He took the final step so he was level with her—though he towered over her, in point of fact, his strong body so close she could feel his warmth and smell his spicy fragrance. His nearness was intoxicating and overpowering, and her already ravaged senses weren’t up to fending off the kick of desire that surged inside her.
It surprised her.
It was wholly unwanted.
And it weakened her too, so that when he pushed at the door again it gave easily.
She didn’t resist. She did move back, though, putting distance between herself and Rio.
He stepped into her home, his eyes glittering in his handsome face as they bored into her for a long moment and then moved down the hallway, studying the pictures on her walls and the arrangements of tulips that were wilting now, their water emitting a faintly rancid odour. Or at least she imagined it was, judging by from the brown sludge outline on the glass vase. Her nose was too blocked to fully appreciate it.
Strangely, though, Rio tickled every one of her senses, even though she was barely functioning.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, focussing on a point over his shoulder. Surreptitiously she pressed her back against the wall, needing the support to stay upright.
A muscle jerked in his jaw. ‘Where is your bedroom?’
Stricken, she shook her head. ‘What? You can’t be serious?’
He looked at her as though she’d taken leave of her senses. ‘As hard as I find it to resist you,’ he said with a hint of droll amusement, ‘you look like you are about to faint. Go and sleep. I will make you tea.’
‘Tea,’ she repeated, confusion making her eyes crinkle.
‘Go. Lie down.’
‘No. Rio, I’m... I do need to...to rest. But please,’ she said with a quiet stoicism that came from the heart, ‘don’t make me tea.’
She lifted a hand, because she couldn’t not touch him, and pressed her fingers into his chest. Electricity arced between them, but this time it burned her. It wasn’t just an arc of desire; it was an explosion.
She dropped her hand away quickly and swallowed. ‘I don’t know why you’re here, but I want you to go away again.’
The words rang with palpable grief.
‘Go to sleep,’ he said with a small nod.
She sighed, reaching for the wall for support. He was going to go. Whatever had brought him to her home, it wasn’t important enough for him to fight for it.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, and it was only as she reached her bedroom that she realised he had said nothing back.
* * *
It was early in the morning when she woke. Not yet dawn, the sky was just yielding its black finality to the hint of daylight, negotiating the terms of their treaty with leaden grey and pale pink.
She sat up without sneezing or grabbing her head for the first time in over a week. She lifted a hand to her hair, pulling it over her shoulder in one big tangle of red. She ran her fingers over its length. It was a tangled bird’s nest, and for the first time since getting sick she found the idea of washing it didn’t leave her feeling exhausted.
She coughed. It didn’t feel as though her throat had been slashed with razor blades.
But it wasn’t until she’d started the shower running and stripped her three-day-old outfit from her body that she remembered Rio’s visit the evening before. Had it been a dream? What reason could he have had for coming to see her in real life? Their business was over. More than over.
It was broken beyond repair.
Had she dreamed his visit? Lord knew she’d had enough dreams of Rio Mastrangelo for that theory to be utterly plausible. She looked down at her fingertips, trying to remember the sensation of touching him. She’d pressed her hand against his chest.
And she frowned.
He’d been clean-shaven. It was easier to imagine him as the formidable tycoon when he looked like that, instead of the island version of himself.
She lathered her hair and rinsed it, then conditioned it and soaped her whole body, propping her back against the tiles when a wave of tiredness returned.
This cold had been dogging her steps for well over a week. At first she’d thought it was just exhaustion, but then her ears had begun to ache, her throat to sting, her eyes to scratch, and finally she’d succumbed to the sickness. In some ways it had been a relief. A physical justification for her pervasive sense of misery.
It had allowed to her to climb wearily into bed.
To stay there.
To hide under her duvet and let the world roll past, carrying on without her contribution.
Strength was in her now, though. She’d slept solidly, as though seeing Rio had given her some kind of closure.
Closure? As if.
Her heart twisted with a pain she was becoming used to.
She flicked the water off and grabbed a towel, wrapping it around her body and then aggressively drying her hair. She felt much better, but there was still an exhaustion within her that came from having not eaten properly in days.
She didn’t bother to dress. Instead she cinched her silk robe around her waist and pulled the door inwards, padding down the hall. The scent of decaying flowers assailed her and, as she’d suspected, it was disgusting. She curled her fingers around the vase, lifting it and carrying it with her to the kitchen.
As she cut through her small, cheery lounge, with its white fabric sofa and colourful throw cushions, its view of her small courtyard, she froze.
Rio sat amongst the cushions on her sofa, his body still, in a seated position, his head bent over the coffee table. He wore the same clothes as he had the day before, though at some point in the night he’d discarded his coat. It hung on one of the chairs that were perched at the window.
She was so shocked she almost dropped the vase.
‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, even as her body screamed at her to go to him, to close the distance and straddle him.
Her body begged her to give in to her craving but her mind was rejecting that idea wholesale.
He didn’t want her.
‘You can stay, cara. Stay. But you should know that all I will ever want you for is sex. It is the only part of us that I believe you weren’t faking. I’d even throw thirty thousand pounds into the mix if that made you feel more comfortable.’
He turned to look at her, his eyes probing hers before dropping, performing a cursory inspection of her figure.
‘I asked what you’re doing here,’ she said through gritted teeth.
He stood then, skirting around the sofa and crossing to stand right in front of her. He reached out, and for one thrilling, confusing second she thought he was going to hug her. But instead his hands took the vase from her.
‘Before you drop it on your feet,’ he explained with a tight smile.
She didn’t return the smile. ‘Rio.’ It was a warning. Though it was only one word, it showed how close she was to breaking point. It was both a plea and a closed door.
He compressed his lips; they were a line in his handsome face. More handsome now that she could see the hard angles of his cheeks, the cleft of his chin. She swallowed convulsively and looked away. Morning sun dappled the windows.
He turned and stalked towards the kitchen. Confused enough to be curious, she followed. He held the gloopy flowers around their stems as he tipped the water down the sink, then lifted them out and dropped them into the bin.
There were two coffee cups at the side of the sink and a plate that held crumbs. He’d eaten? Toast?
He was looking at her, and it was a look that penetrated her soul.
When he spoke, the words were quiet and husky with emotion. ‘You look better.’
She took it as an assessment of her health rather than as a compliment. Her skin was pale, her eyes red-rimmed, her hair still wet. ‘Thanks.’
His mouth twisted.
‘This is you?’
He pointed to the fridge and one of the many photos she had taped across its bland white front.<
br />
Her eyes slid sideways, taking in the old family photo he’d pointed to. It had been taken around the time she and Jack had finished secondary school. She’d been in a full-blown Sex and the City phase and was wearing a fabric flower hooked into her shirt that even Carrie Bradshaw would have called excessive, with lace pink and white petals. Her parents sat as their bookends, proud smiles on their faces.
‘Yeah.’
‘Your brother?’
‘My twin.’
He nodded, filing the information away. ‘You don’t look alike.’
‘No.’ She reached up a hand to her hair, tugging at its damp red length. ‘He got Dad’s colouring; I got Mum’s.’
Rio was in her kitchen, and the strange thing was she felt an overwhelming sense that he belonged. It was unnerving in the extreme.
He turned away, reaching for two more cups and hooking one under the coffee machine spout. He fed a pod into the top and pressed the button. The noise was reminiscent of his machine on Prim’amore.
It sent shivers down her spine.
Fragments of the last time they’d seen each other were like sharp glass, cutting through her equilibrium. The way he’d refused to listen to her, refused to let her even try to explain. The way he’d seen only the worst in her actions.
Time away from him had dragged anger towards bewilderment. How dared he think he’d loved her when he’d found it so easy to turn his back and walk away? No, push her away even as she’d been begging to stay.
‘What are you doing here?’ She spoke with a steely determination that replicated his the last time they’d spoken.
‘I went to see Wyndham last night. You weren’t there.’
Mortification at having lost her job—and having this man discover the fact—caused her stomach to flip. She lowered her gaze, but couldn’t hide the bright red that bloomed in her cheeks.
‘He fired you.’
Her eyes flared wide; but what was the point in lying? Spurred on to the defensive, she snapped sarcastically, ‘Did he? I hadn’t realised.’
A muscle jerked in Rio’s cheek. Her eyes dropped to it of their own accord.
‘I do not think he can fire you because you took a week off work.’
‘That’s not why—’
‘There are laws to protect employees,’ he said quietly, overriding her explanation.
She nodded, moving around him, skirting him at a safe distance, lifting the coffee cup out from the machine. He might be a guest in her home—albeit an uninvited one—but she was desperate for food and energy. She lifted the cup and inhaled its delicious scent gratefully.
‘I know that. But...’ She lifted her slender shoulders, unconscious of the way her robe gaped a little at the chest. ‘I like him too much to fight it. I couldn’t work for him now anyway. Not knowing what I’d helped orchestrate.’
Rio’s eyes were watchful. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, but you had no idea Cressida was going to get married.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She bit down on her lip and forced herself to meet his gaze. It would be over soon. ‘I let her pay me to impersonate her. I lied to Art—a man I care for and admire beyond words. I lied to you, Rio. To you, the man I loved. And I’m lying to my parents now—it would kill them if they knew I’d been frogmarched out of the building by Security. That I’d been fired.’
Mortification crept along her skin at the surreal indignity she’d suffered. Strangely, she saw a corresponding anger in his expression. Had he come here to enjoy her failure? To show her how deserving she was of such humiliation?
‘In any event,’ she said quietly, ‘none of that is your concern.’
He lifted his lip in a small flicker of a smile.
‘Isn’t it?’
His eyes were drawn to her face as if by an invisible magnet. He stared at her for so long that she shifted self-consciously, moving away from the coffee machine to the other side of the kitchen. She propped herself against the door, pretending fascination with the rim of her coffee cup.
‘I didn’t have your address,’ he said quietly.
The sentence was strange. Discordant.
‘The fact you’re here disputes that,’ she pointed out, sipping her coffee so fast she burned her throat a little.
He ignored the comment. ‘Nor did I have your phone number. When you left the island—’
‘After you ordered me to leave,’ she felt obliged to remind him.
‘I seem to remember giving you the option to remain,’ he said, and the words were heavy with an emotion she couldn’t identify. Anger? Annoyance? Irritation?
‘As your paid lover?’ she muttered, her stomach squeezing painfully at the recollection.
To her embarrassment, more tears drenched her eyes. She dug the nails of one hand into her palm, refusing to let them fall. Refusing to let him see her sadness.
‘I was very angry,’ he said, but it was not an apology and she noticed that.
‘I know.’
She sipped her coffee and then turned away, walking with her spine straight and shoulders squared to the lounge. She sat on one of the dining chairs, though mistakenly chose the one with his jacket on it, so a very faint hint of him reached her, making her crave him so badly she felt as if she’d been punched low in the abdomen.
She cradled her coffee, taking warmth from it.
‘I had thought love to be a construct, and then I met you and I lost myself completely. Discovering that it had all been an act of pretence for you...’ He pulled a face. ‘My pride was hurt. I lashed out.’
She swallowed. ‘You had every right to be angry,’ she murmured softly. ‘I never thought I would meet you. I certainly didn’t plan to...to feel like that. I wanted not to. I wanted to be able to ignore it.’
‘Neither of us could ignore it,’ he said with grim honesty.
‘It doesn’t matter now.’ Her mouth lifted in what she seemed to remember was a smile. It felt incredibly strange on her face: heavy and tight.
‘It matters to me,’ he said, the lines of his body rigid. ‘I came here today to apologise, Matilda.’
She closed her eyes. Her name—her real name—on his lips was heaven. But the knowledge that all this was coming to an end was an answering degree of agony.
‘What for?’
‘Take your pick,’ he said, with a rueful smile that was belied by the self-disgust in his eyes. ‘Suggesting you prostitute yourself to me. Telling you that all we’d shared was sex. Forcing you off my island even when every bone in my body wanted me to beg you to stay.’
Her eyes lifted to his, clashing with their grey depths in confusion.
He moved towards her now, and finally crouched at her feet. ‘For telling you I loved you and then proving myself unworthy of your love in every way.’
He didn’t touch her, but he was close, and just having him near her was sending goosebumps over her flesh.
‘For leaving you to face all this alone, when I should have been standing beside you? For showing that I didn’t support you even after I’d promised you with every kiss and every moment that I would?’
Her heart was racing but it was agony, each beat like a tiny blade pressing into her ribs. She felt it scratch and her breath burned in her lungs.
‘You were angry,’ she said again. ‘But you need to know that the woman you met on the island...the one you said you loved...that was me. All I lied about was my name.’
He nodded. ‘I know that.’
She froze. The three words brought her an exquisite sense of confusion. He knew that? What did that mean?
‘I think I knew it even as I was telling you to go.’
He lifted a hand and rubbed it over her knee, as though he could scarcely believe it possible.
‘I went to Prim’amore to deal with my own demons. I thought I had. But then there was so much anger—anger about my mother, my father, their choices and their lives—and I took it out on you. That was wrong of me.’
She flashed her eyes to his, bu
t looked back at her coffee instantly.
His voice was insistent. ‘Because you, Matilda Morgan, are the love of my life, and you deserved so much better than that. I should have stood shoulder to shoulder with you, listened to you and told you that I didn’t care. That nothing you could do would change the facts. That I’d fallen in love with a coffee-addicted, clumsy, teetotal book-lover, and that I wanted to love her for ever. I want to love you for ever.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I will anyway, regardless of what you say. But, cara, I beg you to let me love you.’ He groaned. ‘Give me another chance to love you as you deserve.’
The words didn’t make sense.
Nothing about this did.
She shook her head, her eyes huge in her face.
Was she hallucinating? Heaven knew she’d been sick enough and Rio-obsessed enough to be imagining this.
‘I had no way of contacting you,’ he admitted, the words gravelly. ‘And I fought with myself for a long time. I stayed on the island and told myself again and again that I was glad you were gone. But every night I would reach for you, needing you.’
‘That’s just sex,’ she intoned flatly, her heart thumping achingly. ‘Like you said.’
‘No,’ he denied quickly, as though his life depended on her understanding. ‘It was never just sex. I’ve done that. I know the difference.’
Great—just what she needed. A reminder of his virility and the way he’d indulged it with other women.
‘I told myself I’d come to London to see Art, but really I should have known it was all about you. I wasn’t sure you’d want to speak to me after the things I’d said and the way I’d behaved. I had a whole plan worked out, to make it impossible for you to ignore me, but then you weren’t there.’
‘What plan?’ she asked, lifting her coffee to her lips and sipping it slowly while her mind worked even more slowly.
‘To surprise you at your desk. To tell you I was meeting with Art to let him know that I can never sell Prim’amore after what it has come to mean to me. That I plan to build the house my mother designed and live in it with the woman I love. That I want to wake up every morning to the sound of you making coffee and turning the pages of your book. That I want to swim through the caves with you by my side, that I will build you your very own stairway into the volcano so that you can swim in its depths any time you wish. That the island is our home—that I believe it was our home from that very first night.’
Innocent in the Billionaire's Bed Page 16