His Temporary Mistress by Cathy Williams Page B

unbuttoning his shirt, a prelude to having a shower, and Violet’s eyes were drawn to the sliver of brown chest being exposed inch by relentless inch. She hurriedly looked away but, even though she was staring fixedly at his face, she could still see the gradual unbuttoning of his shirt until it was completely open, at which point she cleared her throat and gazed at the door behind him.
    ‘There must be another room I can stay in. This place is enormous.’
    ‘Oh, there are hundreds of other rooms,’ Damien asserted nonchalantly. ‘However, you won’t be in any of them. It’s a few days and my mother has put us together. Somehow I don’t think she’s going to buy the line that we’re keeping ourselves virtuous for the big day.’ He pulled off his shirt and headed towards his case on the bed, flipping it open without looking at her. ‘We have roughly an hour before we need to be downstairs for drinks. My mother enjoys the formal approach when it comes to dining. It’s one of her idiosyncrasies. So do you want to have the bathroom first or shall I?’
    Violet hated his tone of voice. It was one which implied that he couldn’t even be bothered to take her concerns into account. He was accustomed to sharing beds with women, she thought with a burst of impotent anger. In his adult life, he had probably slept with a woman next to him a lot more often than he had slept alone. It wasn’t the same for her. Did he imagine that she would be able to lie next to him and pretend that she was on her own? The bed was king-sized but the thought of moving in the night and accidentally colliding with his sleeping form was enough to make her feel like fainting.
    ‘I hate this,’ she whispered, filled with self-pity that the last vestige of her dignity was being stripped away from her. ‘You’ll have to sleep on the sofa.’
    Damien glanced at the chaise longue by the window and wondered whether she was being serious. ‘I’m six foot four. What would you suggest I do with my feet?’ He raised his eyebrows and watched as she struggled in silence to come up with a suitable response. ‘I’ve spent hours driving. I’m going to have a shower. Don’t even think of trawling the house for another bedroom.’
    With that, he vanished into the adjoining bathroom, leaving Violet to fight off the waves of panic as she stared at her lonesome suitcase on the bed. Everything about the bedroom seemed designed to encourage a fainting fit, from the grandeur of a bed that would have been better suited to the lovers they most certainly were not, to the thick, heavy curtains which she imagined would cut out all daylight so that the intimacy of the surroundings became palpable.
    Wrapped up in a series of images, she almost forgot that he was in the shower until she heard the sound of water being switched off, at which point she raced to her suitcase, extracted an armful of clothes and then stood to attention by the window, with her back pointedly turned to the bathroom door.
    She heard the click of the door opening and then she froze as his voice whispered into her ear, ‘You can look. I’m decently covered. Anyone would think that you were sweet sixteen and never been kissed.’
    He was laughing as she unglued her eyes from his bare feet and allowed them to travel upwards to where he was decently covered in no more than a pair of boxer shorts and his shirt, which he was taking his own sweet time to button up.
    If he called that decently covered then she wanted to ask him what she might expect of him when the lights were switched off.
    ‘I’ll meet you downstairs,’ she said coolly, at which he laughed a bit more.
    ‘You wouldn’t have a clue where to go,’ Damien pointed out. Her face was flushed. Her hair, which had started the journey in a sensible coil at the nape of her neck, was unravelling. He could feel his mood beginning to lift, which was a good thing because he was ill equipped for negative thoughts. ‘You’d need a map to