Free The Bride Thief by Jennie Lucas Page B

roughly.
    “Why?”
    “Being close to you when I am forbidden to touch you…There’s only so much a man can take. Unless you actually want to make me suffer?”
    Their eyes locked, and for an instant, she forgot to breathe. Then she blinked. “A little suffering on your part might be nice, yes,” she said with an impish smile.
    His returning smile rose slowly across his face, and without realizing what she was doing, she leaned forward on her toes.
    “Sir.” A bodyguard entered the front room with a loud rap at the door, and they both whirled toward him. Exhaling, Xerxes gave him a quick nod. “Excuse me,” he said, turning back to her. “I must leave you now.”
    “But we just got here!”
    “I have something urgent to do. I will return later.” He stroked her cheek. “I’ve arranged for the housekeeper to serve dinner on the beach.”
    Squeezing her hand, he left. Rose stared after him in shock.
    After he left, she walked along the beach and explored the lush grounds behind the cottage. It was strange to be so alone in this beautiful place. Crossing through a tropical garden, she stopped as her jaw dropped when she saw two large weeping rose trees.
    Pink fairy roses. Xerxes’s favorite flower. Growing wild on this island in the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from Greece.
    Resolutely, she turned and walked away. Then, after five steps, she stopped. Whirling, she went back to the nearest rose tree. Careful not to pierce her fingertips with thorns, she picked one of the tiny pink blooms. Returning to the cottage, she carefully put it in water in a tiny bud vase she found in the stocked modern kitchen.
    Hours of sunshine later, she finally put aside the novel she was reading on the lanai in the deepening afternoon. She’d been alone all day long at a luxury beach house. She’d had a lovely lunch served to her by the housekeeper. Reading a fabulous novel and watching the sunlight sparkle across the blue waters of the Indian Ocean, kidnapped or not, she should have been having a decent time.
    But she wasn’t. She was missing something. Or someone.
    The thought brought her up short. She couldn’t miss Xerxes’s company. Ridiculous. He was her captor! If she occasionally found him amusing or entrancing she was merely making the best of a bad situation, that was all.
    But they’d spent the long flight here talking. He’d sat right beside her, plying her with Greek dishes, asking her interested, sympathetic questions about her family and home.
    She’d answered in monosyllables at first, giving him one tart reply after another. But instead of being offended, he’d seemed to enjoy the repartee. And his undivided attention had been strangely… pleasurable.
    She’d felt his arm along the back of the white leather sofa behind her, so close to her body, and she’d trembled. Every time he looked at her, the intensity and heat of his dark gaze turned her inside out.
    Rose didn’t want to think about it now. Or why she’d not only noticed his favorite flower in a lush garden, but she’d also picked a rose for him and placed it in water.
    Looking up from her book, she noticed the dark-haired, plump young housekeeper struggling to carry a table across the beach to a spot overlooking the surf. Relieved to leave the lanai and lounge chair and all her disconcerting thoughts behind her, Rose got to her feet and hurried down to the beach. “Wait! Can I help?”
    The housekeeper, who looked only a few years older than Rose, shook her head, even though she looked as if she were fighting back tears.
    “Really?” Rose bit her lip. “Please, Mrs. Vadi, won’t you let me help?”
    “No,” the woman said, then burst into tears. Within minutes, Rose had learned the woman was grieving for her husband, who’d died six months before, and that she was worried about her feverish eight-year-old daughter, whom she’d had to leave at home alone.
    “But I can’t lose this job, miss,” the woman gasped, wiping her eyes