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‘What’s wrong with you?’ she demanded in a tight, angry voice. ‘You left me alone all day, and now this? You have to work. I get it. I understand that your work might take longer than you thought, but couldn’t you have let me know you were safe? I was worried about you.’ She searched his face with frustration. ‘You could have contacted the ship,’ she insisted. ‘I’m not angry for myself, but your stewards have been hanging around all night, waiting for you.’ When he didn’t answer she got angry. ‘Don’t you care for anyone but yourself? This is the first full day of our honeymoon—’
On top of his frustration, tension, and his monumental decision to turn both his plans and his life upside down, Rosie’s accusations were the straw that broke the camel’s back. ‘Ours is an arrangement—an arrangement!’ he roared. ‘I don’t have to explain my every move to you.’
And now she had tears in her eyes, and he wasn’t proud of that. ‘I’m sorry.’ He had never asked another human being to forgive him in his life. There had never been any call for him to do so, and now he’d upset the one person he should protect to his last breath.
Rosie was in no mood to forgive him. She was firing on all cylinders, chin raised, eyes blazing, ‘An arrangement to suit you,’ she accused him, ‘because a man as unfeeling as you could never get an heir any other way.’
She hated saying words like that. The expression in Xavier’s eyes wounded her as much as she’d wounded him, but she had to get through to him somehow. Leaving her so soon after their passionate wedding night, with no proper explanation, had cut her to the bone. ‘Was that just part of our bargain when you made love to me last night?’ she asked him. ‘You did make love to me. Please tell me I’m not mistaken about that.’ She hated the note of desperation in her voice. ‘So, what am I to think?’ she demanded when Xavier said nothing. ‘You love having sex with me, and you love having me around for the challenge and the banter, but you’ll never be able to love me in the way I need to be loved.’
‘What way is that, Rosie?’ he asked quietly.
She sucked in a breath as she searched her mind for the right words to express her feelings. ‘I want to be loved fiercely, wildly, passionately—I don’t even know,’ she admitted, raking her hair with frustration.
‘Do you think I’m so different from you?’ Xavier demanded. ‘Do I have different needs? Are you asking me to believe you entered into our agreement for anything less than one hundred per cent of the island? Or was it my finer qualities that tipped the balance for you? Perhaps the truth is, you would stop at nothing to get your share increased—and enjoy my lifestyle while you’re at it?’
‘That’s not fair,’ she exclaimed.
‘So I’m not entitled to have the same doubts as you? You dream because it’s safe—
‘That’s right, leave!’ he stormed as she turned for the door.
Like his mother before her, Rosie thought, halting abruptly. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said. ‘I don’t run away from anything. I never have. You have to bloom where you’re planted, I was told at the orphanage, and that’s what I’m going to do here.’
Her heart ached for both of them. Xavier was right in saying that neither of them was prepared to risk expressing their feelings, but there was one thing she had to get straight. ‘I’ve never been interested in your money, or your lifestyle. From what I’ve seen, you’ve got everything and nothing. It doesn’t matter if you drink out of crystal glasses on your super-yacht, or a plastic beaker at the orphanage. Life is empty, if you shun love and go through it alone.’
‘You’re an expert on feelings now?’ he said, with a lift of his brow.
‘I only know what I feel in here.’ She touched her chest. ‘And you can say what you like about Doña Anna, but I think she threw us together in one last attempt to jolt both of us onto a better track.’
‘My aunt didn’t have a romantic bone in her body.’
‘That shows how little you knew her.’
‘Are you saying you knew her better than me?’ Xavier demanded with disbelief.
‘I did,’ she said bluntly. ‘Did you never wonder why Doña Anna lived alone?’
‘I was her nephew, not her agony aunt. Of course I didn’t know.’
‘Did it never occur to you that your aunt had a lot of love to give, or did you just see her as a grouchy old lady who brought you up because there was no one else who was prepared to step up and do that?’
‘Maybe,’ Xavier admitted, frowning. ‘But how does that change anything?’
‘Did you know that her fiancé was killed just before they were due to be married, or that he was the love of h
er life?’
‘I didn’t know.’ And he was shocked to learn that his aunt had been left alone and lonely, until Rosie had arrived on the island.
‘We grew close when I read to your aunt in the library—that was when she told me that books were her escape. She went on to explain why she felt the need to escape.’
‘Dios,’ Xavier murmured beneath his breath. ‘I had no idea.’
‘And no reason why you should. I doubt Doña Anna would have confided in her nephew, even if you had never left her side.’
‘So, what are you saying?’
‘She could only put the pieces into play. She couldn’t direct us from the grave.’
