LITMIR.BIZ

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pursed her mouth as she came farther into the suite. She stepped over a damp towel, her nose wrinkling in distaste as she caught the sour smell of vomit in the air. ‘Serves you right for going out all night drinking,’ she said. ‘Did you know that excessive amounts of alcohol can actually permanently damage your brain? The repeated bouts of dehydration causes the brain to shrink.’

      He lifted his head out from under the pillow he’d been sheltering under and cranked open one bloodshot eye. ‘This is not a hangover. I’m sick.’

      She folded her arms like a schoolteacher listening to a naughty pupil’s creative excuse for not completing homework. ‘Sure you are. Copious amounts of alcohol irritates the stomach lining causing acute nausea.’

      His head flopped back down to the pillow. ‘Whatever …’

      Lottie frowned. He looked dreadfully pale and he appeared to be shivering. She could see the shudders vibrating his body like the rigors of a bad fever. She approached the bed and touched the back of his shoulder. It was roasting hot and damp with beads of sweat. ‘You’ve got a temperature.’

      ‘You don’t say.’ Sarcasm should have sharpened his tone but it was still flat and toneless.

      ‘Maybe we should call a doctor.’

      ‘Maybe you should get the hell out of my room.’

      ‘There’s no need to be rude just because you’re not feeling well.’

      He rolled onto his back, keeping his arm across his eyes as if to block the harsh sunlight. ‘Give me a break, princess. This is not my best look, okay? I just need a couple of hours to sleep this man flu off.’

      ‘What about your terribly important business appointment?’

      He sat upright so quickly his face drained of what little colour remained. Lottie saw him sway as if his centre of balance was skewed. But then he threw back the sheet and stumbled towards the bathroom, banging his shoulder painfully against the doorjamb as he went. He didn’t have time to close the door to protect his privacy. He hunched over the nearest basin and was violently, wretchedly sick.

      Every compassionate muscle of Lottie’s heart contracted. She joined him in the bathroom, grabbing a fresh hand towel from the rack and rinsed it under the tap before squeezing it out and handing it to him.

      He pressed his face into it for a moment, his body still shaking with fever. ‘Go.’

      ‘I’m not going till I call a doctor.’

      He dropped the towel in the vague direction of the bathtub. ‘I meant to my appointment. You’ll have to bid for me.’

      Lottie scrunched up her forehead in confusion. ‘Bid for you?’

      He gripped the edge of the basin for balance as he looked at her through wincing eyes. ‘I want to bid on a miniature painting. It’s never been auctioned before. It’s come from a private collection. The auction is at noon.’

      ‘But I’ve never been to an auction before. I wouldn’t know the first thing about—’

      ‘Please.’ His tone brooked no resistance. It was as if he had summoned the last remnants of his energy to convince her. ‘I want that painting. It’s the only one of its kind.’

      She chewed at her lip. ‘Do you have a budget in mind?’

      Lottie had never felt more pleased with herself. She had not only got out of the hotel undetected by the press—thanks to the aid of a senior staff member, Jean Rene, who set up a decoy—but she got to the auction, which was being held in a private villa and managed to outbid the highest offer. The exquisite painting was no bigger than a brooch and was of the mistress of a duke from the seventeenth century. Back and forth the bidding went until it was finally down to her and a man in his sixties who eventually caved in, shaking his head in defeat as the auctioneer brought the gavel down. ‘Sold to the young lady in pink at the back.’

      Lottie got back to the hotel, again without detection, and dashed up to Lucca’s suite as if she were bringing the crown jewels. ‘I got it! I won the final bid. I—’ She stopped and looked at the sleeping form of Lucca lying on the bed.

      She put the painting down, along with the other three she’d bought, and went over to the bed. He was lying on his stomach with just a cotton sheet covering him from the hips down. She could see the outline of his splayed legs, one hitched a little higher than the other, the taut curve of his buttocks making something in her belly feel wobbly.

      She reached out and gently brushed the damp hair back off his forehead. He didn’t seem to register the contact. His breathing was deep and even, his mouth relaxed in sleep.

      She waited a moment and then trailed her fingers down his cheek to see if his stubble was as prickly as it looked. It was. It scraped against the pads of her fingertips like sandpaper, making her insides give another little quiver.

      She curled her fingers into a ball to stop them exploring any further and moved away from the bed. She let out a sigh as she looked at the chaos of the suite. She could call housekeeping but that would mean disturbing him. She could just as easily grab fresh towels and sheets from one of the housemaids and do a quiet tidy up and keep an eye on him while she was at it.

      She gathered up the balls of paper and placed them in the wastepaper basket. But then her curiosity got the better of her and she bent down and took one out again and unfurled it. It was a rough sketch of one of the villas they had walked by the previous day.

      She picked up another ball of paper and found another sketch of one of the cafés on the harbourfront. She knitted her brows as she took out yet another ball of paper. Each unfinished sketch seemed to tell her more and more about Lucca rather than the sketch itself. It was like peeling back the layers of an onion to find a treasure buried inside. She had never thought of him as an artist, and a remarkably talented one at that. The sketches might be rough but she knew enough about art to know he knew what he was doing with each stroke of the pencil against the paper. The detail and perspective were amazing. It was as if he was looking at the world with an intense focus, narrowed down to a minute degree to capture the hidden secrets of his subject.

      But there was one more drawing.

      Not scrunched up in a discarded ball on the floor, but on a sketchpad on the walnut desk over by the window. The pencil he had been using was lying crosswise on the pad, and an eraser was next to it surrounded by little rubber shavings. The antique chair was pushed back at a skewed angle as if he had got up in a hurry and hadn’t had time to straighten it.

      Lottie looked down at the drawing, her heart doing a little skip of recognition when she saw an image of herself picking flowers in the palace gardens. It was a work in progress, but even so, Lucca had captured something about that frozen moment in time, built it into a story that made her look ethereal, even beautiful.

      She had posed for official portraits before and had hated the stiff, formal results. She had always looked stuck-up and starchy.

      No one had captured her.

      She glanced at the bed. He was still soundly asleep, his chest rising and falling in slow deep breaths. Something prickly and tight in her chest loosened. Smoothed out. Flowed.

       Escaped.

      Lottie drew in a ragged breath and moved away from the desk. She set about briskly putting the rest of the suite to order. Work was a great panacea for wild imaginings that should not be allowed free. Ever. She was not to think of Lucca Chatsfield as anything other than an outrageous flirt, a layabout libertine who was only here to make trouble for her because that’s what he did best. He courted trouble. He relished in it. The press documented it in colourful, lurid detail.

      He was one big flashing human headline.

      He wasn’t the sort of man she should be thinking about. He certainly wasn’t the sort of man she should be kissing, or touching, or sharing a continent with, let alone a penthouse suite, even if it had a hundred separate rooms.

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