The Ring The Spaniard Gave Her - Lynne Graham Page 0,15

and their incredulity over her non-appearance and she flinched, wiping her mind free of the embarrassing images again. What was done was done, she told herself, and she could not regret backing out of her agreement with Percy.

She had returned to bed with her wet hair wrapped in a towel and it took inventiveness to make herself even vaguely presentable because her curls had gone crazy. She finger-sorted and flattened and dampened and gave up in the end, glancing in the mirror and frowning before putting on her biker boots again and leaving the room.

Emerging onto a landing she didn’t even recall seeing before, she headed for the stairs since there didn’t appear to be anywhere else to go.

Ruy looked up from his sketch pad and saw her on the stairs, long pale, shapely legs thrust into those ridiculous boots, his capacious tee shirt almost hanging off one slender white shoulder. Her hair was wild and untamed, a messy mass of curls surrounding her triangular face in a cloud of Titian glory, huge green eyes striking his. He was entranced and he knew it, knew it was the artist in him, not the man, because for the first time in her presence he hadn’t got hard.

‘Ruy,’ she said, awkward in the buzzing silence, her attention falling to the slew of discarded sketches littering the coffee table and squinting at the nearest image, involuntarily impressed by the few slashing strokes on the page, which even she registered as recognisable. ‘Have you been drawing me?’

Ruy tossed the pad down on the coffee table, the faintest colour defining his remarkable cheekbones, dark eyes flaring gold as ingots as he looked up at her.

‘You look so guilty!’ Suzy carolled in unexpected delight, a teasing grin forming on her lips as she settled down on a capacious sofa and curled up. ‘You know you should have asked permission first.’

Unaccustomed to being read that accurately, Ruy suppressed a sardonic retort because she was smiling, and then the entirety of his attention was stolen by a glimpse of slender inner thigh that sent a pulse thrumming directly to his groin. It was that flawless skin of hers, so translucent and smooth that he could only wonder how it would feel beneath his fingertips. ‘I should have done,’ he agreed in a driven undertone, averting his gaze and willing his hormones to stop derailing him, disconcerted that she could make him react with so adolescent a lack of restraint. ‘But occasionally the desire to draw pushes me beyond the limits of courtesy. I apologise.’

‘You don’t need to,’ Suzy told him immediately, wondering why his admission that the pull of his art tempted him into forgetting his manners should strike her as so very, very sexy. She didn’t think like that, at least, she never had before meeting him. It was downright unnerving, in the wake of that first kiss initiated by her, to appreciate that around him she still didn’t seem capable of behaving normally. ‘You helped me today and I won’t forget that.’

‘I could scarcely have abandoned you in the tree house,’ Ruy pointed out. ‘That would have been manslaughter at the very least.’

And there it was: that other side of his nature, Suzy labelled straight away, that very controlled, pretty arrogant and almost chilling attitude of detachment that had set her on edge at their first meeting. ‘Never mind. I owe you a few sketches,’ she told him dismissively.

‘What I would really like is some clarification on the score of the wedding that misfired,’ Ruy admitted as he slid fluidly upright. ‘We’ll talk over dinner, which should be ready in a few minutes...’

‘Oh...’ Suzy said uncertainly, his sheer confidence that she would choose to confide in him leaving her bemused. ‘Can I help?’

‘I have a housekeeper. She does the catering.’ Ruy thrust open a door into a dining room with a contemporary glass table that was already set with cloth napkins, crystal glasses and gleaming cutlery.

Intimidated by that very formal setting, Suzy quickly dropped down into the chair he had tugged out for her. ‘Did you build this house? I didn’t even know it existed and yet it can’t be much more than a mile from the village.’

‘No, I bought it as is. The original owner of the property was something in showbusiness and this was to be his retirement home, but he passed away before he could move in,’ Ruy explained.

‘It’s a beautiful house,’ Suzy remarked, a little more relaxed by the assumption that Ruy