes concealed, it was almost worse.
And he’d just been ruder to this woman than he’d ever been to another in his life.
He could actually be urbane. Charming. But as soon as he’d laid eyes on her again he’d felt animalistic. Feral. Even now his blood thundered, roared. For her. And she wasn’t even remotely his type.
He ran a hand through his hair impatiently. His conscience demanded of him that he say, ‘Look, maybe we can start again. Take a seat.’
Lexie oozed tension and quivering insult. And he couldn’t blame her. Even if her less than pristine life was spread all over his desk.
‘I’m fine standing, thank you. And where, might I ask, did you get your hands on what appears to be a veritable scrapbook of my finest moments?’
Her voice could have cut through steel it was so icy. Cesar almost winced.
‘Someone working on the film compiled information on the cast and crew.’ His eye caught another lurid shot of Lexie pouting over the bonnet of a car. His body tightened. He willed himself to cling on to some control. ‘It would appear that person was a little over-zealous with the back catalogue of your work.’
Lexie flushed, her cheeks filling with dark colour, and Cesar felt his conscience twinge again. As if he was in the wrong. When this woman was standing there with her chin tilted up, defiant in the face of her less than stellar reputation.
She came forward and Cesar’s gaze couldn’t help but drop to where her breasts swayed gently under her top. She stopped at the other side of the desk and put her hands on it and glared at him, her huge blue eyes sending out daggers of ice.
She plucked out the image of her on the car and held it up accusingly. ‘This is not a back catalogue of work. This is a naive young girl, trying to get on in a ruthless cut-throat business—a girl who didn’t have the confidence or economic security to say no to bullying agents and photographers.’
She spat out the words.
‘You might consider that the next time you find it so easy to judge someone you were only too happy to kiss without even knowing who she was.’
Before Cesar could respond to her spiky defence, not liking the rush of a very alien emotion within him, she’d gathered up all the cuttings and pictures, her CV and head-shots, and marched over to a nearby bin, dumping the lot.
She turned around, her hair shimmering as it moved over her shoulder. She crossed her arms. ‘Now, what was it you wanted to discuss?’
* * *
Lexie hated that her body was humming with awareness for this man. Who was blissfully immune to the angry emotions he was arousing.
What a judgmental, supercilious, arrogant, small-minded—
‘I owe you an apology,’ he said tightly.
Lexie blinked. The anger inside her suffered a body-blow. ‘Yes, you do.’
His mouth was a grim line. ‘I had no right to judge you on the basis of those pictures.’
‘No, you didn’t,’ Lexie snapped, but then she flushed again when she thought of another similar shoot she’d done relatively recently—albeit for a much more up-market publication and with a world-famous photographer. But still, she couldn’t exactly claim the moral high ground either... ‘It’s fine,’ she dismissed airily, ‘let’s forget about it.’
He sighed heavily then, and opened up the laptop that was on the desk in front of him. ‘You should see this.’
Trepidation skittered over her skin. Warily Lexie walked around the desk until she could see the laptop, acutely conscious of her proximity to him. When she saw the images, though, her belly swooped alarmingly.
It was her, and him, locked in a clinch that looked positively X-rated. Both his hands were under her skirt, pulling it up, baring her legs. Her breasts seemed about to explode from her corset, crushed against his chest. Their mouths were locked together in a passionate kiss, their eyes closed. Lexie’s hands gripped his shirt so tightly that her knuckles were white. And just like that it all came back in a rush: the desperation, the craving, the aching. The need.
Lexie could feel heat from behind her. She swallowed. There could be no mistaking that whatever had happened between them had consumed them both. It was not a comfort.
‘Where is this?’ she asked hoarsely, unable to stop looking away from the image with some kind of sick fascination.