A Little Seduction Omnibus (6 page)

In fact just as soon as she had had her breakfast she had approached the hotel manager to ask if there was any chance that another interpreter might now be free, but once again she had met with the same response. The conventions taking place in the city meant that it was impossible for them to provide her with this service.

Tempted though Beth had been to tell Alex that she simply no longer required his help, common sense had forced her to acknowledge that this would be cutting off her nose to spite her face. Although it was true that most Czechs could either speak or understand English, Beth needed to be very sure of exactly what was being said if she should decide to give any of the factories an order, and she also needed someone to help her negotiate the best possible price she could for whatever she might decide to order, and that meant having someone with her who had a proper grasp of the Czech language.

However, there was one thing she could do, and that was make sure that she spent as little time as possible with Alex Andrews, and to that end Beth had decided that today, instead of only visiting two factories, she would insist that they manage to visit three, which meant that would leave her with only another half a dozen on her list.

‘No? Then
I
shall take you to see it,’ Alex was announcing, ignoring Beth’s steely silence. ‘I expect you already know that it was the first permanent bridge to be built in Northern Europe and—’

‘Yes, I
have
read the guidebooks,’ Beth interrupted him shortly. ‘But as for seeing it...’ She shook her head and told him briskly, ‘I’m here on business, and that has to take priority over everything else...’

As she spoke she couldn’t resist looking towards the gift shop. The lustres were still there, tantalisingly.

She gave a sigh.

‘I have been thinking,’ Alex told her quietly. ‘If good-quality reproduction Venetian baroque crystal
is
what you are looking for then my cousins’ factory is most definitely somewhere you should visit. If you should wish to visit I’m sure I could arrange something.’

‘Yes, I’m sure you could,’ Beth agreed sarcastically. Just how stupid did he think she was?

‘Is your cousins’ factory mentioned on my list?’ she asked him, already knowing what the answer would be.

As she had known he would, Alex shook his head as she held her list out to him.

‘These factories were originally state-owned, and though they are now back in private hands they do not... My cousins’ factory is not like them. It does not cater to the mass market. Until the Revolution they mainly supplied the Russian hierarchy.’

‘Fascinating though the history of your family undoubtedly is—to you,’ she told him coolly, ‘I’m afraid that I simply don’t have time to listen to it.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘There are three factories I want to see today, so I suggest that we make a start...’

She could see that Alex was starting to frown.

‘Beth,’ he began, reaching out to catch hold of her arm. Unable to move in time to prevent him, Beth went rigid as she felt his fingers circle her wrist.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ he asked her huskily. His thumb was resting on the pulse in her wrist and she could feel it starting to hammer frantically against his touch. He could obviously feel it as well, because his thumb started to move against her skin in a rhythmic, circular stroking movement that should have been soothing but for some reason had quite the opposite effect on her hypersensitive nervous system.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she lied jerkily, willing herself not to allow the deep tremor she could feel beginning deep within her body like some subterranean force to manifest itself in open shivers and shudders of reaction.

And then, to her own self-contempt, she heard herself asking him sharply, ‘Did you enjoy yourself last night—with your family?’

The appraising look he gave her made her wish she had kept silent.

‘Yes, I did,’ he agreed calmly, ‘but nowhere near so much as I would have had you been with us, and certainly nowhere near so much as I would had we been alone...’

Beth’s gasp was, she assured herself, one of furious female outrage. How dared he have the barefaced cheek to stand there and say such a thing to her when she knew, when she had seen with her own eyes, just how he had spent his evening and with whom?

‘Tonight, I want you to have dinner with me,’ he was continuing. ‘Tonight, I want you,’ he added, underlining the sensuality of his message and his desire.

But that desire was faked, flawed, a lie, and Beth knew it.

‘I can’t. I’ve already made arrangements for this evening,’ she told him coolly.

Ridiculous to feel that
she
was at fault just because of the way he managed to fake those dark shadows in his eyes and that male look of hurt withdrawal in the tightness of his mouth.
She
was the one who was being badly treated, not him.

* * *

‘You’re not going to find what you’re looking for at any of the factories on your list,’ Alex informed Beth as they left the third factory.

‘No. I’m coming to realise that,’ Beth said testily. She felt both tired and disappointed, but that was not the real cause of her defensive anger and she knew it. Five hours of being cooped up in a small car with Alex was beginning to have its effect on her equilibrium—and her emotions.

She had done everything she could to hold him at a distance, but to her chagrin, instead of recognising that she had guessed what he was up to, he’d seemed to think that she wasn’t very well, anxiously asking her in some concern several times if she was suffering from a headache or feeling unwell. Only her own cautious nature had prevented her from telling him that if she
was
suffering from any kind of malaise then he was its cause. But there was more to what she was experiencing than that, she was forced to acknowledge honestly.

Had she simply been able to feel for him the contempt and disdain she knew he deserved then there would have been no need for her defensive and protective anger. But against all logic, and certainly against any cerebral desire on her part, she was unable to deny her body’s physical reaction, her body’s physical
response
to him; that was why she was getting so uptight and angry.

Every time he made some comment about wanting her, every time he alluded to how much he desired her, she could feel herself starting to react to him. And she had even, at one morale-lowering point, found herself wishing that he
would
put his softly suggestive comment about longing to silence her sharp tongue with his mouth into action.

‘You’re so prickly that a man can’t help but feel tempted to wonder what it would take to make you purr,’ he’d informed her outrageously when she had refused his suggestion that they find somewhere to have lunch.

‘You’re right,’ he had agreed, when she had told him shortly that she didn’t want to eat, his eyes suddenly dark and hot. ‘
My
appetite isn’t for food either. What I really want to taste is the sweet softness of your flesh. Its juices will be like nectar, honey to my lips, whilst—’

‘Stop it,’ Beth had demanded frantically, unable to screen out the mental images his erotic words had provoked for her. How could she dislike him so much, distrust him so much, and yet, at the same time,
want
him so much?

It was just sex, she told herself fiercely. That was all. For some reason he had aroused within her a hitherto unexperienced need, a desire she had never suspected herself capable of feeling. The hesitant and awkward experiments of her teenage years had simply not prepared her for what she was feeling now—and that was all it was, a quirky build-up of the sexual desire she should perhaps have felt at a younger age but which, for some reason, she had not, and which was now manifesting itself in this totally unacceptable reaction to Alex Andrews.

Yes,
that
was what it was, she decided in relief. It was just sex...just an itch that needed scratching... Shocked by the unfamiliar directness of her own thoughts, Beth tried to concentrate on the countryside they were driving through. Just because she now knew the cause of her disturbing reaction to Alex, that didn’t mean she had to give in to it, she warned herself. And at least it meant she no longer had to worry about it, she told herself in relief.

‘Look...I’m sorry if I seem to be crowding you or rushing you,’ Alex was saying gruffly at her side. ‘All this is new territory for me, you know. I’ve never actually felt like this before, experienced anything like this before. I always knew that one day I would fall in love just as passionately and permanently as my grandfather fell in love with my grandmother, but I have to confess I didn’t expect it to be so...’

Heavens, but he was quick, clever... Beth acknowledged as she forced herself to be detached and step outside her own feelings to admire the adroit way he was handling not just the situation but her as well.

First the advance, now the back-off. No doubt he expected her to feel chagrin and to start pursuing
him
. And as for that schmaltzy comment about his grandparents...!

CHAPTER FIVE

‘I’
M
SORRY
THAT
none of the factories we visited today came up to your expectations.’ Alex joined her in the hotel’s gift shop and looked at his watch. ‘It’s too late for me to organise anything now, but why don’t I give my cousins a ring and arrange for you to visit their factory? We could...’

They moved back into the hotel foyer, which was very busy with business-suited people who Beth assumed must be attending one of the conferences in the hotel the manager had told her about. She felt tired and disappointed, but those feelings weren’t the real cause of the desire she felt to snap sharply at Alex.

Why, when she knew exactly what kind of man he was and exactly what he was after, was she experiencing this sense of new panic and fear that her self-control might not prove strong enough for her to hold him at bay? What was the matter with her? Surely she had enough intelligence to know that once one had been struck by lightning a first time one did not return to the same tree in a thunderstorm and stand there waiting for it to happen again. Not unless one was a very peculiar sort of person who thrived on suffering pain.

Was
she that kind of person, the kind of person who only attracted the sort of relationship, the sort of
man
who would hurt and humiliate her? Beth knew from the strength of her own inner abhorrence that she wasn’t.

So why, then, did she feel the way she did?

She felt the way she did because she was sexually attracted to Alex, she told herself brutally; she was chemically and hormonally responsive to him. That was all... It crossed her mind as the movement of the crowd pushed her up against him and he reached out automatically to hold her that it might almost be worthwhile actually giving in to what she was feeling, what she was
wanting
, and simply having sex with him. Perhaps once she had done so, once he had realised that she was able to separate her feelings of sexual desire for him from her emotions, that just because she went to bed with him it didn’t mean she was going to allow him to persuade her to give his cousins her business or him her money, he might stop trying to pressurise her. After all, she already knew that the only real interest he had in her was a financial one, despite the attention he was paying her and the compliments he was giving her.

‘It’s too crowded in here. We could talk more easily in your room.’

Alex’s words, whispered so temptingly against her ear, mirroring so closely the intimate sensuality of her own thoughts, threw Beth into feminine panic.

‘No. No...’ she denied quickly, frantically trying to make some space between them. Could Alex feel the tumultuous, uneven thudding of her heartbeat as clearly as she could feel the deep male pounding of his? And, if he could, was it having the same intense effect upon his senses as his was upon hers? Beth closed her eyes, struggling to break free of the tide of hungry need she could feel welling up inside her. All day long she had been fighting against this; all day long she had been struggling to hold both Alex and her own unfamiliar responsiveness to him at bay.

Now, pressed up against him in the airless atmosphere of the hotel lobby, she was terrifyingly aware of how readily her senses responded to him, of how great the temptation was not to move away from him but to move
closer
.

‘I could ring my cousins from your room,’ Alex was telling her persuasively. ‘I promise you you won’t be disappointed, Beth.’

Was it just her imagination, or was he subtly implying that her expectations of pleasure would not merely be satisfied by the quality of his cousins’ glass? Beth could feel her face starting to burn with hectic hormone-driven colour.

The warmth of his breath as he spoke to her was so tantalisingly like a caress that she had to grit her teeth to stop herself from moving closer to it, to stop herself from imagining how it would feel to have the soft caress of his mouth moving against the tender, vulnerable pleasure spot just behind her ear, to move from there to...

Beneath her clothes Beth could feel her nipples peaking and thrusting eagerly against their protective covering, flaunting their availability and their need.

Frantically Beth decided that she had to do something, anything, to put a stop to what was happening.

‘From the way you’re talking, anyone would think that your cousins are the
only
manufacturers who produce high-quality reproduction antique glass,’ she told Alex challengingly, gritting her teeth as she deliberately pushed herself away from him and looked into his face.

‘Well, they aren’t the
only
ones, but they do have a reputation for being the best. Of the only other two I know, one has order books going right into the millennium—mainly from its American customers—and the other is presently in negotiation with an Italian company that wants to go into partnership with them.’

‘How very convenient,’ Beth told him sarcastically. ‘But as it happens I’ve actually found my own source...’

‘You have?’ Alex was frowning slightly. ‘May I ask where? None of the factories you’ve got listed...’

‘It isn’t somewhere on my list,’ Beth told him, too infuriated by his patronising manner to be guarded or cautious. ‘I’ve been told by one of the gypsy stall holders in Wenceslas Square that she can supply me with an introduction to a factory that makes the quality of glass I want.’

‘A stall holder in the Square?’ Alex looked patently unimpressed. ‘And you believed her?’ he derided, before asking her hardily, ‘You didn’t give her any money, did you?’

‘No, I didn’t. Not that it’s any of your business,’ Beth defended herself sharply. She felt like a naughty child, called up before her head teacher to explain herself, and it wasn’t a sensation she was enjoying. What right, after all, did Alex have to question any of her decisions? And as for his comment about her not parting with any money...!

‘She’s going to get some samples of the glass for me to look at...’

‘You’ve told her where you’re staying?’

If anything he was looking even more disapproving, and a belated sense of caution warned Beth not to tell him that she had actually arranged to go down to the Square to meet with the stall holder that evening.

‘She knows how to get in touch with me,’ was all she permitted herself to say.

‘You do know the reputations some of these gypsies have, don’t you?’ Alex demanded. ‘You must have been warned. A lot of them are illegal immigrants into the country. They are well known to be in the pay of organised criminals...’

‘What,
all
of them?’ Beth derided him, parodying his tone of voice to her minutes earlier.

‘This is not a situation you should take lightly,’ Alex told her sternly. ‘These are potentially very dangerous people.’

Beth couldn’t help herself. Childish though she knew it was, she gave a heavy, theatrically bored sigh that stopped Alex speaking immediately and caused his mouth to harden into an implacably tight line.

‘Very well,’ he told her curtly. ‘If you won’t listen to my advice then at least, for your own safety and my peace of mind, let me be there when you see these people.’

Let him be there... Knowing what she did, and knowing now just how determined he was to push her in the direction of his family’s business—no way.

The crowd which had thronged the lobby was thinning out now. The girl behind the reception desk, catching sight of Alex, signalled to him.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to Beth quickly, walking towards the desk. Beth could hear the girl saying something to him in Czech—telling him what? she wondered, her curiosity aroused by the girl’s unexpectedly respectful manner towards him, rather as though she considered Alex to be someone important.

From what she had seen of them, Beth knew that the Czechs were a very polite and courteous nation, treating one another with courtly good manners which seemed to have gone rather out of fashion in other Western countries, but the clerk behind the desk wasn’t merely treating Alex courteously; whilst her behaviour wasn’t exactly obsequious, it was very definitely deferential.

Frowning a little over this perplexing insight into someone else’s opinion of Alex, Beth quickly warned herself against encouraging herself to see hitherto unnoticed good points about him. She had made
that
mistake with Julian Cox, determinedly supporting him and even defending him to her closest friends when they had tried gently to warn her what kind of man he was.

She had even ignored the fact that her own best friend, Kelly, had had to reject his advances at the same time that she was actually seeing him, letting Julian persuade her that Kelly was just jealous.

Beth could hardly bear now to reflect on her own wilful foolishness. She knew that Kelly and her friends, most especially those closest to her—Anna and Dee—all believed that Julian’s perfidy had broken her heart. And it was true that she had believed that he loved her, that she had allowed herself to be carried away by the fantasy he had created around them both, the romantic deception he had woven. She was, as Beth was the first to admit, someone who was inclined to be a little over-idealistic, to believe that all her geese were potential swans, so to speak. However, even whilst Julian had been pressuring her to make plans for an elaborate engagement party, even whilst he had been swearing undying love to her, a tiny part of her had been just that little bit concerned, just that little bit wary that he was rushing things too much, that she wasn’t being given time to assimilate her own feelings properly.

All her life there had been fond, loving people there to make her most important decisions for her, to relieve her of the burden of having to do so for herself. Her parents, her grandparents, even her friends, all of them loving and caring, all of them protective, all of them acting from the best possible motives. But Beth could see now that their love and their protection had taken from her the right to make her own decisions
and
her own mistakes. It wasn’t their fault. It was her own. She ought to have been more assertive, less passive, less eager to be the beloved, adored child and more eager to be the respected woman. Well, all that was behind her now. For practical reasons she needed the services of an interpreter and a guide, but that was all. There was no way she needed anyone else’s support or anyone else’s advice in deciding what she wanted to buy for her shop.

Alex was still speaking with the girl behind the reception desk. Beth came to a quick decision. Whilst he was busy she had the perfect opportunity to get away from him. Quickly she headed towards the lift, only realising how anxious she had been that he would come after her once she was safely inside it and it was moving.

She had the lift to herself. Briefly she closed her eyes, her face burning as, without meaning to, she suddenly found herself remembering what Alex had said to her about being in a lift with her the previous day.

Angry with herself for the wayward and highly personal nature of her thoughts, she told herself determinedly that she had far better and more important things to think about than Alex Andrews.

Once inside her room, she rang down to the reception desk and informed them that she didn’t want to be disturbed—under any circumstances or by anyone.

She doubted that Alex would genuinely be concerned at not being able to make contact with her. After all, she wasn’t his only woman ‘client’, was she?

Beth frowned as she tried to analyse the feelings tensing her body when she recalled the very elegant, if undeniably older woman she had seen him with the previous evening—the evening he had told her he intended to spend with his family. She hadn’t looked the sort of person who would be taken in by the attentions of a flirtatious interpreter, but then perhaps, like her, she’d recognised Alex for exactly what he was and had decided to... There had certainly been a good deal of intimacy in the closeness of their bodies as they had stood together.

Beth wrapped her arms protectively around her own body. The distasteful suspicions flooding her mind should surely have the effect of totally destroying the physical desire she had begun to feel for Alex, not feeding the unexpected jealousy she could actually feel.

Annoyed with herself, she paced the floor of her room. It was too early for her to go back to the Square, where she had seen the gypsy, and she felt too restless to remain here in her room—as well as much too aware of the growing danger of wanting to remain alone with her own seriously undermining, intimate thoughts.

Perhaps a guided tour of the city would help to pass some of the time. Besides which, she genuinely wanted to see more of the place which had such a wonderful reputation.

* * *

Three hours later, at the end of her chosen tour, Beth had to acknowledge that she hadn’t realised the breadth of Prague’s varied history. She had been shown the Jewish Cemetery, and had marvelled at its antiquity. She had stood on the hillside and looked down at Prague’s pretty rooftops, admiring their copper cupolas and the soft warm reds of its tiles and bricks. She had seen the castle, with its many courtyards, and wandered with the other eager members of her group along the narrow streets lined with tiny, fascinating gift shops.

Having thanked her guide for her stimulating talk, Beth excused herself, slowly making her way back towards Wenceslas Square, stopping at one point to order a sandwich and a pot of coffee at a small attractive café where she could sit outside and watch the world go by.

If anything the Square was even more crowded this evening than it had been the evening before when she had first visited it, Beth decided as she made her way through the groups of other sightseers thronging the large cobbled area. The armour-making stall, the fire-eater and the acrobats were all there, and familiar to her, barely meriting more than a second interested look as she hurried to the stall where she had met the gypsy. Not only was the Square more crowded with tourists, there also seemed to be more stalls as well, Beth recognised, and at first she thought that her stall wasn’t there.