Free The Dark Side of Desire by Julia James Page B

…
    No!
No, she
must not
let herself remember, recall, replay …Must shut that memory right down, lock it down so that she was no longer haunted by it.
    That was what she told herself all that day, on the train journey down to Dorset. She had set her alarm early to get out of the apartment before her father and Anita surfaced, to get to the station and pile herself on to a morning train, to stare sightlessly out of the window as she passed the time
not
thinking,
not
remembering …
    Only rationalising. Ruthlessly, remorselessly, rigorously.
    I met a man. A man like I’ve never met before. And for some inexplicable and irrational reason he had an effect on me no other man has ever had. Which is ridiculous, because he’s nothing like any man I’ve ever been out with! And it’s impossible even to contemplate anything with him! He belongs to my father’s world and I want nothing to do with it—and even if he didn’t I still can’t have anything at all to do with him, because my place is with my grandmother. I have an indelible responsibility for her, and nothing on earth can change that. Nothing
.
    And if he did sweep past my defences last night, then I must take that as even stronger evidence that I should and can and must have absolutely nothing more to do with him! Because he’s made it clear—crystal clear!—that he’d sweep me off to bed as well!
    Would she have gone with him?
    That was the stark, unanswerable question that hung in her head. He had assumed she would—she’d heard it in his voice, heard that note of confidence, of assurance. Of course, since she’d melted in his arms in the back of his limo, she would melt all over him in bed straight away!
    And you would have, too …
    The whispering, treacherous thought wound into her brain and found an echo in her treacherous flesh … which quickened at the thought. Her pulse was insistent, a sensual, shimmering tremor quivering through her body. A vision leapt in her mind: herself entwined with him, laid upon a wide, waitingbed, and his dark sloe eyes burning into her as he possessed himself of her with mouth and hands and all his strong, lean body …
    But it was a vision—only that. Nothing more. Not real, not actual—and it never could be, never would be.
    She swallowed, forcing herself to focus on the passing landscape beyond the windows of the train. All around her the wide English countryside spread to the horizon. Fields and hedges and woods and little houses, all flashing past. She was going home. She was going back to her grandmother and
that
was her reality. Only that.
    A man who could melt her with a single glance of his dark, dark eyes was
nothing
to do with her.
    Nothing.
    She went on staring sightlessly.
    Inside her, a little pool of bleakness formed.

CHAPTER FIVE
    L EON sat back impassively in the large leather chair in his London office. Alistair Lassiter was talking at him. He’d been talking at him for the last twenty minutes, and Leon had stopped listening after the first ten. He’d heard all he needed to know. The man was getting desperate. That much was screamingly obvious. Leon had been well aware of the financial precariousness of the Lassiter organisation, but now—whether he realised it or not, and Leon suspected he didn’t—Alistair Lassiter had shown him that there were no white knights in the offing to save his sorry, extravagant skin.
    All that was left for Leon to decide was whether he would do so.
    But that wasn’t what was currently occupying his mind.
    It wasn’t Alistair Lassiter’s business affairs that were preoccupying him. It was his daughter. Thoughts about her were going round and round in succession.
    Talk about conflicted …
    After their final barbed exchange at the charity function, with Flavia Lassiter doing her damnedest to make him think her rude and stuck up to the point where he was almost ready to wash his hands of her, he’d then completely reversed his decision while taking her home! She’d