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She wobbled slightly, but she held her head high. She did not need to explain herself to him—and she wasn’t going to let herself be distracted by the feel of his hands.
‘You could have been swept away,’ he said harshly. ‘What would have happened if I hadn’t been here?’
‘I’m a good swimmer. And I can clamber over rocks just like anyone else,’ she said. ‘I didn’t ask you to come out to get me. And I didn’t need you to carry me!’
‘Swimming doesn’t come into it—not with those white horses pounding you!’ he exclaimed, gesturing fiercely towards the huge white crested waves that were breaking over the rocks.
Claudia turned and stared at the wild sea with startled eyes. Suddenly her head was spinning and her legs felt weak. But it wasn’t the power of the waves that was roaring in her ears and making her dizzy. It was hearing Marco describe them as ‘white horses’.
She had taught him that phrase.
Four years ago when she’d brought him to Pembrokeshire—to the tiny village where her real mother had grown up—she had told him how much she loved to photograph a stormy sea. The weather had been beautiful as they’d sat together on the headland, looking out over the mirror-flat surface of the bay. On that day it had been almost impossible to imagine the sea anything other
than a tranquil backdrop to a perfect summer’s day.
Claudia had been so happy. So in love. She’d looked deep into Marco’s eyes and he had pulled her close to him. His lips had found hers and they’d tumbled down on to the springy thyme-scented grass, totally lost in each other.
But she had given her heart—and her body—to nothing more than a fantasy. Marco’s feelings for her had not been real. He had used her and discarded her. That exact same night, Marco had walked out while she had been sleeping—without bothering to tell her he was going, or even to leave her a message.
‘Claudia—’ Marco’s voice, hard and insistent, broke into her reverie and brought her hurtling back to the present ‘—you’re shivering!’
She stared at him with wide eyes.
He was right—she was shivering. But whether it was from the cold, or the shock of plunging into the sea, or from the unexpected force of her memories she couldn’t say.
‘Why did you follow me to Wales?’ she demanded—repeating the question he had evaded earlier. Her voice caught in her throat as she spoke, but she needed to know the answer. ‘How did you even know I was here?’
‘Your friend at work told me,’ he said.
‘You mean Rosie?’ Claudia looked up at him in surprise. ‘She shouldn’t have done that. And you had no right to go behind my back, asking questions about where I was.’
‘Why not—I wanted to see you,’ he responded. ‘To talk to you.’
She stared at him, knowing it couldn’t really be that simple. No one followed another person that far just to talk to them. There must be something else. He must want more.
He was standing with his back to the sea and she could hear the waves crashing dramatically on to the rocky beach behind him. It was an unfamiliar, wild and stormy setting for them to be together. Their brief, intense affair had taken place during the summer, mostly in the elegant and stylish northern Italian city of Turin—and that was where she’d usually thought of him.
But somehow Marco’s raw masculine presence seemed to fit the untamed beach in the wilds of Pembrokeshire perfectly. His clothes were soaked through, his black hair was spiky with salt water, and the edgy, slightly dangerous quality that usually characterised his expression seemed to echo their elemental surroundings exactly.
‘If you knew where I worked, why didn’t you just leave me a message?’ she asked, suddenly feeling unnerved by the brooding sexual energy that glinted in his dark eyes.
She wrapped her arms across her body and hugged herself tightly. It was an instinctive gesture, as much about defending herself from Marco’s penetrating gaze as about keeping warm. But he had seen her reaction to him, and his eyes glittered all the more.
‘Oh, but I forgot—you don’t do messages,’ she added quickly, determined to stand up for herself and not let the sheer force of his personality overwhelm her.
‘I couldn’t wait that long.’ He was unfazed by her barbed comment and deliberately let his eyes drift down across her body, leaving a sudden flare of heat where they passed. ‘I needed to see you—now.’
‘Why?’
But Claudia already knew the answer. And if the potent message in his dark and meaningful gaze wasn’t enough, his voice had dropped to a sensual purr that shimmied across her body like a lover’s caress.
‘After you’d gone, I couldn’t get you out of my mind,’ he said.
His eyes burned into hers and Claudia knew exactly what he was thinking about. And that was enough to fill her own mind with powerful images of Marco making love to her.
But it was not what she wanted. Although her pulse was racing and the deep, dark longing to lie in Marco’s arms again was making it hard to think straight—the thought that he had followed her all the way to Wales simply to bed her was utterly crushing.
Was that really all she’d ever been to him—someone to warm his bed? Didn’t he care enough about her to ask how she’d been since he’d left her? Of course not. If he cared at all, he would never have left her so heartlessly.
