Con moved over to the white canopy bed with the gauzy pink hangings. “The two rooms on this floor are the only ones left from the castle’s previous incarnation. The owner hired Dad to do the renovations, and he’s gutted all of the other rooms.”
“I want to marry your dad.” Weary, she looked for a chair. No chair. No way would she sit on the bed while Galveston’s sexual magnet was looming over it. All he’d have to do is lean close enough to draw her into his magnetic field and she’d be stuck to his delicious body for the rest of the night.
Besides, sitting on a bed with Con in the room would invite memories—his powerful body, bare and poised above her, her cries of . . . nope, didn’t want to think of that. She sat down instead on the fuzzy white carpet. Slipping off her sandals, she stretched her legs out in front of her, wiggled her toes, and leaned back against the pink-striped wall.
Turning her head, she came face-to-face with Deimos’s interested stare. “Where’d he come from?”
“He must’ve run up the stairs and slipped in when you opened the door.” Con picked up her shoes and headed for what she assumed was the bathroom. He was silent for a moment, and all she heard was water running into the sink.
“Have you noticed anything strange about Deimos?” he asked from the bathroom.
She glanced into the cat’s yellow eyes. Nope, no demon lights there. “Seems like just a cat to me. Okay, a clumsy cat and maybe a little obsessed with human companionship, but nothing else out of the ordinary. Why?”
“No reason.” His tone said there was a reason, but he wasn’t ready to talk about it. “What’re your plans for the castle?”
“I want the place to have mellow old-world charm. Light-colored walls, dark wood furniture, and jewel-toned accessories. And of course authentic. It has to look authentic. I’ll need some ancient-looking weaponry and tapestries with a medieval flavor to enhance the authentic feel.” She narrowed her gaze on a white table where a sadly limp plant sat in a pale beam of sunlight. The table was pushed against the wall under an arrow slit that passed for a window. Poor droopy plant. It was a tiny island of green floating in a vast sea of putrid pink.
“I don’t know about the walls.” He came out of the bathroom holding her now clean sandals. “This is the Castle of Dark Dreams. Remember? I’m thinking dark walls, gargoyles, fetid dungeons, maybe even a murder hole. One of the castle guardians can stand on the battlements and pour boiling oil down on guests who try to sneak off without paying their bills.”
She’d never been speechless. She was pretty sure that on the night she was born, when the doctor slapped her bottom, instead of crying she’d calmly pointed out the hospital’s unfortunate color scheme.
She was speechless now. A slipstream of nightmare images trailed behind her careening imagination. Black walls. Velvet paintings accented in blood. Fake fur bedspreads. Lava lamps.
Ignoring her openmouthed horror, he sat on the floor facing her. He trapped her legs between his and then pulled her bare foot more snugly between his thighs as he prepared to put her sandals back on her feet. His gaze lifted to meet hers.
Amanda was still speechless, but for a completely different reason now. She remembered. They’d sat this way on the beach that night. She curled her toes reflexively, feeling again the cool wet sand beneath her feet, the even cooler breeze off the Gulf. But none of that chill could lower the heat they were generating or hold back the flames. Desire was the perfect combustible.
Swallowing hard, she tried to find her voice. She must have a deer-in-headlights expression. Who would’ve guessed she’d be ambushed by hot memories in the Sleeping Princess room?
Con’s gaze darkened, and his lips parted slightly. He remembered, too. Of course, she didn’t want him to remember anything that would interfere with their business relationship. Uh-huh, and you’re a pitiful liar.
“We have unfinished business, sweet-heat.” His voice was a husky murmur of erotic promise.
Amanda opened her mouth knowing there was a very real possibility nothing but a panicked squeak would emerge. What had happened to all that self-assurance she’d cultivated over the years? She mentally got down on her hands and knees searching for it. Here, backbone. Come to Mama. Nope, her backbone had left the building.
“The only business we have together is getting this castle ready for the public.” Take that, Conleth Maguire.
His smile was slow, sensual, and said that no matter how good she’d been at handling everything else in her life, she’d never been any good at all when it came to handling him.
Handling him. Oops. Freudian slip. “Just put my damned shoes on so I can get up.” Good. A healthy “damned” always made an assertive statement.
“No.”
Checkmate. Now what? Wrestling him for her shoes lacked dignity, and she was all about dignity. Besides, initiating physical contact would just play into his hands. Literally.
Con watched her, seeing every one of her thoughts in her eyes. He laughed softly. “Come and get them, Mandy.” And wondered at what point his mouth had parted company with his brain. But it wasn’t his brain that was driving him now. It was a primitive part of him that bypassed thinking in favor of pure sensation, a part that had never forgotten sex with Amanda Harcourt.
For a moment, he thought she’d jerk her foot away, stand, and then start tacking up paint chips on the wall. She surprised him.
“I can make you give them back.” Her smile held the remembrance of what they’d done ten years ago and how good it had been. “Don’t make me resort to the foot torture.”
“A threat? Intriguing.” Con dropped his gaze as she moved her bare foot from his grasp and pressed
