Suzy’s chest heaved as she snatched in short breath after short breath in an effort to control her temper. She wanted to slap his point-scoring fingers off his hand. She wanted to deprive him utterly of the ability to stand there telling her without embarrassment that he had approached her father behind her back on her supposed behalf. ‘I don’t know what you’ve done... I’m not even sure I want to know!’ she exclaimed. ‘Did you tell Dad that Percy attacked me?’
‘Yes, and while he was very angry he knows that you’re not seriously hurt.’
‘You have no right to interfere in my life!’ Suzy hurled at him.
‘The pub belongs to your father, not to you, and what arrangements he chooses to make with me are entirely his business,’ Ruy spelt out, dropping her back down to earth again with a crash. ‘As it happens, I’ve bought a share in the pub. I will be a silent partner, but it takes the pressure off your father. He will be able to repay Brenton without difficulty, although, as I told him, he could take him to court over the paperwork, which did not clearly specify the interest rate Brenton was charging. But your father prefers to let that go—he’s not keen on the idea of calling in a solicitor.’
Suzy had gone white with mounting shock and dismay. ‘You’ve bought a share in our pub?’ she gasped in disbelief. ‘But why the heck would you do that?’
‘I live locally now, although I won’t be resident here throughout the year. It’s an investment. A pub is an asset in a village,’ Ruy pronounced, as though he were not aware that the business was struggling. ‘Now it will stay open and your father remains the landlord.’
‘I just don’t believe this!’ Suzy confessed in seething frustration.
‘I had to find some way around your reluctance to accept my financial help,’ Ruy pointed out without shame.
‘But don’t you see that what you’ve done is wrong?’ Suzy demanded angrily. ‘That you’ve simply found another way of bribing me and getting me to do what you want? Evidently, you only bought into the pub to manipulate me!’
‘Your father is happy, and you love your father. I don’t see what the problem is or how it can be wrong when I have only good intentions,’ Ruy declared, brilliant dark eyes challenging hers.
‘I know you’re not likely to beat me up, but you leave Percy standing in the ruthless stakes!’ Suzy condemned.
‘That is possible,’ Ruy conceded without surprise or regret. ‘I always play to win. When I want something, I do go all out to get it.’
‘I’m a person, not a something!’ Suzy hissed censoriously. ‘I already agreed that I would try to model for you. At no cost! There was no need for you to go behind my back and invest in the pub!’
‘Set aside my financial investment in your father’s business,’ Ruy advised. ‘It is nothing to do with you, except insofar as it means that you can now stop worrying about your father’s security.’
In a passion of confusion and incredulity, Suzy folded her arms and spun away from him. ‘Nothing will convince me that you had a sincere interest in buying a share of the pub!’ she shot at him.
Ruy shrugged a broad shoulder. ‘I’m not trying to convince you. I don’t have to justify what I’ve done, but I would make the point that your father is very happy with his side of the bargain and even more relieved to know that Percy is out of both your lives.’
Suzy’s slender hands knotted into fists. ‘Damn you!’ she snapped at him, because every time she thought she had him on a weak spot he leapt away and put her there instead. ‘You drive me insane!’
‘And your passion lights me up,’ Ruy confided in a raw undertone, needing to touch her almost as badly as he needed to paint her, flexing his long fingers and coiling them up again, rigid with the tension of unsated arousal.
Never before had he been with such an emotional woman. He had learned to repress his own emotions. He slept with women who had no drama to irritate him and he could not begin to explain or understand what it was about Suzy’s volatility that made her so very desirable. That trait, that essential fire in her, should have been a turn-off and yet, it wasn’t. She was not his type, categorically not his type, but when she went toe to toe with him, fists knotted, eyes shimmering in challenge like polished malachite, pink pouty lips parted to display little pearl-like teeth, it turned him on so hard and fast that the zip of his jeans bit a pattern into his throbbing flesh.
‘Your control, your coldness, has the opposite effect on me,’ Suzy confided tautly. ‘It makes me want to shake you up.’
‘Success...major success on that score,’ Ruy purred with an emphasis that seemed to glide down her rigid spine like caressing fingers.
Suzy’s knees wobbled a little. ‘We really are oil and water,’ she muttered uneasily.
‘No, we’re more like a conflagration,’ Ruy husked, stalking closer, suddenly seeming to snatch all the oxygen out of the air she needed to breathe. ‘And it’s a fire I don’t want to put out because, like any man, I love the burn, querida.’
‘I’m shouting at you. You can’t change the subject in the middle of an argument,’ Suzy told him loftily.
‘That’s the look I want when you lift your chin...just like that.’ Ruy angled up her chin with a fingertip, let it slide back down the cord of her neck to her clavicle, where it lingered. ‘And you look at me like you’re a queen and I’m a filthy peasant. No woman has ever looked at me like that.’
‘You have the most wildly extravagant imagination,’ Suzy remarked unevenly, stepping back a few inches, the skin of her neck tingling, tenderly aware of that light touch, so very different from Percy’s harsh, careless grip on her arm, her elbow or her shoulder. Her shoulders met with the wall. She had honestly believed that Percy didn’t know his own strength. How naïve had she been in believing that that occasional roughness was simply masculine, careless and unintentional?
Her gaze locked to Ruy’s lean dark features and something sweet and yet almost painful clenched low in her pelvis and for the first time she recognised what was happening to her body. She regretted that she had got halfway through her twenty-second year before experiencing normal sexual attraction. The race of her pulse, the hammer of her heart, the sudden tightening of her nipples as well as the dryness of her mouth held her fast because she had never felt anything that powerful before and she was remembering that kiss, that brief but glorious adrenalin rush.
Dark golden eyes welded to hers, Ruy stalked slowly closer and her heart raced so fast it felt as though it were thumping at the foot of her throat. He reached for her and if he hadn’t reached for her she reckoned that she would have shamelessly grabbed him.
‘You want this?’ Ruy breathed in a driven undertone, easing her closer, one hand braced on her hip, the other braced against the wall behind her.