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Natalia blinked, too shocked to even push her dress back down. One of the airport’s security guards was shining a torch into the plane, but he’d immediately grasped what was going on for he backed quickly away.
‘Scusi…scusi…’
Reality returned in a sickening rush. Humiliation too. Carefully Natalia pulled her dress back down.
‘Sorry,’ Ben muttered, and reached for her hand. Natalia ignored it. It wasn’t easy to act sophisticated when she’d just been dumped on the floor, but she tried.
‘That’s not quite how I envisioned this ending,’ she murmured, giving him a tart look even though inside she felt sick with humiliation and hurt.
‘I thought it was the press.’
Ah. Well, that explained it. The last thing Ben wanted was to be caught in flagrante with Princess Natalia. ‘The press, camping out at the airport after midnight?’ she remarked drily. ‘I know you don’t like the paparazzi, Ben, but I think that’s verging on paranoid.’
‘Sorry,’ he said again. He didn’t look at her as he said it. Natalia felt her heart start to splinter.
‘Sorry you thought it was the press, or sorry for dumping me on the floor like so much rubbish? Or,’ Natalia continued, making sure to keep her voice dry, as if this were all so amusing, ‘sorry for kissing me in the first place?’
Ben didn’t answer. His expression had become so irritatingly unreadable. ‘Perhaps you’re sorry for all three?’ she suggested. ‘That would be a nice hat trick.’ Ben remained silent and she finished adjusting her dress, her chin held high, her hands trembling.
‘I’ll drive you home,’ he said after another interminable moment, and Natalia didn’t bother to reply. She didn’t think she could.
* * *
Nothing had gone the way he’d expected. Fury and regret pulsed through him as Ben drove Natalia home. She sat next to him, her posture ramrod straight, her chin tilted at an impossibly proud angle. Had he hurt her?
Of course you did, you bastard.
He’d dumped her on the floor. He’d pushed her away from him as if she disgusted him. It had been an instinctive response, one borne of self-protection and even fear. He’d had his moments of weakness exploited all too often. A tear-streaked face at four years old. Sullen and alone at twelve. The agony of his knee injury at sixteen. The paparazzi had captured every moment of emotional vulnerability and anguish he’d ever experienced and plastered them across their papers so the whole world had seen. So his mother had seen, and been heartbroken. Oldest Jackson misses his Daddy. Another Jackson Disappoints. Ben Jackson’s Dreams Shattered.
He’d lived through it all, and he would not do so again. He’d spent his life, his whole damn life, trying to live a quiet life, worthy of respect and out of the glare of the media. Trying to give the Jackson name the respect it had once earned. He’d thought he could have done it with football, but when that failed—when he failed—he did it with business. All along he’d wanted to make a difference, to change the way people thought about his family, and in one sordid moment he could have ruined it all. That’s what had gone through his head in a lightning-flash of fear when the cockpit had suddenly blazed with light. And while his history might have justified the fear, it certainly didn’t excuse the way he’d just treated Natalia.
He’d been foolish, he supposed, to have taken her out at all, and yet even so he couldn’t regret it. He’d wanted to be with her…and he still did.
Even now he wanted her, and not just physically, although that was certainly foremost in his mind. He wanted to apologise, explain why he was so afraid, and not just of the press, Ben realised in a rush of painful self-recrimination. Maybe that was just an easy excuse. He was afraid of himself. Afraid of losing control, of letting himself go because heaven only knew when Natalia was in his arms his whole world spun on its axis. Natalia had been right; he didn’t like feeling weak and helpless and out of control. He hated it.
You’re afraid of being afraid.
He pulled up to the palazzo and put on the emergency brake, turning to look at Natalia, to say something, but she’d already opened the door, her face angled away from him. ‘Natalia…’
She turned to him with one of her old mocking smiles, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. His wasn’t either. ‘Thank you for an evening that was full of surprises,’ she said, and without waiting for a reply, she waggled her fingers in farewell and then disappeared into the palazzo.
