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“Still. It would have perhaps been a good idea for me to make sure that you were not in a state of undress.”
“I am not a maiden,” he said.
She looked at him. “Was that a joke, Luca?”
“Yes and no. It’s true. But also, I was being funny.”
She laughed, in spite of herself. Because every moment of the last five years hadn’t been terrible. And this one certainly wasn’t.
“Well. It was amusing.”
She felt a sudden tension rise between them, and she turned away from him. “I am going to get ready. And I will meet you in the ballroom.”
“As you wish.”
CHAPTER FOUR
LUCA COULDN’T GET Polly’s expression out of his head. She had been looking at his body. It wasn’t the first time. She had done so at his apartment last week the night she had quit.
She was aware of him physically. And she was nearly not his assistant anymore, which was pushing the bonds of his control.
He could not want her.
And yet.
He liked clear rules, and he liked to follow them. He spent so much of his time pondering the mysteries of humanity. Of science. The human body, and what men could accomplish when they studied that body.
There was no room for gray areas in his life.
Polly had been his first window into understanding the lure of reaching for something you should not touch.
Obsession, he’d called it. Because he was familiar enough with obsession and that didn’t have to be sexual. It wasn’t forbidden for him to catalog her outfits, her mannerisms, the way her hair moved when she tossed her head. And how it changed depending on whether she was amused, annoyed, or upset.
Obsession, because it could be nothing more.
Or rather, it had never been able to be more because she was his assistant and he would never, ever violate his position of power by seducing his assistant.
He thought about how she was leaving him, and he was beset by rage again.
But there was something about the rage that stoked the fire of that forbidden desire even higher.
This was not attraction as he knew it.
He was attracted to women. Their round bodies, their softness. He was not particular about the particular shape or features of a woman. He simply enjoyed the all-encompassing air of femininity. Soft skin, floral scents. When he indulged himself, he appreciated every aspect of that indulgence.
But it was never this. This aching pull that he had felt ever since that night last week.
Her defense of him on the plane had added a strange sort of sensation to the mix.
He was also not a man who enjoyed novelty.
He liked to be assured of things. To be certain in them.
In his work, he dealt in the miraculous and mysterious. He did not need any more of it. That was what he told himself. And yet, he found himself being fascinated by her in new and distracting ways.
And he was not a man given to distraction.
“Go and ready yourself,” he said.