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“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Quinn came back bitterly. “Warren’s standards are so high you can’t be human. You have to be a machine.”
“How’s that going for you?” he asked softly. “You seem to be doing a pretty good impersonation of one and it’s still not making you or him happy.”
She squeezed her eyes shut. “I just need to do better.”
“No, you don’t.” He took a step closer. “Dammit, Quinn, you need to believe in yourself. You are working miracles here but you need help.”
“I just need to get through the next few weeks and I’ll be fine.”
He sighed. “There are too many issues with too many properties.”
“I will manage.”
“You will self-destruct.”
She looked him dead in the eye. “I didn’t ask for your commentary.”
He hissed in a breath. She could be a cold bitch sometimes. He’d been busting his butt for a week trying to help her and this was what he got? But even as he thought it, he knew better. Knew the puzzle that was Quinn had grown a hard shell to protect herself from getting hurt.
Let it go, Matteo. The voice of sanity echoed in his head. Drop it now before you get more emotionally involved with a woman who is mortally off-limits to you.
They ate at the candlelit table for two that overlooked the ocean, protected by a canopy as a crackling thunderstorm descended. It lit up the night with outrageously beautiful white light that arced across the sky and stole their breath. The small talk made him crazy. The need to hold her made his hands curl at his sides. He gritted his teeth and went through the key points to review with the sommelier in the morning. Forced the salmon down his throat. Did not acknowledge how she bit her lip against the electricity that raged between them every time their gazes collided, just as strong as the storm around them.
One more taste of her, he knew, and he was a dead man.
Matteo did not do relationships with women. Didn’t even know if he was capable of one with his checkered past. With his parents’ business merger as his prime example of what one could encompass. Quinn needed someone she could believe in. Someone who could restore her faith in men. Not him.
She offered him a liqueur after dinner. Coffee. He turned them both down flat. Watched the disappointment slacken her lower lip. “I have work to do,” he murmured, getting to his feet and throwing his napkin on the table. “Thank you for dinner.”
Then he escaped to his room.
* * *
Quinn poured herself another glass of wine and paced. She was out of control with her stress, no doubt about it. Matteo did not deserve her ire, not when he’d just spent the entire week bailing her behind out of an impossible situation they might actually pull off if they were very, very lucky.
It’s just that he was so damn perfect sometimes. So calm and in control and able to see the big picture. Her fingers curled around her wineglass, absorbing its icy chill. That was, when he wasn’t falling apart over a death he wouldn’t talk about....
She stopped in front of the incomparable view of the sparkling sea that stretched for miles in front of her. And admitted it. Wasn’t the real problem what a good job he was doing ignoring her?
She wanted to kill him. How rational was that?
Quinn stalked inside and changed into the bikini she’d raided from the boutique. Who cared if the sides were cut so high you could see her butt? Or if the triangles of fabric on the top didn’t do a great a job of covering her chest? Matteo had damn well walked away from her again. Without a backward glance. Which was absolutely their deal. It was. She just didn’t know how he could so completely turn off his feelings. Forget how unbelievable that night they’d shared had been. Because she’d tried. She’d really tried. And it wasn’t working.
She went back outside and sat on the edge of the plunge pool. The storm had moved off, silvery moonlight slanting across the smooth surface of the water, reflecting her confusion back at her. One night was supposed to have been all it was, yet she felt changed somehow. Matteo’s hands on her skin, his passion for her, had replaced the fear and inadequacy Julian had implanted in her with the alternate reality that she was beautiful and desirable. Worthy of being treasured.
It had shattered a perception of herself carved over a roller-coaster year of marriage. She wasn’t home enough, Julian had said. She wasn’t warm enough to the wives of his business associates. Which had degenerated into the fact she wasn’t warm enough in general. She didn’t treat him like the man of the house.
She downed another gulp of the wine with a jerky movement. Her inexperience in bed had been a major disappointment to Julian. But now that that night with Matteo had proven she wasn’t a cold fish, now that she’d sampled her ability to feel, to want, she was struck by the disturbing thought that she would never experience it again. That no man would ever know her as instinctively as Matteo did. Had from day one.
She sank her toes into the water. Lifted them out and watched the droplets fall like big fat tears from her skin. Hot moisture gathered at the corners of her eyes. She didn’t want to be that person anymore. The woman who had written off a part of herself as unrecoverable. Who had never believed herself capable of more. A lump formed in her throat, swift and hard. Julian had taken away her desire to feel. Matteo had given it back to her. But he was just a playboy doing his thing. He would move on now, win this deal. Focus on what was important to him. And Quinn would be left with the empty shell of who she’d always been.
The tears slid silently down her cheeks, shocking and unbidden. She hadn’t cried like this since Sile had died. When she had finally lost the fight she had so valiantly waged against the cancer that had been too strong even for her adopted mother, who had been the most courageous woman she’d known. Now it felt like a fissure had opened up inside her and exposed everything. Every part of her. Made it painful to breathe.
The silvery moon dipped behind the clouds. Everything became blindingly clear in that moment. So blindingly clear that she didn’t care anymore. She wanted more. She wanted her life to be more. The problem was, she thought, swiping the tears away from her cheeks with the back of her hand, she didn’t know any other way to be. This was all she’d ever been. Quinn, who got the job done.
She blinked hard as the tears flew faster down her face. Matteo was damn right she didn’t want to be human. Being human sucked.
* * *
Sometime around midnight Matteo, hot and unable to sleep, emerged from his bedroom and headed for the pool. The rhythmical song of the tree frogs filled the otherwise silent air with a deafening symphony he was surprised anyone could sleep through, yet he had slept through it these past couple of weeks, finding it exceptionally soothing white noise.
But not tonight. He’d emptied his email in-box, read every last report and talked to Gabe who was presently wildly excited over a new wine. And he was still wide-awake with no sign his head wanted to join his body in its state of complete exhaustion.
He grabbed a towel from the rack and turned toward the pool. Then he froze as he saw Quinn sitting with her legs dangling in the water. Her gaze was fixed on the dark mass of the Caribbean Sea, her profile so exquisitely drawn he couldn’t tear his eyes from it. He had never met a woman whose beauty was so all-encompassing—so layered. Just when you thought you’d reached the end of it, she revealed more of herself that made you fall deeper under her spell.
If he had continued on with his sensible behavior of late, he would have turned on his heel and gone back inside. Instead he focused on the spare amount of material in the tangerine-colored bikini that did little to cover her mouthwatering curves. Her upswept ponytail revealed the long, graceful curve of her neck that he wanted to sink his teeth into. Dammit. He should never have shared this space with her.
She sensed his presence as if a whisper of air had carried him to her. Looked up at him, the bright glimmer in her eyes wrapping itself around his heart and tugging. She’d been crying. Quinn, who took everything on the chin like a prizefighter and just kept on going, had finally showed a chink in her armor.
Run, a voice inside him warned. Run before this all comes falling down around you. Except he didn’t. He stepped closer, lowered himself down beside her and dunked his feet in the bathtub-warm water.
“Couldn’t sleep?”
She shook her head.
“What’s wrong?”
She pressed her lips together. “I don’t know.”
He pushed a wayward chunk of her hair behind her ear so he could see her face. “You’re too hard on yourself. You need to back off and accept help before you break.”
“It’s not that.”
Just as Quinn had crossed the threshold into his room that night, Matteo knew what he was about to ask was the verbal equivalent of doing the same. But the words tumbled out of his mouth anyway. “Then tell me what it is.”
She looked down at her hands. Twisted them together in her lap. “You made me feel alive the night we were together. Like for the first time in my life I could feel like everyone else. That I wasn’t a machine programmed to churn out profit numbers...”
