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 was not personally responsible for the profound luxury of their surroundings. The property wasn’t in a fashionable area and although the rooms were very spacious there didn’t seem to be that many of them. The house was a quirky one-off, so possibly he had got it cheap, she reasoned. On the other hand, equally possibly, he was a very successful artist. How would she know? That she had not recognised his name meant nothing because she had no knowledge of the art world.
‘The woods sold it for me more than anything else,’ Ruy told her. ‘Now, some things you said earlier today have worried me and I can’t pretend you didn’t say them. You said Brenton had too much power and that he would pile on the pressure and threaten you. Aside from the assault, why are you so frightened of the man?’
Suzy flushed from cheek to temple, the heat of mortification engulfing her in a tide, for she hadn’t realised just how much she had revealed while she was in the grip of hypothermia. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t discuss that.’
Undaunted, Ruy stretched his big powerful body back into his seat and lifted his dark head high, narrowed dark eyes of astonishing intensity locked to her. ‘Does it relate to your father’s ownership of the village pub?’ he enquired smoothly. ‘I’ve already learned that Brenton has a reputation for unscrupulous behaviour and that his financial dealings may be questionable.’
Hugely disconcerted by that statement, Suzy was grateful when the door opened and an older woman bustled in with plates. The interruption was welcome but at the same time Suzy was desperate to know how Ruy had acquired such information, bearing in mind that she had lived in the area all her life and had not heard so much as a whisper of such rumours.
‘Who told you that about Percy?’ she pressed as soon as they were alone again.
‘When I make financial enquiries, I have good sources.’ Ruy shook out his napkin with infuriating cool. ‘Let us enjoy our meal.’
Fizzing with frustration, Suzy settled her attention on her tomato and mozzarella first course and ate with an appetite that surprised her. Only when she thought about it did she recall that she had skipped her evening meal the night before and breakfast that morning and had only had the sandwich that Ruy had given her. Yet it felt to her as though weeks had passed since the previous day, because the future she had expected had suddenly vanished and she had no idea what would take the place of her acting as Percy’s wife. She supposed that after they had lost the pub she and her father would move to the nearest town in search of employment.
The main course, another sophisticated dish, arrived and Ruy offered her wine with the quip that Cecile wasn’t present to police her.
‘I’ve still got a bit of a headache and I took painkillers, so no, thanks, for the moment.’