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She stilled. Stopped staring at the gorgeous gemstone on her finger, as if trying to ascribe a meaning to the sapphire it didn’t have. Was he saying what she thought he was trying to say? She looked at him, narrowed her eyes.
‘What do you mean by that, Gage?’
In all the time she knew him, she’d only seen him embarrassed once. The first time had been when they’d sneaked a kiss at the bottom of the garden on her seventeenth birthday and he’d tried to touch her breast. He looked a little like that now. Eyes not quite holding her gaze. A faint stain of colour on his cheekbones. It made him look young, uncertain. Her heart ached for that simpler time when everything had been perfect and new.
‘It means I took into account that you’d be more...’ He cleared his throat. She almost smiled at his discomfort. ‘...womanly now.’
He was right. Even though it had happened in her twenties, pregnancy did that to a woman’s body. After she’d overcome the crippling grief of losing her child, losing every hope for her future, she’d relished the changes in her body the experience of pregnancy had wrought. The breasts that had never gone back to their normal size. Her wider hips. The curves she’d once have starved away in a quest for perfection, which she now wore like armour, always reminding her of the child who might have been. The little boy lost to her for ever. She refused to think about whether he’d have looked like Gage or like her.
She shut her eyes. Controlled the tears that she wouldn’t let fall, not here. She coated herself in the icy indifference she’d perfected and opened her eyes again. Hiding from everyone what had happened to her. She looked Gage up and down to make a point but immediately regretted it. Being up close to him only accentuated how much he’d changed from a lean twenty-three-year-old to a vital man of thirty.
‘Yes. We’ve all grown and sized up a bit.’
His nostrils flared. Gage looked down at the ring on her finger. A kind of heat burned in his eyes, which seemed even bluer than before. It slid through her like a jolt of spirits.
‘Do you like it?’ His voice was softer. He said it like he almost cared what she thought.
‘I adore it,’ she whispered, and he looked at her with the faintest of smiles teasing at the corner of his mouth. Vulnerability here was a mistake. She’d allowed herself that weakness once but now he’d wield it against her. She hardened her heart and her voice. ‘It suits the narrative you’re trying to fabricate perfectly.’
That banked heat in his eyes bled away till all that was left was a cold, unfathomable blue. Almost like he couldn’t believe they’d had a civil conversation. He stood and she couldn’t help but snatch a fleeting glimpse of the tight pull over the fly of his trousers, the unmistakeable bulge there. Heat rose from her throat to her face as he tugged his suit jacket closed and buttoned it, hiding the evidence of his arousal from view. The realisation that she might still affect him thrummed through her, potent and intoxicating. She could have moaned at the thought of it. How he tasted, how he smelled. Those memories didn’t fade either, no matter how many times she tried to file them firmly in the annals of her past.
‘It’s a long flight. There’s a bedroom down the back. You look tired. While it suits my narrative to have the world think I’m exhausting you with hours of lovemaking every night, you might not want the dark rings under your eyes for the inevitable pictures.’
She responded with a tight smile as he gave with one hand and took away with the other. She’d asked for it, and he’d delivered. Did he know how much he still affected her too? Did he care?
‘I might just do that.’ At least it would get her away from him, from this shimmering attraction that zapped through her. That made her crave things she couldn’t have. Because that’s what exhausted her every night. The lack of sleep, being woken by dreams of their bodies intertwined. His hands all over her skin. Exploring, probing. Those midnight fantasies were like an endless torment. ‘Thank you for your concern.’
‘I’m not concerned, cher,’ he said as he turned and began to walk towards the cockpit again. ‘I really don’t give a damn about you at all.’
As she sat back in her seat, crushed under the emotional weight of the engagement ring on her finger, she realised they were both liars.
CHAPTER THREE
HE SHOULD HAVE allowed Eve to travel alone, but he’d wanted to test himself. To show that she didn’t affect him anymore. That he didn’t care. Yet those hours on the plane with her were a nightmare because his body cared, the clawing desire for her like an addiction that no drug could fix.
Even when she’d taken herself to the bedroom of the airplane it had ridden him hard—the need to open the door, slide onto the bed with her, see where it led. He’d lost control and had almost embarrassed himself after he’d given her that infernal engagement ring. Why the hell was he interested in what she thought of it? And yet the look on her face as her eyes had lit up, as she’d stared at the perfect gem on her finger... One of a kind. It had warmed something inside him.
He’d told her he didn’t give a damn, and that was the truth. He didn’t care, not even when he’d stood and she’d looked at him like her favourite kind of candy. None of that mattered. She was a means to an end. And then he’d end it. Redeem his family name, take Caron Investments and conquer the damned world. Move on with his life and finally be free of her.
To hell with his unruly hormones.
The car ride ahead of them now they’d landed was around an hour. But he was an adult and could survive at least that long. Gage grabbed his tablet from his briefcase and scrolled through some emails—tried to read a few financial reports—but his concentration kept wandering back to Eve with every elegant move she made, from checking her phone to reapplying her lip gloss or merely crossing her long, slender legs. His heart began racing in a thready, excited kind of rhythm like he’d been for a damned run without the benefits of taking any exercise.
Why hadn’t he hired a helicopter to fly them the distance? But that would have been excessive. He understood his position of privilege in the world based on luck of birth and tried not to abuse it. Though right now he wished he wasn’t trapped in this ever-shrinking space with her.
After not nearly enough time and yet far too much, she looked out the window and frowned.
‘We should be there now. Aren’t we going in the wrong direction?’
‘And where should we be?’
‘Nice.’
‘That’s where we’re meeting Greta for dinner, but that’s not where we’re staying.’
He went back to work, numbers swimming as her scent filled his head. Something fresh and sweet and floral. Every time he saw damned flowers, smelled flowers, he thought of her. So he wouldn’t have them in his offices or any of his homes, no matter how hard his staff tried to encourage him, because when he’d first spied Eve from his vantage point in the old magnolia tree she’d been clutching a handful of blooms and looking like the mythical fairy at the bottom of the garden.
He’d never forgotten that first glimpse of her, he would probably remember it till his dying day. How innocent life had seemed then...
