‘I don’t think it’s a good idea if we continue with this…’
This was not what Nick had expected to hear. Her softly spoken words hit him like a physical blow in the gut and his hand tightened fractionally on her shoulder.
He wasn’t going to let her get away. He couldn’t. He forced himself to smile politely at some of the guests who were glancing across in their direction. In a minute they would have to move across to where plans were being made to help out. Their expensive guests appeared to be launching themselves into the spirit of charity work with admirable enthusiasm, including the high-level company directors who had previously been clamouring to escape the island in case they missed a few of their precious meetings. They could not physically leave the island just yet, and their energies needed to be directed into something, and helping out appeared to be filling the void.
They would need steering, though, and for that he and Lucy would have to be at hand. Good intentions and some spare time would not necessarily do the trick.
‘We need to go and see what’s happening with this lot,’ he said grimly, releasing her from his hold only so that he could look down at her with darkly flaring intent stamped in his eyes. ‘But do not consider this conversation finished.’
‘Because it won’t be finished until you get your own way?’
‘How well you know me, my darling.’
Which meant what? Lucy wondered feverishly as the better part of the day was spent with her hands to the deck, preparing containers of food for the islanders who seemed to have suffered most, dispatching those few staff who were not outside already clearing debris to help deliver, making sure that the guests didn’t overdo things.
She barely saw Nick. He himself was wrapped up in his assessment of damage and communicating with various transport services to establish when they could be reconnected to the mainland. Boats would be available the following day, but the light aircraft that normally ferried the hotel guests not for another three days at the earliest.
By six in the evening a fair amount had been accomplished. She had sent the guests away to relax and freshen up, though not before polishing their haloes with a few well-chosen words of praise for their efforts, and she herself was fully prepared to have an hour to herself—during which she would dredge up all the necessary common sense she could put her hands on, anything that would stop her from committing the ultimate folly of prolonging the tenuous relationship she had allowed Nick to instigate.
The last thing she was prepared for was to emerge from the shower with nothing but a towel wrapped around her, the bedroom door safely locked, only to find the French doors thrown open and Nick waiting outside for her, lounging against the doorframe, arms folded.
‘I thought you might have locked the bedroom door,’ he said lazily, ‘which is why I took the precaution of making sure that I took the key to the French doors with me earlier on.’
Lucy was frozen to the spot.
‘That’s…that’s…’
‘Sly? Cunning? Underhand? All three, I admit.’
‘I can’t talk to you with a towel around me.’
‘Why not?’ He stepped forward and she held her ground, even though with every step closer that he took she could feel her carefully prepared high-principled, sensible speeches begin to unravel at the seams. ‘Do you need to climb into a business suit to give you the strength you need to tell me that you don’t want us to carry on?’
‘I didn’t bring any business suits,’ Lucy said pedantically, while her heart continued to pound against her ribs and her eyes were drawn like magnets to his riveting face.
By the time he was standing in front of her, she could hardly breathe. He traced her skin along the top of the towel she was desperately clutching to her and she felt her breasts tingle in response.
‘You want me and I want you. What could be simpler?’ His eyes were hooded as he followed the feathery path his finger was making.
‘Casual flings aren’t my style, Nick.’
‘That’s not the song you were singing last night.’
‘Last night I was—’
‘Taking what you wanted and loving every minute of it. Life is too short for us to walk away from what gives us pleasure.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ she muttered unsteadily, and then gasped as his hand slipped beneath the parting in the towel and found one aching breast.
‘Doesn’t that feel good, Lucy? I know it does. Your nipple is hard.’ This was hardly the subtle approach he had planned, but, God, he couldn’t resist her. His voice was thick and shaky. He slipped his other hand beneath the towel, which dropped to the ground, exposing her in all her naked glory, and he groaned. ‘For God’s sake, Lucy, don’t go for safety.’ He dropped one hand to cup the soft mound between her legs and kept his hand there, exerting just the merest pressure.
The last of her coherent thoughts flitted out of her head and she raised her face to wordlessly offer her lips to his.
Robert was safety, and she had already decided that she could not possibly be with him.
Nor would she remain with this man, but to take these passing moments would be worth the heartache. He was right. To hell with safety.
‘You’ll finish with Robert when we get back to England,’ he ordered softly and she groaned.
‘I’ll finish with him.’
A few days, a few weeks; maybe she could hold on to him for a few months. It was a gamble she was now prepared to take.
CHAPTER NINE
LUCY stared out of the kitchen window of her flat with her face cupped in her hands and a cup of tea, not a sip taken, resting on the small table next to her elbow.
It was raining. Not the hard, hot, pelting rain that she had seen six weeks ago when they had been caught up in the hurricane, but a typically English rain. Cold, fine, steady and never-ending.
Her flat bore all the tell-tale signs of a place that was rarely lived in. Three times a week, against Nick’s wishes, she made sure to sleep in it.
‘Let it go,’ he had urged her more than once. ‘It’s a dump and it’s inconvenient. Move in with me.’
She had weathered his anger and refused, even though the temptation to wake up each and every morning next to the man she deeply loved was as tempting as a long drink of water to someone dying of thirst.
The fact was that, realistic as she was, she was all too aware that the passion that still fired him up, and had them making wild, unrestrained love in the most inappropriate of places, was as transitory as a cloud in a summer sky. She had lasted the course far longer than any of the other women he had dated since his wife had died, but love was still a word that had never crossed his lips. Not once. Not even when his big body shuddered above hers, and in the throes of physical fulfilment he murmured words of wanting and needing.
She sighed and wondered what the hell he was going to say to the little bit of news she had for him.
He would be coming to collect her in half an hour and they were going to have lunch at a pub just outside London. Followed by the cinema for a romantic comedy for which he had expressed less than zero enthusiasm but which, he had informed her with a magnanimous, teasing smile, he would endure because she wanted to see it.
How easy it would be to read all the wrong signals into little gestures like that. How easy to think that perhaps, without even realising it, he really did love her—because would he put her interests ahead of his if he didn’t? Would he have suggested that she move in with him if he didn’t? Would he laugh at some of the things she said if he didn’t? Would she turn in her chair at work to find him staring at her with that brooding, lazy expression that always made a shiver of suppressed excitement race down her spine?
But if he loved her he would have told her. Of that she was certain. He would also have been more forthcoming about himself because love was all about sharing and exchanging the information that mattered.
Oh, yes, he would talk to her about everything under the sun. Everything except his wi
fe and their life together. The one time she had tried to raise the subject she had seen the shutters snap down over his eyes and just as easily he had changed it, leaving her in no doubt that any discussion in that area was not authorised and would not be tolerated.
And so what was going to happen now?
She idly began to sip the tea, wrapping both her hands around the mug, waiting for the knock on the door that would announce his arrival. He had had a key cut for the front door for himself, arrogantly telling her that he was a possessive man, and instead of being annoyed at such a Victorian concept she had blushed and felt a thrill of pleasure.
The knock came just as she was finishing her tea, and even though she was expecting him Lucy still felt her nerves jump at the prospect of telling him what she had to say.
She had dressed for the weather. Olive-green corduroy trousers and a clinging roll-neck long-sleeved T-shirt, over which she wore a cream and brown jumper that was cropped to the waist.
She had even noticed how subtly her dressing had begun to change. She still dressed sensibly, but far more fashionably, and twice on a Saturday they had gone shopping together, with Nick channelling her towards items of clothing that she would never have thought to wear, grumbling all the way that she should allow him to take her to upmarket designer shops so that they could do some proper shopping for her, instead of trawling the cheaper shops where she insisted on going.
‘Snob,’ she had teased him, and he had had the grace to redden, even though he’d denied it vigorously, informing her that she would be severely punished for thinking such an uncharitable thought. It had been another brilliant day. Her punishment had been to be made love to with such leisurely skill that she could still burn thinking about it two weeks later.
‘I thought you would never open the door,’ Nick growled, moving into the room to circle her in his arms. ‘I spent all day thinking about you, you witch.’ He kissed her mouth, taking his time, and then feathered her neck with little caresses. ‘And why on earth have you dressed in the thickest jumper you could lay your hands on?’
‘Because it’s cold?’
‘But won’t it make it impossible for me to do anything with you in the back row of the cinema?’
Lucy laughed, distracted from her sombre frame of mind for a few minutes.
He, too, had dressed for the weather, and the dark colours made him appear even more rakish and devilishly good-looking than ever. Brute that he was, the tan he had acquired weeks previously had still not faded, while her trace of golden colouring was already a thing of the past.
‘Only teenagers fumble with one another in back rows of cinemas,’ she pointed out, pulling him into the room so that she could look at him fully, drink him in with her eyes.
‘You make me feel like a teenager.’ He had never felt so damned alive in his life before. Their night of passion on the island, which had had its dubious roots in his own burning curiosity, had not fizzled out into nothing, as he had half expected it to do. He had not grown bored and tired of her. Just the opposite. She was in his head all the time. It wouldn’t last, of course, but for the moment she was as bewitching now as she had been from the very first.
‘Is that good or bad?’ She laughed, stooping to get her bag from the sofa, guiltily aware that the speech she had planned to make as soon as he walked through the door was already slipping away through lack of will-power.
‘How hungry are you?’
‘What?’ He had a peculiar habit of jumping from one topic to another, without any link between the two. It was a characteristic that she was becoming accustomed to, although now and again he could still catch her sleeping.
‘Hungry. Are you very hungry? This pub I have in mind is at least forty-five minutes’ drive away, and that is not counting on any heavy traffic. Then another forty-five minutes to make it back to central London if we are to catch the movie in time.’
‘I take it you have an alternative suggestion,’ she said drily. Later, she thought. We’ll talk later; we won’t spoil this glorious Sunday, not yet…
‘Well, by my calculations, if we eliminate the country pub…’
‘But what about the best fish and chips I could ever hope to taste?’
‘As I was saying, we eliminate the country pub and go to somewhere a little closer to the cinema, we then save ourselves at least an hour and a half, giving us more than ample time to…’
‘To…?’ The smouldering intent in his eyes left her in no doubt as to what he had in mind, but she allowed the excitement to build. At the back of her mind lurked the inevitable talk that they would have to have before the day was over, but, like a coward, she allowed herself to be swayed by him.
‘What do you think?’ he asked, pushing up her jumper, only to find the further restraint of her long-sleeved T-shirt. It took him only seconds to tug it out of the waistband of her trousers and then his hands were on her breasts. ‘Mmm. No bra. You make a very good learner.’ He caressed her bare breasts until every pore in her body was tingling.
How could she resist? How could she shut herself off sufficiently to give her brain time to function and her mouth the opportunity to say the things that needed to be said?
Making love with him was a taste of heaven. It was shamefully easy to postpone unpleasantness, even for someone like her, someone who had never seen the benefits of trying to avoid the unavoidable, however gruesome it might be.
As it turned out, they made it to the cinema with only minutes to spare, by which time Lucy could barely concentrate on the light-hearted comedy. Her mind was busy catching up for lost time and she sat, huddled down in her seat, frowning and thinking, absent-mindedly linking Nick’s fingers through hers.
And as soon as they walked out into the cinema foyer she turned to him and said flatly that they had to talk.
‘Here?’
‘No, not here. It’s…it’s too public.’
‘It was a joke.’
‘Oh, right.’ She chewed nervously on her lower lip and looked at him. Lord, but he was beautiful. She was aware of the way other women looked at him, their eyes flicking sideways, running up and down the length of his body appreciatively. She wondered whether she had done that herself when he had been married, and even afterwards, when he had still been out of reach.
‘What is the matter?’ he asked, frowning.
‘We just need…to talk. Perhaps we could go…’
‘Back to my apartment?’
‘No!’ Not his apartment, and not her flat either. Nowhere where the temptation to touch him might get in the way of what she had to do.
‘Yours, then.’
‘No.’
‘Well, I’m running out of suggestions here. It’s too late and too cold to find an isolated bench in a park somewhere.’
‘The office!’
Nick looked at her as though she had suddenly taken leave of her senses. ‘You want to go to the office? Now? On a Sunday evening?’
‘Yes.’
He shrugged and wondered what the hell could be so important that it had to be discussed in the office of all places. Perhaps she was going to talk to him about commitment, about settling down, and he wondered what he would say if she did.
Surprisingly, he felt none of the distaste that he had previously felt when some of his other women had broached the subject.
Maybe she wanted to move in but she had some conditions. He would listen to her and, dammit, he might even be tempted to meet her conditions. It was driving him crazy not having her by his side all the time. This morning he had woken up thinking about her, and he hadn’t stopped until he had walked into her flat four hours later.
He had a gut feeling that marriage would be on the agenda. The word had not so much as surfaced since their affair had taken off, but Lucy would not want to be stuck on the outside for ever, and he needed her; lord, but he needed her. Her wit, her smile, the way she listened, the way she made love.
But did he need her enough to marry her? The memory of
Gina and the hopes he had felt at the onset of their marriage rose to remind him of why he had vowed never to repeat the same mistake twice.
It was only when the taxi was pulling up in front of the building that he realised that they had completed the entire journey more or less in silence. A first for them.
When he looked at her it was to find her staring out of the window and playing idly with the thin gold chain she wore around her neck, a twenty-first birthday present from her godmother, who had died weeks after giving it to her.
‘It won’t be as bad as you imagine,’ he said, stroking the side of her face with one finger, and she started.
‘What?’
‘Whatever is going through your mind…it cannot be that bad.’
‘We’re here.’ She seemed to finally register that they had arrived at their destination. Now the office didn’t seem like a good idea either. Not only was it the place where she had first slept with him, but they had made love there afterwards as well—three times, in fact. Once even when there were people around; he had simply locked the door and treated her to a fast, hard and blissfully satisfying twenty minutes.
But it was the least personal of the options.
‘And there is no need for you to look as though you have arrived at the gates of hell.’ He was tempted to hold her hand, but she had stuck them both into her coat pockets and was now lagging behind him, frowning, her head drooped in thought.
It occurred to him that she might not be thinking about moving in with him after all, or raising the delicate subject of a future together. It occurred to him that she might be thinking of doing just the opposite, might be thinking of breaking off their relationship altogether, and he felt a cold, poisonous trickle of apprehension curdle in his veins.
Her normally open, transparently clear face was closed and unreadable, and as they took the lift up to the directors’ floor together he noticed that she hadn’t moved automatically towards him, to nestle against him, but was standing stiffly by the panel with the buttons, hands still firmly tucked out of sight.
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