‘Okay. I apologise for that.’
Their eyes tangled and her breathing picked up. She nodded and he hesitated fractionally.
‘I’ve learnt that the only person I can trust is myself,’ he told her heavily. ‘It’s just the way I’m built.’
Mia nodded and some of the hostility drained away. What did he mean by that? No one was built to be distrustful. She waited until he had left the bedroom and shut the door behind him.
She was as exhausted, as if she’d run a marathon, by the time she had changed into the loose-fitting cotton bottoms, baggy tee shirt and fresh underwear.
The torrential rain had subsided to a steady drumbeat, but she still had to shout to be heard, and she was as tense as a bowstring when he pushed open the door, glass of water in one hand and in the other a couple of painkillers that he held out to her.
‘These might take the edge off. Found them in one of your kitchen cupboards.’
Mia silently accepted the proffered tablets and automatically flinched as he levered himself down until he was kneeling at her feet like a supplicant as she sat on the edge of the bed. Or a guy about to propose to the woman of his dreams. A fine film of perspiration beaded her upper lip.
‘I’m going to just try and feel my way around your ankle.’ He looked up at her.
Mia was finding it very hard to actually hear a word he was saying because she was so conscious of his fingers on her skin, gently, very gently, stroking her tender, sensitive ankle. She was captivated by his eyes. Her breathing slowed and her mouth went dry. She felt giddy.
‘I guess you’re wondering why I should know anything about ankles and sprains,’ he offered, and she nodded mutely. ‘Well, believe it or not,’ he continued, in the same soothing, best bedside manner voice as he began manipulating her foot in tiny, barely discernible circles, ‘I did a summer job at a hospital when I was eighteen.’
‘You did? Ouch, that hurts.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s going to a bit, I’m afraid. Try not to think about it.’ He looked up and smiled crookedly. ‘Think about me instead.’
‘About you…’ She did as he asked and then blinked a little unsteadily. Not a good command to give, because now all she could think about was his hands moving up from her ankle, up along her calf, slipping under the baggy bottoms to slide over her inner thigh…to go further…
Heat rushed through her body.
‘Think about me working at a hospital. I was no more than a dogsbody, but you’d be amazed at what a dogsbody can pick up, and I’ve always been very good when it comes to picking things up.’
His voice was so quiet and so calming that she was aware of the pain in her ankle, whilst almost not being aware of it. He was very thorough and strangely tender for someone so big.
He told her about his hospital job. She really wasn’t sure whether he was making it all up to distract her or whether he actually had worked in a hospital for three months.
He certainly seemed to know what he was doing.
When he asked her to tell him about her family, she sighed and complied. He vanished for a couple of minutes and returned with the first aid box she kept in the bathroom.
He was distracting her. She knew that. He wasn’t interested in hearing about her family. Why would he be? She’d spent the past few days sitting opposite him and he’d barely noticed her existence, except on those occasions when he’d looked up and engaged her in something about the hotel. Other than that, she could have been a pot plant on the sideboard next to the platters of breads and pastries.
So did he really want to hear about her sprawling family? Her sisters? Her nieces and nephews? Or about that time when she was eight and they’d all gone on a family picnic by the sea, and she’d wandered off and ended up spending the night in the forest because they hadn’t been able to find her for love nor money? Was he really as interested as he appeared to be when she told him about school, and about wanting to be different from her sisters, wanting to avoid university and an office job?
He seemed to be, because he kept asking questions, while busying himself with the bandage, wrapping it around her now swollen ankle with painstaking care.
He was a persuasive listener. The tablets had kicked in and the throbbing in her ankle had eased. The tension had seeped out of her and she’d never felt so relaxed.
Relaxed enough to sigh as she considered all the stuff she’d been through… Relaxed enough to say, as he neatly began finishing the job he had begun with the bandage, ‘I guess it’s because I come from such a close family that I ended up getting married so young…’
CHAPTER FIVE
‘MARRIED?’
It wasn’t often that Max was shocked, but he was shocked to the core now.
He almost burst out laughing at himself and his erroneous assumptions. Was his version of a divorced woman so one-dimensional? Did he really think that all divorcees were hard, bitter and plastered with war paint?
No. He didn’t. But it was a telling assumption, and for the first time he found himself a little unsettled at realising just how pervasive his cynicism had become over the years. It coloured all his opinions and every aspect of his life.
Mia had told him that she felt sorry for him. Naturally, that was a laughable criticism. Anyone sharp enough to have mechanisms in place to deflect the slings and arrows of uncertain fate could never be an object of pity. The thought of it was ridiculous.
And yet, when he thought about it, his life was so intensely controlled…
He was accustomed to obedience on the work front. He might have groped his way for a while, when he had been thrust into a position of responsibility at the age of twenty-two. He had been surrounded by men and women twice his age. Many of them he had been forced to let go. Many more he had been forced to relocate. He had gritted his teeth and done what he had had to do. Life in a boarding school from the age of seven had toughened him. Sacking people to refine a business that would have to pay for his siblings had toughened him even further.
And now, many years later and with a business that was a thousand times bigger, he had learnt every aspect of control.
Handing over the building and running of this hotel to Izzy was the first time he had ever let go of the reins and look where it had got him.
He should have been the overlord in the equation, and everything would have run to plan. He would have had his hotel with its marble and glass and infinity pool and wouldn’t now be wading through a bunch of designs, purchases and supply chains that shouldn’t have been required in the first place.
The truth was, though, that his control extended way beyond what happened in his sprawling empire. When it came to women, he allowed no one past a certain point. He had been raised with the consequences of impulse. His parents had specialised in that to the exclusion of everything else. He had been brought up to distrust the so-called power of love and the irrational need to let other people in. His parents had certainly been indulgent when it had come to their all-consuming love, and in the process had ignored everything and everyone else, including their kids. Or at least him.
Holding the world at a distance had been one of his strengths. But now he wondered just how insular he had made his fabulous, moneyed world. He let no one in. He knew his parameters at all times.
Coming here had been a step out of his intensely controlled comfort zone. Under normal circumstances, were one of his smaller projects to need a helping hand on the ground, he would dispatch a member of staff. But he had needed to find his sister, so he’d made the trip himself.
And, since then, where was all that control he had always held dear?
He had arrived to find his ideas for the hotel in tatters. His aim to find his sister and leave within a couple of days had been trashed. He seemed to be permanently engaged in a standoff with a woman he couldn’t go near without wanting to touch.
Ther
e was a battle raging inside him.
Sure, he was attracted to her. She was an incredibly attractive woman.
He’d been out with very many incredibly attractive women. So why was it that this particular one had managed to get under his skin in a way no other woman had?
It made no sense because, beyond the physical appeal, she should have been a turn-off.
She’d kicked off by not telling him where Izzy was. That in itself should have solved the problem of hanging around. He should have just gone ahead and taken the practical route of hiring someone to find her. It would have been easy. Not the most desirable option, but an easy one, given the fact that Mia had dug her heels in and refused to co-operate. Hire someone to do the job, get Izzy back at the hotel within hours—job done, bye-bye Hawaii and hello to the concrete jungle that was the city of London.
But he hadn’t.
He’d listened to her—but had that put paid to her mouthiness? Not in the least. She felt utterly free, it seemed, to say exactly what was in her mind. Sometimes, he could tell that she was trying hard to hold back, despite the fact that she worked for him, but the thread that held her back from speaking her mind was gossamer-thin and often broke.
And yet, bewilderingly, he didn’t seem to object as much as he knew he should. He was beginning to think that, the more she tried his patience, the more attracted he was to her and the faster his self-discipline got flushed down the pan.
He was her employer! She worked for him. He had always made a point of keeping business very far removed from pleasure. You let someone who worked for you into your life, and you lost control of the reins. That had always been his motto.
And yet, not even her status could detract from her appeal.
And now, finding out that she’d been married…
Been married? Or still was…?
Had she been clear?
‘Where is he now?’ Max asked abruptly. He stood up and stretched his joints, then cast a satisfied look at the job he had done bandaging her foot. ‘And don’t try to stand. It looks like a nasty sprain. Bit of swelling but I suspect a day or so of painkillers and keeping it off the ground will do the trick.’ He looked at her. She was rain-washed. Her hair was drying in a spiky way but it did nothing to detract from her sexiness.
‘So?’ Never one to dig deep when it came to women’s backstories, he now found that he was burning with curiosity and impatient to continue the conversation.
‘So what? I won’t stand on the foot. At least not right at the moment. And thank you for…you know…bandaging this up. You didn’t have to.’
‘The guy you married. Where is he now?’
‘Oh. Kai.’
‘That his name?’ He was still getting his head round the fact that the woman now resting her bandaged foot on the stool he had brought for her, the woman with the sparkling brown eyes and skin as soft as silk, could have been married…could still be, for that matter.
‘He lives in Honolulu with his new wife, as it happens.’
‘You’re incredibly sanguine about that.’
‘You think I should be bitter?’
‘I think it would be understandable.’ He pulled a chair closer to her and dropped down into it. What did the guy look like? More to the point, what had gone wrong? Curiosity dug deep.
‘I was very young. We both were. We knew each other from school. You could say that we mixed in the same crowd and then, at some point, we became an item. Both of us came from large families and after we left college it just seemed natural for us to…take things to the next level.’
‘You drifted into marriage.’
‘Sounds awful, but we had really high hopes. In fact…’ She paused and sharply looked away. ‘It never occurred to us that it would all fall apart at the seams. That’s how cocky and confident we were. But as it turned out we were way too young and, much as we got along, we’d never shared space together. We did everything as part of a group most of the time. We surfed and went to parties and hung out. We liked each other and we translated that into something else.’
‘And then…?’
‘You don’t have to pretend to be interested in my life, Max,’ she said gently. ‘And you don’t have to feel that you need to hang around here for a bit longer because you’ve been kind enough to bandage my foot.’
‘I seldom do anything because I feel pressured,’ he returned drily. ‘Tell me what happened. I’m interested.’
‘Things went wrong.’ She shrugged. ‘We started arguing. Kai wasn’t cut out for staying in. He still wanted to party all the time. We thought we’d be great but in the end we couldn’t even play house. It all started unravelling and eventually we called it a day.’
‘And yet you seem to have gone past that pretty successfully.’
‘I learnt from it.’ Mia tilted her chin and firmed her mouth. ‘That was years ago, and I made my mind up after that that I would never jump into anything without really testing the waters first. I’d have to be sure that any guy I went out with was the right one.’
Max wanted to laugh. Was there such a thing as ‘the right one’? He very much doubted it. There were the loved-up and oblivious, like his parents. That seldom lasted. The magic wore off and in the blink of an eye someone was getting up to something they shouldn’t with someone else. Too much fairy dust never augured well for the institution of marriage. Boredom had a nasty way of setting in and then where was the fairy dust? On the ground, being swept up by a disillusioned spouse.
Of course, in the case of his parents, the overpowering ‘I only have eyes for you’ love had lasted, but to the detriment of the kids they’d had.
Whichever way you looked at it, handing your emotions over to someone else and asking them to return the favour was never a good idea.
The ‘right one’ didn’t exist.
A life lived logically was a good life, he mused. And if he ever decided to get married, well, a logical union would be just the ticket. Something that made sense. A business proposition, in a manner of speaking.
His eyes met hers and he held her gaze until she blushed and eventually looked away.
That blush said a lot, he thought with lazy satisfaction. He’d noticed it before—the way she slid her eyes away if he looked at her for too long, and the way she focused on him when she figured he wasn’t looking.
A Pandora’s box begging to be opened and he clenched his jaw, trying hard to stifle temptation at its source.
‘You must be hungry,’ he growled. ‘I am.’ He stood up and strolled without his usual grace to the window that gave out onto a dark, rainy and windswept night.
‘I… There’s no need…’
Max, still struggling to hang on to his self-control after too much introspection, and way too much interest in a woman who should be no more than another employee, was more brusque than intended when he replied. ‘Repeat—I don’t do anything because I feel obliged to. Tell me what you want to eat.’
‘I could make something.’
‘Italian food? French food? Chinese food? Name it.’
‘But Max…’
He’d flipped his phone out and gave her an enquiring, impatient look.
‘Okay…anything. Chinese food.’
It took him under five minutes to instruct his dedicated driver to fetch the food as soon as possible. The conversation was brief. He simply told the guy to put a call in to the restaurant with the best Chinese cuisine in the city, give his name and ask them to bring enough to feed two generously.
It never failed to impress Mia just how much money talked. She knew the restaurant the driver would order the food from and they didn’t do take away. But he would get one without any trouble because he was obscenely rich. Rich enough to buy the restaurant. Rich enough to have the luxury of never doing anything he didn’t want to do because he felt compelled.
T
he air he breathed and the world he lived in were far removed from hers. He’d arranged that they meet at his partly-built hotel so that she could walk him through some of Izzy’s ideas. Instead, here he was in her home, bandaging her ankle, and she wondered if he resented the call on his time.
‘I’m sorry…’ she began awkwardly.
He had returned to his original position on one of the wide, squashy chairs and now he tilted his head to one side and looked at her questioningly.
‘Are you going to apologise for my being here?’ he asked drily. ‘Because, if you are, then it will turn out to be a replay of the conversation where you tell me that I didn’t have to, and I can’t be bothered to repeat my response to you.’
‘You might have had plans for the evening,’ she mumbled.
‘My plans were to work.’
‘You must miss your…er…life in England.’ Somehow he’d ended up knowing a great deal about her and she wanted to find out something about him. Was that so unusual? Here they were, and the circumstances had shifted the normal barrier between them. She felt less like his employee and more like just another person.
Besides, they had to talk about something. It would be a disaster if they just sat and stared at one another in agonising silence, while her vivid imagination had a laugh at the expense of her common sense.
She hadn’t been with a guy on her own for a long time.
The handful of dates she’d been on had been conducted with the buzz of anonymous chaperones all around, people coming and going on the beach, or in a bar or in a busy restaurant.
A sense of intimacy feathered through her, playing with her nerves and unpicking her composure, which had been pretty thin to start with.
‘Which bit in particular are you talking about?’
Mia shrugged. ‘You must have quite a busy social life. I mean…’ she gave a smile that was a mix of reassuring, mildly interested and screamingly polite ‘…you’ve quizzed me about my youthful adventure with Kai but I don’t even know whether there’s someone back there in England waiting for you!’ She shook her head with rueful apology and laughed. ‘I guess you must be involved with someone and, if so, then I can only apologise for the fact that you’re having to stay here longer than you’d anticipated.’
Forbidden Hawaiian Nights Page 7