He’d had enough women throwing themselves at him on practically a weekly basis that he’d never had to lust after any woman quite so...helplessly. Not the most stunning supermodels, or the most worshipped Hollywood starlets. But he was lusting after this perfectly pretty, perfectly cheeky, perfectly ordinary woman. Who, it turned out, was to him most extraordinary.
A little like the woman who had been too frightened to do the static line jump but who, when steering the tandem jump chute with him, had displayed a skill and eagerness that had belied his initial conclusion that she was a novice.
Against all logic, Kaspar found himself fascinated.
There was a story there. But what? And why did he even care?
Sexual attraction was one thing. But this was something else. Something...more. Certainly more than the physical. She possessed a magnetism in the aura she gave off and the way people gravitated towards her. Especially—and Kaspar gritted his teeth at the thought—the other men on the dance floor. Was he the only one to notice how she danced and twirled, shaking and shimmying quite mesmerisingly, and yet all the while deftly kept her friend between herself and any would-be suitors?
As if the intensity of his stare had finally reached her, she lifted her head, met his gaze and froze. Even from this distance, in this light, he could see the sweetest bloom staining her cheeks and down the elegant line of her neck, her chest rising and falling rapidly in a way that had nothing to do with the fact she’d been dancing. Or perhaps it was just the vividness of his imagination. Remembering the way she’d flushed in the plane the other day.
Either way, he was certain she was consumed by the same greedy fire as he was. The fire that had brought him here tonight, against every shred of logic.
And then she moved, heading off the floor and away from him. His stomach lurched in a way that was all too alien to him and before Kaspar knew what he was doing, he had set his untouched drink down on the bar behind him and was shifting his feet, ready to move. Not prepared to lose her.
Abruptly, her friend caught her and pulled her back. He kept waiting for them to glance in his direction, maybe share a giggle, which he’d seen from women time and again. A part of him almost welcomed it. It might help to topple her from whatever invisible pedestal on which he’d set her, help remind him that she was a woman like any other.
But it didn’t happen. If anything, Archie studiously avoided meeting his gaze again, and had clearly omitted to mention him to her friend, and her dignified discretion only seemed to add to her allure. Especially when she resumed dancing, only to be a little more self-conscious, a fraction stiffer than she had been before. It was the tell he needed, knowing now she was indeed equally attracted to him.
It should concern him more that it felt like such a victory.
Alarm bells were sounding but too faint, too distant to have the impact he suspected they should have had. To jolt him back to reality. To warn him that she didn’t look like the kind of woman who did one-night stands. She looked like the kind of woman who did walks along beaches, and romantic meals, and talking until dawn. Relationships. Love. It was such bull.
He’d seen first-hand the toxic depths to which such emotions could plunge. His parents’ explosive marriage had been equalled only by their acrimonious divorce. And him, in the middle of it all his life. Their pawn. The tool they’d used to goad and taunt each other. The burden they’d each tried to make the other one bear.
And not just his parents. What about his own explosiveness? That out-of-control side of him that had only had to emerge once to completely ruin someone’s life. He’d sworn it would never happen again, and it hadn’t. Some might call him emotionally detached, or unavailable. He wasn’t. Where his patients were concerned he felt as much empathy as he could, for patient and family, without it impairing his ability to do his job. It was only in his personal life where he exerted such emotional...discipline.
So he did sex. He did fun. He did mutual gratification.
He didn’t do intimacy and he didn’t do complications.
Something told him that this Archie woman was both, and the best thing he could do, for both of them, would be to stay away.
Turning back to the bar, Kaspar picked up his drink and tried not to be irritated by the group of preening, simpering women who had begun to cluster around his part of the bar. It was about as easy as pretending he wasn’t searching out blonde hair and a metallic shimmer in the reflection of the mirror behind the glasses.
Apparently, his skydiving butterfly was now edging her way off the opposite side of the dance floor. About as far away from him as she could get.
He didn’t give himself time for second-guessing. For the second time that evening, he set his untouched drink down and gave in to temptation.
CHAPTER THREE
‘ARCHIE, WAIT. SLOW DOWN. Where are you going this time?’
‘Relax,’ Archie cast over her shoulder, a bright smile plastered to her lips at her friend’s typically bossy tone. ‘I’m just going for a drink.’
Still, she didn’t slow down in her quest to get off the dance floor and around to the other side of an enormous pillar that would shield her from Kaspar’s view. No easy feat in the ridiculously high heels Katie had insisted on lending her to go with the seriously sexy metallic number her friend had also talked her into buying this afternoon.
It was years since she’d been out so called clubbing it—not that she’d ever had the time or inclination to go out all that often, neither was this charity wrap party exactly clubbing it—but, still, she hoped she hadn’t looked too awkward and robotic out there on the dance floor. She’d felt fine...right up until she’d seen him watching her.
The minute she’d spotted him, her body hadn’t quite felt her own. As though it wasn’t completely under her control. Even now the memory of his eyes scanning over her left her blood feeling as though it was effervescing through her veins, making her entire body hum.
It was an unfamiliar, but not altogether unpleasant sensation.
Ducking behind the pillar, Archie pressed her back against the cool, smooth concrete and rested her hand underneath her breastbone. She could feel the tattoo her heart was drumming out, leaving her unable to even catch her breath. And it had nothing to do with the dancing. Oh, she’d tried to ignore him, especially when his usual harem had draped themselves around him and he’d barely had the decency to offer any of them the time of day.
But who could ignore Kaspar Athari?
‘So, if you’re getting a drink why are we the other side of the room from the bar?’ Katie bobbed under her nose, her brow knitted.
‘Hmm? Oh. I just...needed to catch my breath.’
It wasn’t exactly a lie, but she might have known her old friend would see through it.
‘Archie, you’re about as jittery as a beachgoer trying to get across hot sand.’
‘No, I’m not.’
Katie’s eyes narrowed sharply.
‘Is this about “the Surgeon Prince of Persia”?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she managed loftily, only for Katie to snort in derision.
‘Yeah, sure you don’t. He’s been devouring you with his eyes all night and you’ve been lapping it up.’
‘I have not,’ Archie spluttered, her knotted stomach twisting and flipping. ‘And it hasn’t been all night. It has been half an hour at most.’
‘Aha!’ Katie declared triumphantly. ‘So it is about the perennially sexy Kaspar Athari.’
‘No...not at all...well, not really. That is... Why are you frowning? Aren’t you the one who said I needed to get back out there and have fun, like we used to in uni? Like I did before my dad...died? Before I married Joe?’
