Perfect Strangers

34

His tone is polite. Distant, even. I don’t know if this is part of his breakneck mood change or if he’s taking pity on me and letting me off the hook. I think if he tried to force me to respond directly to that mind-blowing speech he just gave, I’d bolt right out of the room in a panic.

I clear my throat and moisten my lips. Despite all that water I drank, my mouth is desert dry. “I didn’t…I haven’t really thought about it, to tell you the truth. I expected I’d be focused mainly on trying to write, not…” I trail off, picturing our passionate tryst in the book store. Heat creeps back into my cheeks. “Sightseeing.”

“Sightseeing,” he repeats, his voice husky.

Don’t look at him. You’ll burst into flames. “But I suppose now that I’ve got someone with experience to show me around, I should take advantage of it.”

“Yes, I’m very experienced. And I’d very much enjoy showing you around.”

That’s a double entendre if I’ve ever heard one. Spoken in the same husky tone from moments before, his words carry a hidden meaning, a dark undercurrent of sensuality that tightens my stomach and makes me swallow hard around the sudden lump in my throat.

Or is my imagination playing tricks on me? Is he merely making conversation and I’m reading too much into innocent words?

Dammit, I hate having a brain that manufactures magical portals out of everyday cracks in a wall! Life would be so much easier if I were an accountant.

“That would be great,” I say carefully, looking everywhere but at him.

I hear his low chuckle and know that I’m amusing him.

Then from somewhere inside his suit jacket comes a muted electronic ding. I glance over. Frowning, he reaches inside his jacket and pulls out a cell phone, small and black, the size of a credit card. It’s thinnest one I’ve ever seen. Must be a European model not available in the States.

He takes one look at the screen and his entire body stiffens.

“Everything okay?”

His gaze flashes up to meet mine. He stares at me for a fraction of a moment, a strange new hardness in his eyes, then he says curtly, “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

“Go? Where?” I look around the restaurant, as if searching for a plausible explanation for this sudden turn of events, but James is already standing.

When he doesn’t answer, I know we’re in Touchy Subject area again.

Feeling dismayed, I allow him to help me out of my chair. Then he ushers me through the restaurant with his hand flattened protectively on the small of my back, moving his gaze swiftly left and right as if visually sweeping the area for land mines as we head to the door.

When we’re in the elevator heading down and he’s standing stiff and silent beside me, I lose my patience with the cloak and dagger routine. “Are you going to tell me why you’re so angry all of a sudden, or am I going to have to make up some story in my head that will probably be a thousand times worse than reality?”

“I’m not angry,” he snaps, sounding angry.

I sigh and close my eyes. “Okie dokie, then.”

A few seconds later, the elevator jolts to a stop.

I yelp in surprise, throwing a hand against the wall for balance. My eyes fly open. James turns away from the panel of buttons and looms over me, fire burning in his gaze as he backs me up against the elevator wall.

“It’s work. I don’t want to leave, but I have to.”

I stare up at him with narrowed eyes and a crinkled nose. “Work? An emergency portrait session, is that it? Somebody decided on a whim on a Friday night that they desperately needed you to get their mug on paper before they went to bed?”

“No, smartass. That’s not it.”

He’s big and bristling and obviously mad, but I’m not afraid of him and I’m not backing down. I know I’m the one who set up this whole no questions format, but that was before he started acting so suspicious.

“No? Okay. So your agent texted you to tell you he just lost a big sale? You have to run over to the gallery and beat him up or something?”

Through a clenched jaw, he says, “No.”

Nose to nose, we glare at each other. The heat of his body burns me right through my dress. I’m as pissed off as he is, but holy s**t do I want him to kiss me.

He can tell. He drops his gaze to my mouth. The heat between us ratchets up a few hundred degrees.

“I’m taking you home,” he growls. “I’ll come by later. It might be late. Don’t wait up for me.”

“Ha! You’re taking a lot for granted there, Romeo! Don’t come by later, I need my beauty sleep. You can try giving me a call tomorrow, but I’m not guaranteeing I’ll answer, because I’m feeling a little weirded out by this whole scenario. The only reason I can think why you’d suddenly get called away in the middle of dinner on a Friday night and then start acting all sorts of freaked out and paranoid is because you’re—”

I stop, the words turning to ash in my mouth.

I was about to say “in the witness protection program”—which I realize doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I was on a roll there—but something far worse has presented itself as an option. A word even more terrifying than “fugitive” has leapt into my mind.

That word is “married.”

I stare at him in horror.

When Edmond told me at the cocktail party that James was the most eligible bachelor in Paris, I took that to mean he was single. But considering Edmond’s blasé attitude toward monogamy, it’s possible he thinks all men are lifelong bachelors, no matter what legal commitments they’ve made.

James could have a wife holed up somewhere.