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For an endless moment he did not speak. The whole world was this moment, this sensation.
Then, in a low, husky voice, he said what she had both longed to hear him say—and dreaded.
‘I want you very much. Will you stay with me tonight?’
He had said it. Beneath the low murmur of his voice, emotions surged like a flood-tide in him.
All evening he had felt the tide running. Running strong and silent and so powerful that its strength all but overwhelmed him. Where had it come from, this overpowering tide that was sweeping through him? Sweeping away things he must not let it sweep away.
He tried to drag those things back, because he must not let them be lost, but the tide was running stronger and stronger still.
He knew its name. Had felt its power before. But never like this.
He tried to fight it. But it was like swimming against a current so strong that he could make no headway. Nor did he want to fight it. That was the worst—that knowledge, that grim recognition deep inside him, that what he was doing now was not what he had planned to do.
It should not have come to this. He should have stopped it, halted it in its tracks, forced it by main strength back down into the subterranean depths of his being where it belonged.
But he couldn’t—and now, unstoppable, incurable, it had taken the ascendant. Brought him to this moment.
His eyes held hers, his hand had taken hers, and now nothing else mattered.
Except one thing.
The answer to his question.
He saw her eyes flare. Her lips part.
And then, like a long, slow exhalation, he heard her speak.
‘I can’t …’
For a moment he was still—quite still. Then, his eyes never leaving hers, never letting hers go for an instant, a second, he spoke, too.
‘Why not?’
His fingers, without conscious volition on his part, had tightened around hers.
Her eyes were huge, haunted. Haunting.
‘I can’t,’ she said again. Her voice was a thread of breath. ‘I have …’ She swallowed, and for a moment her face was stark and bleak. ‘Commitments.’
‘There is someone else?’ He spoke sharply, like a knife cutting.
The moment of truth now. Truth on so many points. All of them impaling him.
Slowly, she nodded. ‘Yes. Someone very important to me.’
He let go her hand. Forsaking it as if suddenly it were a poisonous snake. His jaw tightened.
‘And yet,’ he said, clipping out each word, harsh and hard, ‘you chose to dine with me tonight?’
She bit her lip. He could see it, and it sent a punishing flare through him to see the whiteness of her teeth indent into the soft curve of tender flesh.
‘I … I had to.’ She was forcing the words out, he could see, her eyes still wide and huge. ‘I told you—’
His eyes narrowed. Something in her face was pinched suddenly.
‘Ah, yes, your charming employers—threatening you with—what is that clumsy English expression? Ah, yes—threatening you with the sack if you did not accept my invitation to dinner.’
