Lexie opened her eyes and turned her head, and Cesar’s face was so close she could see the darker flecks of green in his eyes. Green on green—an ocean. She had the bizarre urge to reach up and touch his face, and had to curl her hand into a fist to stop herself.
The line of his cheek was a blade, giving his features that edgy saturnine impression. Something came over her—perhaps the knowledge that she could touch him in public as it would be expected. She lifted her hand and touched his jaw. She felt it clench under her hand and looked at him. His eyes had darkened and something hard shone through their depths. Cynicism.
It made her snatch her hand back. But not before he caught it with lightning swiftness and captured it, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the skin just as he had in the car. It was no less devastating this time.
‘You are quite the actress...’
Before Lexie could respond with some acid retort that might deflect from the fact that a scary poignancy had gripped her on seeing that cynicism, a menu was being handed to her by a waiter and she had to accept it. There was no room for poignancy; she didn’t care if Cesar was cynical.
Lexie stared at the menu blankly for a moment as she regained her composure. Damn the man. Again.
But of course the menu still remained largely incomprehensible to her. Another kind of dismay filled her—especially when she was so keyed up. She didn’t need this particular vulnerability right now.
‘It helps if you turn the menu the right way up.’
His voice was low and gently mocking. Lexie’s hands tightened on the thick vellum as embarrassment washed through her in waves, making her hot. She sent a glare to Cesar, who had that tantalising smile playing around his mouth again.
She turned the menu around but of course that made no difference. She could see the waiters taking orders now and started to panic. With the utmost reluctance she said to Cesar, in a low voice, ‘What would you recommend?’
He glanced at her for a moment and then perused his own menu and said, ‘Personally I’d recommend the quail starter—’
‘Quail?’ Lexie asked, feeling ill at the thought.
Cesar looked at her. ‘Well, there’s a brie starter too.’
‘I’ll have that,’ Lexie said with relief.
Cesar glanced back at the menu. ‘Then there’s a choice of salmon risotto, beef carpaccio...’
‘The beef,’ Lexie said, too ashamed to look at Cesar. Especially when she thought of his multi-lingual lovers who would be well used to these situations.
He said from beside her, ‘Not everyone is used to menus in French—it’s nothing to be embarrassed about.’
Lexie’s own mortification made her lash out. ‘Don’t patronise me, Cesar. I’m not stupid, I’m just—’
But before she could finish a waiter had arrived and Cesar was ordering for both of them. Lexie clamped her mouth shut. Did she have to let every tiny detail of her life out whenever she opened her mouth?
When the waiter moved on Cesar’s attention was taken by someone sitting to his left, and Lexie was facing a table full of people looking at her with varying degrees of curiosity.
To her immediate right was an older woman who leaned into Lexie and said in an American accent, ‘My dear, you’ve quite set the cat among the pigeons, arriving with one of the most eligible bachelors in the world.’
Lexie smiled weakly. To her relief, she discovered that the woman was as charming as she was obviously eccentric and rich, and she regaled Lexie with stories of her ex-pat life in Spain.
Relieved to have an excuse to avoid that green-eyed scrutiny, Lexie conversed enthusiastically with the woman.
* * *
Cesar willed himself to relax for the umpteenth time. The food had been served and eaten. Lexie had managed to spend most if not all that time ignoring him. It was unprecedented. He’d never had this experience with a woman before. And certainly not with one he’d kissed.
When he’d noticed her struggling with the menu, and that she’d had it upside down, a lurch of emotion had tightened his gut. He remembered her story about how she’d got started in the industry, leaving home so young, and presumably leaving school. She hadn’t gone to university. She obviously wasn’t as sophisticated as the women he was used to. And yet there was something refreshing about that.
Just before they’d been interrupted she’d said angrily, ‘I’m not stupid.’ But that was one thing that had never come into his mind. Lexie Anderson had more intelligence sparking out of those blue eyes than he’d ever seen in his life.
With some of his previous lovers Cesar had found himself calling things off purely because of mental exhaustion. It was as if they felt they had to prove to him what worthy candidates they were by conversing in three languages at once, about complicated political systems that he had no interest in. And in the bedroom more than one had been keen to initiate kinky scenarios that had felt anything but sexy.
But with Lexie...every time he looked at her he felt kinky. He wanted to tie her down to some flat soft surface and ravish her.
Perhaps it was due to the fact that when they’d stepped out of the car earlier, to face the press, his body had still been humming with an overload of sexual frustration, but the experience hadn’t been half as painful as he’d imagined. Having Lexie by his side had seemed to mitigate his usual excoriating feeling that the lenses of the paparazzi had some kind of X-ray vision.