Craving Her Enemy's Touch
Page 18
Holly had thought she’d accepted how hard this was going to be already—but that had been before she’d seen him again. Somehow, the years had dulled him in her memory. Dimmed him.
Seeing him again, even through a screen, was as blinding as the first time she’d laid eyes on him. In that tiny restaurant in Santorini where she’d been sipping an afternoon coffee, unaware that her entire life had been set to collide with his when he’d shouldered his way inside and claimed the table next to hers.
Like a comet, she’d thought then, even on a sun-drenched Greek island with nothing but dizzying blue and whitewashed walls on all sides and then this man in the middle of it all, like a dream come to startling and powerfully sexy life...
“Holly.”
His voice tore into her, dark and impatient and yet still, that little lilt to her name that made her whole body shimmer into instant, almost painful awareness. She was glad he couldn’t see the way she tensed in her seat in automatic reaction, her legs going tight as she dug her toes into the floor beneath her desk. Or that bright little light inside she knew was the most dangerous, most doomed, thing of all. Hope.
“I don’t have time for this today. And even if I did, I have nothing to say to you.” His hard mouth moved into some lethal approximation of a smile, and her curse was, it made him no less attractive to her. Quite the opposite. “Nothing polite, that is.”
It was so tempting to simply lose herself in him, or to let herself break down and start telling the truths she already knew he wouldn’t believe, not when she’d spent these long years trying so hard to force him to let her go by any means possible. She’d made him detest her, if not release her. She had to remember the game she needed to play here or she’d lose before she started.
So Holly smiled at him. Not the way she once had, when she hadn’t had the faintest shred of self-preservation in her body, when she hadn’t been able to help herself from falling into him and for him like the proverbial ton of bricks, her innocence indistinguishable from her stupidity, to her recollection. But the way she’d perfected in these past few lonely years, the smile that made it possible to play the role she’d created for herself out of the ashes of the marriage she’d burned to the ground with her lies. The role she’d thought would make it so simple for him to wash his hands of her, to discard her, to divorce her and free them both.
She’d been wrong about that, too. She’d finally, painfully, faced the fact that she’d been wrong about everything, and that she’d done nothing here but reenact her own painful history. But he wouldn’t believe her if she told him that. He would think it was nothing more than another game, and he’d made it clear he wouldn’t play them with her, hadn’t he? Perfectly, coldly clear.
Which meant she had no choice but to play one last game with him, this one with the highest stakes of all.
“Busy?” she asked, letting her drawl take on a life of its own, a Texan specialty. “Doing what, exactly? Still playing the crown prince in your daddy’s great big kingdom?”
Theo’s expression went from furious to something like thunderstruck, then back to a hardness that should have left her in tatters. Maybe it did. Maybe the truth was that she couldn’t tell the difference any longer.
“I beg your pardon?” His voice was icy, but there was no mistaking the threat beneath it. “I didn’t realize it was time for our long-overdue conversation regarding each other’s character flaws. Are you certain you’re ready for that?”
“Blah blah blah,” she said, rolling her eyes and waving a hand dismissively, wishing she felt even a tiny bit that relaxed or casual. “Just call me a whore already, Theo. You’ve been dancing around it for almost four years now.”
Copyright © 2015 by Harlequin Books S.A.
ISBN-13: 9781460380949
Craving Her Enemy’s Touch
Copyright © 2015 by Rachael Thomas
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