Mills & Boon Modern Romance Collection: February 2015. Кэрол Мортимер
widened incredulously. ‘Are you saying that there’s another one just like him at home?’ There couldn’t possibly be!
The man who had just walked into the restaurant was—well, he was utterly unique. In a dark and compelling way Andy could never imagine anyone else ever being. Certainly not in the form of an identical twin.
She knew little of the Sterne brothers’ personal lives. When they had first rocketed into the public eye she had only been thirteen and at ballet school, and totally caught up in that world. She had paid little attention to the world of business, or society photographs in newspapers and glossy magazines of the rich and the famous.
And after her accident she had been too busy trying to rebuild her future to be too aware of what was going on in other people’s lives.
She had known her brother-in-law had worked for Midas Enterprises for the last few years, of course, but the bachelor billionaire Sterne brothers inhabited a totally different world from her own—no doubt they could eat at a different one of their own restaurants every night around the world, and fly there on their own private jet!
But she would certainly have remembered it if she had ever seen so much as a photograph of the man seated across the restaurant.
‘Hardly, darling. That’s his twin sitting beside him,’ Kim explained softly.
Andy’s gaze shifted to the man who had walked in with Mr Dark and Compelling—Darius or Xander Sterne?—and now sat at the table with him talking to the older couple.
Definitely not an identical twin!
If one of the twins was dark and compelling then the other was light and magnetic; the second man’s fashionably tousled hair was a pale blond, his skin golden, a sexy grin lighting up his handsome and chiselled features, laughter lines fanning out from warm brown eyes, as if he smiled often. He was as tall and muscled as his brother, his impeccably black evening suit also tailored to perfection.
Under any other circumstances Andy knew she would have found the second twin the most handsome man in the room, but the dark twin was just so breathtaking she had to admit to having barely noticed his brother until now.
Dark twin. Light twin.
Andy’s gaze moved inexorably back to the dark twin. ‘Which one is he?’
‘Mr Gorgeous? That would be Xander,’ Kim supplied lightly.
‘Hello? I’m still sitting here,’ Colin put in pointedly, his own dark-haired and blue-eyed looks better described as homely rather than gorgeous.
‘You know how much I love you, love,’ Kim assured him warmly. ‘But no woman in her right mind could stop herself from looking at someone like Xander Sterne.’
Again, Andy was barely listening to her sister and Colin as they bantered back and forth. Mainly because the dark twin had just glanced her way again. And given another raise of that dark and mocking brow as he’d found her still watching him. Causing Andy to quickly look away, the warmth of embarrassed colour flooding her cheeks.
‘—all that gorgeous golden hair and those warm brown eyes. As for the delicious and toned body underneath that wonderful designer-label suit...’ Kim continued to sing the man’s praises.
‘I’m going to go to the bathroom, leaving you two ladies to continue drooling, before I develop a complex,’ Colin excused dryly as he stood up and left the table.
‘Xander is the blond one?’ Andy questioned her sister sharply once the two of them were alone, instantly revising her thoughts as she realised it was Darius she had been staring at, not the light twin, Xander.
‘Well, of course he’s the gorgeous blond,’ Kim teased dismissively. ‘I would hardly be drooling, as Colin so elegantly put it, over Darius.’ She gave a shiver. ‘All that dark, cold broodiness makes him just too scary for words!’
Dark, cold and scary.
Yes, Andy acknowledged, Darius Sterne was definitely scary. But, as far as she was concerned, not in the cold and brooding way her sister meant.
If Xander was light and good humour, then Darius was the opposite; a man as dark as sin—inside as well as out. His chiselled features were so grimly forbidding it looked as if he rarely found occasion to smile, let alone laugh.
But when he did?
How would it feel to be the woman responsible for putting a smile on that coldly arrogant face? To bathe in his appreciative laughter? To be the one responsible for putting the warmth of that laughter into those beautiful topaz eyes?
Or the heat of desire!
And on that note Andy brought her thoughts to a screeching halt.
Men like Darius Sterne, successful billionaires like Darius Sterne, she corrected herself ruefully, did not look at women like her. Women who so obviously did not even belong in a restaurant like Midas, let alone the rarefied world of extreme wealth that the Sterne brothers inhabited.
And yet Darius Sterne had certainly looked at her.
Only briefly, Andy admitted, but he had definitely returned her gaze.
Maybe that was because she had been caught staring at him eyes wide, mouth agape?
Well, yes. Maybe. But to be fair, everyone else in the restaurant had also been staring at the Sterne twins. Maybe not in quite the lustful way she had been staring at Darius Sterne, but they had all been looking, nonetheless.
Lustful?
Lord, yes, her feelings were lustful, if the tingling fullness in her breasts and the heat surging through her body was any indication!
And Andy was sure it was.
Though she had never, ever, responded in such a visceral way to any man before tonight. Before she’d looked at Darius Sterne and been unable to look away again.
Until the age of nineteen, her life and her emotions had all been totally dedicated to ballet and her career, with no time left for romance. After the months of recovering from the accident, Andy had had necessarily to concentrate on making something else of her life.
Her dream of one day becoming a world-class ballerina had been over, but she was by no means a quitter, and had no intentions of just sitting around feeling sorry for herself. Consequently she had known she had to do something with her life.
It had been a lot of hard work, and taken most of her own share of the money left to her and Kim by their parents when they’d died almost five years ago. But three years after making that decision, Andy had finished her training to teach and been able to open a ballet studio for five-to-sixteen-year-olds. Ballet was what she knew, after all. And maybe one day, if she was lucky, she might actually be responsible for discovering and training a world-class ballerina.
Her personal life had been the casualty of all those years of hard work, both as a ballerina and latterly her training to teach others to dance. As a consequence she’d had no intimate relationships before her accident. Or since...
The loss of both her beloved parents had been a terrible blow, and Andy had buried herself even more in her love of ballet as a way of coping with that loss. The accident just months later, putting an end to her career in ballet, had shaken her to her very core.
Oh, she had recovered some of her previous confidence these past four years, on the outside at least. But the physical scars that now marred her body were undeniable. She certainly hadn’t ever wanted to share those with any man.
Most especially a man as handsome and sophisticated as Darius Sterne, who no doubt dated some of the most beautiful women in the world. He certainly wouldn’t be interested in someone like Andy, who was scarred emotionally on the inside, and visibly on the outside.
* * *
‘Darius?’
Darius masked his irritation as he gave the beautiful blonde across the restaurant