Avoiding Mr Right by Sophie Weston Page B

narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’
    Christina took one look at his bleak expression and decided that her sympathies lay with the Princess. ‘You weren’t in that hotel by chance. I saw you at the fax machine.’
    ‘Really?’ He was clearly not going to explain himself.
    He sounded icy.
    Christina refused to be intimidated. ‘Really,’ she said with spirit. ‘What’s more I wouldn’t spend the night with you if you were… were…’
    ‘The last man on earth?’ he prompted, his eyes glittering.
    She glared. ‘I was going to say, the Emperor of China, but it amounts to the same thing.’
    He stared at her as if she had struck him. There was a sharp silence. A muscle worked in his temple. Christina put her hand on the doorhandle. His mouth hardened.
    ‘Doesn’t it just?’ he said at last.
    ‘Goodbye.’
    She turned away, opening the door.
    ‘You’ll walk away from—?’
    He stopped as she swung back on him, suddenly savage. ‘From what, Luc? A few kisses? A man who was quite willing to hound me through the backstreets of Athens in a damn great Mafia limo? A man who can’t even tell me anything about himself because he doesn’t want me to know what he does for a living?’ Her voice spiralled upwards.
    Luc stared at her. She had the impression that he was utterly taken aback. It was some balm for her wounded feelings, but not much.
    She drew a shaky breath and said more quietly, ‘I don’t know what sort of girl you think I am, Luc. But I can tell you what I’m not. I’m not the sort of girl who spends the night with a man she can’t even trust .’
    She flung herself out of the car without waiting for his reply. She ran along the quay and scrambled quickly down the slippery steps where the car could not follow. She leaned back against the warm stone wall, her blood pounding in her ears.
    She did not know how long she stood there, the sun on her closed eyelids. Her breath slowly came back to normal. Luc did not follow her.
    Eventually she heard the expensive engine start and purr away down the sweep of the harbour road. When she looked, he had gone.
    Christina sank shakily down onto the sun-warmed steps. Her brain was whirling. Not just her brain, either. Physically she felt as if she had just withstood a tornado, every nerve alert, every muscle trembling faintly. And when she touched it her mouth was tender.
    How can a man affect me like this? she thought. Especially one I don’t know and don’t trust!
    She could find no explanation. Oh, there were plenty of excuses: he had startled her, she had not been braced to resist him, she had never met anyone like him before, she was trying to protect the children and the Princess by removing him from the hotel in the first place…
    But Christina was honest enough to admit that they were only excuses. She had gone with him, stayed with him for hours because she was deeply attracted to him, maybe was even a little in love with him. In spite of the heat haze she shivered. It was not a pleasant thought.
    She had never felt like this before about anyone. She had never had to face this tension between attraction and deep mistrust. She did not know what she ought to do. She did not even know, in her heart of hearts, what she wanted to do. She only knew that she did not want to think about the invitation she had rejected in case she regretted it too bitterly.
    That was where Christina stopped her thoughts dead in their tracks. ‘Who are you kidding?’ she muttered aloud, despising herself. ‘You don’t want to think about it in case you change your mind!’
    The thought was so alarming that she banished the whole subject. She stood up with resolution. There was still a job to be done. And first the children had to be collected.
     
    When she got to the hotel she did not even think about going through the main reception area. That was where she had encountered Luc Henri last time. This time she made her way round through the garden to the sports complex. In the