A Prize Beyond Jewels (9 page)

Which, with hindsight, he could see that he had done, and still was.

Just because Nina had walked out on him this morning? Or something else? Something more?

Nina had certainly got to him in a way no other woman had, but surely that didn’t mean—

‘Then why bother asking?’ Nina snapped impatiently, hands thrust into the back pockets of those tight-fitting denims as she glared across the office at him, thrusting her breasts forward.

And instantly causing Rafe’s body to throb and ache with the desire to make love to her all over again.

What was it about this woman, this woman in particular, that he had told her those things about himself last night? That he became aroused just looking at her flashing green eyes, those lushly full lips, the challenging tilt of that stubborn little chin, and those breasts tipped by hard little points visible against her T-shirt? Damned if Rafe knew, he only knew that he did.

He sighed heavily. ‘Okay, so I might have come on a little strong downstairs.’

‘A little strong?’ Nina echoed scathingly as she began to pace the office like a caged tigress. ‘You not only embarrassed yourself but you embarrassed me too.’ She glared at him. ‘Rich and Andy know exactly where I spent the night, an awkwardness I already have to deal with. I certainly didn’t need you bursting into the gallery just now behaving like some prehistoric—’

‘I think I got that part of the conversation,’ Rafe drawled dryly.

‘Then I suggest you make a note of it for any future relationships you might have,’ she snapped. ‘Because women have moved on a long way since we all lived in caves.’

His brows rose. ‘I’m perfectly happy with the relationship I have at the moment, thanks very much.’ And he wasn’t sure he felt altogether comfortable discussing any future relationships with the woman he was currently involved with, either. The woman he had spent such an amazing night with. The woman he wanted to spend many more nights with.

‘We don’t have a relationship, Rafe,’ Nina told him evenly.

‘Last night—’

‘Was last night,’ she insisted firmly. ‘And one night does not a relationship make,’ she added decisively.

Rafe stilled as he eyed her guardedly. ‘Then what does it make?’

Nina shrugged slender shoulders. ‘It made for a few very enjoyable hours in bed together.’ She deliberately used the past tense, knowing she would never forget those precious hours, at the same time as she accepted she had been just another conquest for Rafe, just another woman to fall for his charm.

But she had known that when she went to bed with him, so no recriminations there. It wasn’t Rafe’s fault that her emotions had become involved to a degree where Nina wasn’t sure if she wasn’t already half in love with him.

Rafe didn’t care for the past tense in Nina’s statement. ‘And is that your usual modus operandi? Spend the night with a man and then just walk away?’ he persisted, now wondering exactly what Nina had meant the previous evening when she had told him she ‘lacked experience’? That inexperience certainly hadn’t been apparent last night when the two of them had enjoyed each other so completely.

He’d assumed at the time that Nina had meant that she’d had a couple of previous lovers, but nothing serious; her offhand attitude towards him this morning, to the night the two of them had spent together, seemed to imply otherwise. And he didn’t like it; he didn’t like it at all.

Nina didn’t like the sneer she could hear in Rafe’s tone. At the same time she wasn’t willing to back down on the stance she had decided to take where he was concerned.

Rafe might give the outward impression of a relaxed and charming playboy, but after their conversation last night Nina now knew there was another man behind that façade. A man of astute business acumen and deep intelligence. And curiosity.

And intelligence and curiosity were things she simply couldn’t afford where her father and the past were concerned.

But that didn’t stop her from wishing it could have been otherwise.

She had woken a little after six this morning, her body a pleasurable ache as she’d turned to find Rafe sleeping soundly beside her. She hadn’t been able to resist lingering, for just a few minutes, in order to study him in the early morning sunlight streaming in through the windows.

His face had appeared almost boyish in his relaxed state, the overlong darkness of his hair a silky curtain about those relaxed patrician features. Long lashes a dark sweep above the sharpness of his cheekbones, chiselled lips curving in a smile even in his sleep.

The sheet had fallen down to his waist, leaving his bronzed and muscled chest bare. His chest was covered in that light dusting of ebony hair that formed a vee down to the flatness of his navel, and lower, to where his shaft already lay aroused against his stomach.

Rafe was, without a doubt, the most beautiful man Nina had ever seen.

And last night he had been all hers, to kiss and touch. Their lovemaking was beyond anything Nina had ever imagined it could be, their bodies seeming to be totally attuned to pleasuring each other, each kiss, each caress a symphony of that pleasure.

It had been a beautiful night. One that Nina never intended to forget. But, as she had lain beside Rafe, drinking in her fill of him, she had known that it was over. That, for her father’s sake, it had to be.

She certainly wasn’t about to put her father at risk and become Rafe’s ‘sometimes’ girl. She knew Rafe well enough, his history with women well enough, to know that, despite their closeness last night, he had no intentions of settling down with one woman.

She gave a dismissive smile. ‘There’s nothing worse than waking up the morning after and turning over and being sorry that the person beside you is there.’

Rafe drew in a hissing breath, his eyes as hard as the gold they resembled. ‘And is that what happened to you? Did you wake up this morning and look at me and regret last night had ever happened?’

‘Don’t be silly, Rafe.’ She forced a tinkling, dismissive laugh, knowing she would never, could never, regret waking up beside Rafe this morning. But if he wanted to think that was what she had done, then perhaps she should just leave him under that misapprehension.

‘The two of us have a business relationship, and I think it’s more important we continue to maintain that than pursuing any fleeting pleasure we might find in going to bed together for a few days or weeks.’

‘A business relationship,’ he echoed softly.

She nodded. ‘There’s my father’s exhibition, and you asked me to consider designing some display cabinets for the Archangel galleries,’ she reminded him.

‘An offer I seem to remember you refused.’

Nina avoided meeting his piercing gaze. ‘And which I’m now reconsidering. Unless you’ve changed your mind?’

‘I haven’t, no. But I’m curious as to why you’ve changed yours,’ he prompted shrewdly.

It was a good question. And the simple answer to that lay in the decision she had made during the night regarding her future. No matter how much her father might fight against it, it really was time, past time, for her to start to break free of the confines that had been put on her life. Rafe’s barbs had shown her she needed to start to make a life of her own.

And the best way Nina could think of to start doing that was to make that career for herself. Without the help of her father. And certainly without continuing to sleep with the man responsible for offering her the commission that would be the stepping stone to her starting that career.

The Archangel galleries, in New York, Paris and London, were the most prestigious privately owned galleries in the world, and having her work on show there, by designing display cases for each of the three galleries, would bring her work to the attention of collectors and other galleries.

‘Why not, when it seems I already have my first commission?’ she came back dismissively.

Rafe couldn’t say he didn’t feel a certain satisfaction in hearing Nina say she had finally decided to break away from her father, to do something she wanted to do. He just questioned the reasons as to why she was choosing to do it now.

He was also far from pleased at the way Nina so easily dismissed the idea of there being any future relationship between the two of them.

‘If you feel it could be a problem for us after last night,’ she continued lightly, ‘then I can always discuss my ideas with Michael when I see him tomorrow evening.’

Rafe tensed as he felt a sharp pang of— Of what? Jealousy? He had never been jealous over a woman in his life!

His emotions had never been engaged enough in the past with any of the women he had been involved with to ever feel anything so basic as jealousy because of them.

Another way in which his feelings towards Nina were different from anything he had felt before?

His mouth thinned at the suggestion. He liked Nina, had very much enjoyed making love with her last night, but that was all he felt for her. He certainly wasn’t jealous of her suggestion she spend time with Michael tomorrow night. ‘It was my idea, my project, which means that Michael will also insist you deal directly with me, and not him.’

Nina’s eyes widened at the harshness of Rafe’s tone. She was unsure as to the reason for it. Any woman, unaware of Rafe’s aversion to emotional entanglement, might have thought that he was expressing jealousy at her suggestion of talking with his haughty but equally handsome older brother. Because Rafe D’Angelo didn’t do emotions like jealousy; why should he, when he could have any woman he wanted just by crooking his little finger at them?

No, Rafe was obviously still annoyed with her for having left his apartment this morning without saying goodbye. As annoyed, it seemed, as Nina was relieved that she’d found the strength to do so.

It would have been so much easier not to leave, to wake Rafe instead, to spend the morning in bed with him, making love with him. But she felt far too much for him already to allow herself to become any more deeply involved with him; she also knew she was just asking for her heart to be broken if she continued to be intimate with him.

If it wasn’t already too late.

She had never met anyone like Rafe before. A man who had everything, it seemed. A successful businessman. Confident and wealthy and so handsome he made her heart beat faster just to look at him. So charming it took every effort of will on her part to resist giving him whatever he asked of her. So indulgent and experienced a lover that Nina had lost count of the amount of times she had climaxed in his arms last night.

Just so everything that Nina was afraid she might already, stupidly, have fallen in love with him.

‘Fine,’ she accepted abruptly. ‘Was that all? It’s the gala opening tomorrow night, and I really need to get back to the gallery now and finish placing the jewellery in the cabinets.’

Rafe barely managed to bite back his irritation, his frustration, with this conversation. With Nina. With the fact that she had somehow managed to answer, and yet at the same time not answer, a single one of the questions he had asked her.

Why had she left so abruptly this morning? Was that how she usually reacted after spending the night with a man? If she had been the one to wake up beside him this morning and regretted spending the night with him? And lastly, why had she chosen today, of all days, to decide to begin to break away from her father, to pursue her own career, by accepting Rafe’s commission to design the display cabinets for the three Archangel galleries?

All of her answers to those questions had been either outright avoidance or glibness. Two behaviours Rafe had never before associated with Nina.

Two behaviours he found damned irritating, if he was honest with himself. Because they stopped him from reaching Nina. They erected a barrier between the two of them, and one that she seemed determined to keep firmly in place.

He sighed his frustration with the situation. ‘Is there going to be any fall-out for you, with your father, because you stayed at my apartment last night?’ he prompted impatiently.

Nina hadn’t seen her father yet today, but she had no doubt he would know by now that she had spent the previous night at Rafe D’Angelo’s apartment. Just as she had no doubts he would mention it to her when she saw him later this evening.

And Nina had absolutely no idea what he was going to say to her on the subject.

She was close enough to her father that she usually knew how he would react in any given situation, but her having stayed the night at Rafe’s apartment was so unusual that Nina really had no idea what her father’s opinion on that was going to be. No doubt she would find out later this evening.

‘It’s a little late to think about that, isn’t it, Rafe?’ she said dryly.

He shrugged. ‘I’ll talk to him if that would make it easier for you.’

Nina eyed him scathingly. ‘And say what, exactly?’

‘That it’s none of his damned business where you spent the night.’

‘No, thanks, I think I can handle it.’ She chuckled wryly, recalling the phone conversation she’d had with her father the first time he realised she had been with a man. It had been embarrassing for them both, but that was all it had been; much as he wanted to protect her, to keep her safe, her father also wanted her to enjoy what other twenty-something women enjoyed. As long as it was in the circle of his protection.

‘This isn’t the first time it’s happened, hmm?’ Rafe rasped knowingly.

‘Now you’re being deliberately insulting again.’ A frown creased Nina’s brow as she looked across at him reprovingly.

‘Am I?’ He crossed the room in restless strides before sitting down in the chair behind his desk. ‘Maybe that’s because I’m finding the whole of our present conversation insulting. We spent an enjoyable evening together—apart from when I made you cry,’ he acknowledged tightly. ‘But we got over that, and spent an even better night together. And yet this morning you’re telling me that you don’t want to go out with me again, because you want to concentrate on your career.’

‘I don’t recall your having asked me to go out with you again,’ Nina replied. ‘But you’re quite right in assuming my answer would have been no if you had,’ she continued firmly as he would have spoken. ‘We did have a lovely evening, and a fantastic night, and now it’s time to get back to the real world.’