The Banker's Convenient Wife

Sucking in a deep steadying breath, she studied him. Her heart jumped as though it were on a trampoline. His luxuriant black hair was tousled, bold profile taut, his dense black lashes cut crescent-shaped shadows over his proud olive cheekbones. Extravagantly handsome, he had a raw masculine appeal that turned female heads wherever he went. He still took her breath away. Just as he had the very first time she’d seen him and the recollection of that particular day nearly four years ago swept her back in time…

Talking on a mobile phone, Roel had walked through the door of the busy salon where she’d worked as a junior stylist. There he had stilled, ebony brows elevating with a faint air of well-bred surprise as he’d taken in his surroundings. She had immediately understood that, like others before him, he had mistaken the salon for the much more exclusive place a few doors further along the street. In that split second when he had been on the brink of wheeling round to leave again something had propelled her forward. Something? The fact that he was so outrageously good-looking she would have gone without food for a week just to own a photo of him? How could she explain her own unbelievably powerful need to prevent him walking back out of her life again as casually as he had wandered into it?

‘Just you stay on the phone and I’ll take care of your hair,’ Hilary suggested, planting herself between him and the door, relying on his essential male instinct to avoid acknowledging that he had made a mistake to guide him.

He flicked her a perplexed glance, the sort that told her he did not really see her and was much more interested in his phone conversation. She expected that to change when she wielded the styling scissors around him. In her admittedly slender experience handsome men were well aware of being handsome and as keen as any woman to ensure that their hair was cut only to their own exact specification.

‘Do what needs to be done,’ Roel told her impatiently.

Asked for guidance a second time, he gave her an unbelieving appraisal. ‘But it’s only a haircut, nothing important.’

So she just copied the existing conservative style. Even the feel of his luxuriant black hair thrilled her fingertips. As he paid she urged him to make sure that he came back. He had just walked out when she noticed the large denomination banknote that she assumed he had accidentally dropped on the desk. Ever eager, she rushed out into the street after him.

‘It’s a tip,’ Roel said in a pained tone when she attempted to return the money. He stared down at her from his great height while a limousine the length of a train drew up behind him and a uniformed chauffeur leapt out to throw open the passenger door for his entry.

‘But it’s too much…’ she mumbled, staggered by the sight of that limo and the concept of a tip that size.

With a shrug of imperious dismissal, Roel swung away into his opulent car.

Hilary drifted back to the present to discover that while she had been lost in her thoughts Roel had contrived to regain his natural colour and was upright again.

‘Should you be standing?’ Hilary queried, watching him set down the phone he had been using.

‘We’re going home,’ Roel imparted, ignoring the question.

In search of support, Hilary looked in dismay at the consultant. ‘Dr Lerther?’

The older man aimed a stiff smile at her. ‘There is no physical reason why your husband should remain at the clinic.’

‘Naturalmente…the other problem will vanish,’ Roel pronounced with supreme confidence.

We’re going home. Home? For goodness’ sake, where was home? Caught totally unprepared for the development, Hilary followed Roel out to the lift, which swept them down to the ground floor. There she learned that the case she had left at reception had already been stowed in the transport awaiting them.

‘So where were you when I crashed my car yesterday?’ Roel enquired a tinge drily.

‘In London…er…I have a business there,’ Hilary answered in an undertone while she frantically wondered what she was supposed to do or say next for she had no script on which to act. Nothing was as she had assumed it would be. He was walking wounded, conscious, but by no stretch of the imagination was he himself.

A limousine with tinted windows sat outside the clinic. A chauffeur doffed his cap. She climbed in and sank into a seat upholstered in rich hide leather. She struggled not to gawp at the astonishing luxury of the car interior.

‘How long have we been married?’ Roel drawled softly.

Without looking at him, Hilary breathed in deep. ‘I think it’ll be more relaxing if I don’t force-feed you facts—’

Roel reached out a lean brown hand and closed long, sure fingers over hers. ‘I want to know everything—’

Startled by the ease with which he had touched her, Hilary could not prevent her fingers from trembling within the hold of his. ‘Dr Lerther said that telling you things that you didn’t really need to know would just complicate matters—’

‘Let me decide what I need to know,’ Roel incised without hesitation.

‘I think Dr Lerther has your best interests at heart and I don’t want to risk your recovery by going against his advice,’ Hilary confided unevenly, for that physically close to him for the first time ever she was a bundle of nerves.

‘That’s nonsense.’

‘In a few days you’ll have remembered it all for yourself,’ Hilary pointed out in urgent consolation, appreciating how much more that scenario was likely to appeal to him. ‘It would be better that way…much better.’

In her eagerness to convince him that patience was his best option, Hilary finally dared to glance up. She met his dark golden gaze in a head-on collision. Her mouth dried and her heart pounded like crazy.

‘And in the short term?’ Roel prompted in his dark, deep drawl.

His delicious growling accent seemed to shimmy down her sensitive spine and set up a chain reaction through her tense body. She was welded to the spot by the electrifying gold of his appraisal; her mind was a blank. ‘The short term…?’ she parroted like someone who had never heard the expression before.

‘You and I,’ Roel specified with a low-pitched laugh that sent the colour flying up into her cheeks while she stared up at him with eyes the same shade as winter skies. ‘What do I do with a wife I’ve forgotten?’

‘You don’t need to do anything. You just trust her to l-look out for you,’ Hilary stammered, fighting with every fibre of her being to suppress her embarrassing lack of self-control around him. Why was she hanging on his every word like a lovelorn schoolgirl and gaping at him like a star struck fan? She was infuriated by her own weakness. Her role was to be a supportive friend, nothing more, nothing less. But the sheer thrill level of just being alone with Roel seemed to have stolen her wits.

‘Look out for me?’ Roel studied her from below black spiky lashes. She was planning to look out for him? In all his life he did not think that he had ever heard anything more naive or ridiculous. Yet he said nothing because she shone with sincerity and good intentions.

‘That’s what I’m here for…’ Hilary extended, but she could hardly find her voice to make that added assurance for her vocal cords were threatening to let her down. His proximity and the casual confidence with which he touched her were sending her brain into freefall.

Even as she spoke Roel raised a hand to let his forefinger trace the luscious fullness of her soft pink lower lip and that did nothing to cool her temperature. Indeed, where he touched her skin seemed to tighten with an awareness so acute it almost hurt to experience it. Leaning closer without even being aware of it, Hilary gave an almost imperceptible gasp as her nipples hardened into stiff straining points below her tee shirt.

‘You’re trembling…’ Roel murmured huskily. ‘But then why not? This is a stimulating situation.’

‘I beg your pardon…?’ Hilary whispered, convinced she had misheard him.

‘A wife I’ve forgotten,’ Roel quipped, watching her with eyes as bright and tough as metallic bronze. ‘A woman with whom I must have shared many intimacies but who appears to me at this moment in the guise of a complete stranger. It’s a sexually intriguing concept, cara mia. How could it be anything else?’

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