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‘Where did you get the laptop from?’ he asked, coughing to clear the lump that had formed in his throat. He needed to get away from personal territory. He had opened a big enough can of worms the day before, by pumping her for information that should have been left alone.
‘Patrick lent it to me,’ she said, referring to one of the crew members. She stepped into her dressing room, leaving the door open. He watched as she rummaged through some drawers.
‘What were you working on?’
‘It’s personal.’ She bent over to step into the yellow skirt she had selected. Anyone else and he would suspect her of being deliberately provocative. Instead he could feel the taut anger reverberating through her, pulsing through the physical distance she had placed between them and hitting him with the force of a Taser.
He should let it go. Hadn’t he learned by now that with Rosa he should leave well enough alone, if only for his own sanity?
His mind flickered back to their last night on Butterfly Island and her suspicious behaviour before they had gone to dinner. ‘Is this what you were doing the other night, before we went to dinner with Robert and Laura?’
* * *
Why was he even pretending to care?
Deep inside Rosa’s bones a fire raged—a fire she had spent the day obstinately refusing to admit even existed. For the first time since she had married Nico the fire had nothing to do with lust or desire. This was rage—a simmering inferno of anger. And now, with him conversing so casually, acting as if nothing had happened—as if he hadn’t dumped her and then left her to her own lonely devices for the day—the inferno was approaching boiling point.
She would not allow it to spill over. Whatever happened, she would never let him know the utter devastation he had wrought.
She answered him only when she was certain her tongue could be kept under control. A stupid thing, to think a tongue could take a life of its own, when it was her brain and consciousness that controlled it, but over the past few days it felt as if all the control she had spent years cultivating and perfecting was being ground into dust.
‘Yes,’ she said, zipping the skirt and smoothing it down. ‘It’s what I was doing the other night.’
‘And are you going to share what you have been doing with me?’
‘If you must know, I’ve been trying to trace my father’s family.’
He was silent before cautiously asking, ‘Are you having any luck?’
‘No.’
‘What sites have you tried?’
She closed the dressing room door and told him briefly of the ancestry and genealogy sites she had signed up to.
‘Have you searched on the social networking sites?’
She threw him a look of disdain and immediately wished she hadn’t. Looking at him hurt. ‘I’ve searched everywhere. I’ve got copies of his birth and death certificates, but the only thing I know for certain is he was an only child. His parents died young. His father was an only child too, but his mother had a sister who emigrated to Australia decades ago. In the year I’ve been searching she’s the only possible surviving relative I’ve found. I have no idea where in Australia she is, or if she’s married or...anything.’
‘I know a good private investigator in Australia,’ he said. ‘If you give me your great-aunt’s details I can get him to look into it.’
‘No, thank you,’ she said stiffly, forcing her legs to walk past him to the stupidly enormous bed. ‘I’m happy to take my time. I have no intention of reaching out to her.’
Nico was the last person she wanted help from. All she wanted from him was his signature on the divorce papers.
How dared he lead her on? How dared he say he wanted a proper marriage when all he’d really wanted was to get into her knickers? She had trusted him, and all along he had been pretending, playing a role.
She could hear his brain ticking. She wouldn’t put it past him to hire the investigator whether she agreed to it or not.
‘What about your mother’s family?’ he asked quietly.
She carefully picked up the laptop. ‘All dead. My mother was the only child of elderly parents—her mother was forty-four when she had her. In those days that really was old to be a mother.’ Unwilling to continue the conversation a second longer, she tucked the laptop under her arm. ‘I need to get this back to Patrick before he finishes for the evening.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ Nico offered.
‘I’m quite capable of walking down two flights of stairs on my own,’ she said tersely. She didn’t want to be anywhere near him.
In fact, she decided, as she passed through the saloon, she would spend the night in here. The leather sofas were comfortable and it would be easy enough to borrow a blanket. Anything had to be better than sharing a bed with a man for whom two nights with her had most definitely been enough.
