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‘It made happy too,’ Natalia muttered. She could feel herself starting to blush again. Wonderful.
Ben smiled. ‘I know it did.’
‘I think your eggs are burning,’ she told him, and felt a rush of relief when he turned back to the stove. She was so not ready for this kind of honesty. Intimacy. It was entirely out of her experience, totally foreign to the way she normally operated. Defend. Deflect. Go on attack. Anything to keep people from getting close. From knowing.
She took a sip of coffee and wandered over to the sliding glass doors that led to the beach. The sunlight sparkled off the water, and she could see both her and Ben’s footprints in the sand, leading back to this door. Upstairs. Memories of last night rushed through her again and her throat tightened, her fingers clenching around the mug. Desire and dread, hope and fear, warred within her, an impossible tangle of emotions.
‘Breakfast is ready,’ Ben said, and she turned to see he’d placed two plates loaded up with eggs and bacon on the glass-topped table.
‘Fabulous.’ She wasn’t sure she could manage a mouthful, but she came to the table with her gamest smile. Not that she could ever fool Ben.
‘And I thought we could read the papers,’ Ben continued, smiling as he dropped two well-reputed papers on the table. ‘No paparazzi photographs, I promise.’
Natalia stilled, stared at those newspapers. Such a simple little thing. Reading the papers over coffee and eggs, sharing bits of news and toast with each other. What normal people did. What everyone else did. And virtually impossible for her.
‘Natalia?’ Ben prompted. She looked up, saw him frowning at her and she felt the pressure build in her chest.
It should be so easy to tell him. It could be. She knew he would show her compassion rather than contempt; she knew him—loved him—well enough to believe that. Yet she still couldn’t form the words. Bare her secret, her soul. It was just too hard. And she didn’t want to have him look at her with pity, couldn’t bear that now when she was already feeling so exposed and vulnerable.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said quietly and Natalia shook her head.
‘I can’t do this.’
‘Do what? Eat breakfast?’ He kept his voice light. ‘Read the paper?’
Yes. ‘All of it. This…playing at some kind of happy families. Being a couple. I can’t do it.’
Ben’s expression hardened even though she knew he was trying to stay reasonable. In control. As always. ‘Why not?’
‘I know it’s easy for you, Ben—’
‘It’s not actually.’
‘You seem to have fallen into the role of attentive boyfriend rather easily,’ Natalia snapped, and Ben’s eyes flashed temper.
‘You think it comes naturally, Natalia? You think I’m not trying? Because just like you, I’ve avoided relationships. Commitment. I’ve seen the train wreck of my parents’ marriage and I haven’t wanted anything like it. I’m still wary. Still afraid.’ His voice throbbed with both sincerity and anger and he let out a shuddering breath. ‘But I recognise that we have something between us—something I’ve never had with anyone else—and think I’d keep at it, see if it works. Why aren’t you?’
‘Because it won’t.’ The pressure in her chest was taking over her whole body, so every muscle and nerve ached with suppressed emotion. Something had to happen or she’d surely explode. ‘It can’t.’
‘You’re so sure about that, Princess?’
‘Yes, Ben, I am.’ She kept her voice cutting, as sharp as it ever was, a razor of remembrance that cut through the emotion, reminding them both of who they were and where they’d started. ‘Because I’m a princess, just like you said. And we don’t have a relationship, because—’ She took a breath, made herself make the final cut. ‘I’m about to marry someone else.’
She saw Ben draw back as if she’d punched him. For a second he looked shocked, devastated, and then he blinked, and the expression was wiped clean from his face. Natalia felt her breath come out in a tearing gasp and she stared back at him, her whole body taut and quivering with tension. ‘I see,’ he finally said, his voice utterly devoid of feeling. ‘I’m afraid I didn’t realise that.’ He sounded horribly, eerily polite, and Natalia just stood there as he nodded towards the door. ‘There’s not much else to say then, is there?’
‘No,’ she agreed, her voice a scratchy whisper. Yet words clambered inside her, clogged in her throat. There was so much more to say. It was just she was so afraid to say it.
