The Master's Mistress by Carole Mortimer Page A

here?’ Elizabeth came to a stop in the library doorway as she saw Rogan, sitting behind his father’s leather-topped mahogany desk, her laptop open in front of him.
    He looked up to raise an unimpressed eyebrow. ‘As the new owner, don’t you think I have a perfect right to be in here?’
    Well…of course he had a right to enter his father’s library. His library now. Elizabeth was just surprised, having cometo the library with the intention of working again this afternoon, once she had been upstairs to freshen up after they’d returned from town, to find Rogan had beaten her to it.
    She stood in front of the desk to arch her own auburn brows. ‘Find anything of interest on my laptop?’
    Rogan sat back. ‘ Your laptop?’ he murmured slowly. ‘I thought it was my father’s.’
    Elizabeth smiled at having at last been able to disconcert a man who was so self-confident he made her want to scream. ‘I prefer to work with equipment I’m familiar with.’
    There it was again, Rogan noted with a frown. Elizabeth Brown liked her life ordered and predictable, even down to the laptop she used for whatever work she happened to be doing.
    Rogan grimaced. ‘I had some e-mails I wanted to send.’ Damn it, if he had known this was Elizabeth’s laptop he might have had a look through some of her other files. Just in the interest of gaining further insight into what made her tick, of course. It was something Rogan was always careful to do with the people that were around him on a day-to-day basis.
    He already knew what Elizabeth did; it was the rest of the information on her that was still a little sketchy. Where she came from. Who her family was. Who her friends were.
    For different reasons, most probably, Elizabeth kept her personal life as close to her chest as Rogan did his own…
    ‘Sorry about that.’ He shut the laptop down before standing up, his eyes narrowing at the instinctive way Elizabeth instantly took a step away from him.
    What the hell?
    Was this woman scared of him?
    No, that wasn’t fear Rogan could see in her eyes, but something else. Something much more interesting…
    Elizabeth took another step back as Rogan moved out from behind the desk, once again finding herself overwhelmed by the sheer animal magnetism of the man. He really was like that predator she had been reading about last night, his movements slow and stealthy, soundless on the carpeted floor. The muscles moved smoothly in his legs and beneath his tight-fitting T-shirt as he came ever closer, the very air about him seeming to part in deference to all that rippling power.
    Her eyes were wide with apprehension. ‘I—What are you doing?’
    He raised dark brows over those inky eyes. ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’ Even his voice sounded lower, husky, purposeful…
    Elizabeth swallowed hard. ‘I came in here to work—’
    ‘Later.’
    ‘Later?’ she repeated, with a nervous sweep of her tongue across suddenly dry lips.
    The blackness of Rogan’s gaze locked on to that nervous movement. ‘Later,’ he confirmed gruffly.
    He was standing so close to her now that Elizabeth could feel the heat of his body enveloping her, and that heat and the subtle scent of him were acting like a drug on her already heightened senses.
    The same senses that had been on alert from the moment she first set eyes on this man.
    Sight. Smell. Touch…
    Elizabeth gave a shake of her head in an effort to clear her mind of the foggy haze that seemed to be encompassing her. ‘I don’t know what game you’re playing, Rogan—’
    ‘I never play games, Liza,’ he assured her softly.
    He had called her by that hateful name again, but for the moment Elizabeth was too concerned by the threat he represented to her, to her equilibrium, to bother correcting him. ‘You’re playing one right now. And it isn’t funny,’ she reproved.
    Rogan didn’t find this situation funny, either. In fact, he deeply regretted having started this, and was no longer sure