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He wouldn’t know how to feel that way if he tried.
With a growl of frustration Malachi spun away from the lake, in which he could suddenly see his own reflection all too clearly, bright in the moonlight. He didn’t think he liked what he saw—and stalked back to his room.
He was hauling off his constricting shirt even as he pushed through the door to his suite. Minutes later he was beating a punching bag in the corner of the gym as though he could mete out punishment for his every last frustration and knock his self-doubt into submission. Banish the emotions he hadn’t felt since he was an eight-year-old boy, running errands for the local gang just to get enough money to put coins in the electricity meter and a scant bit of food on the table for five-year-old Sol.
He had no idea how long he stayed in the gym. After the boxing he took a long run on the treadmill, imagining in his head that he was actually running through the vineyards outside, which lay all around this stunning valley. Finally he dived into the still waters of the indoor pool and swam one hundred exhausting lengths, then a hundred more, and then another for good measure.
When he finally—finally—allowed himself to stop, to breathe, to look up, it was to see Saskia curled up on the window seat of the suite he had given her, a book in her hand.
But she wasn’t reading. She was watching him.
He could feel it.
Her eyes caressed his skin as surely as if it had been her hands themselves. How he wished that were the case. He wanted her. He hungered for her.
And he did not hunger. Ever.
Yet now it rolled through him like the thunder for which this valley was so well known at this time of year. Raw and uncontrollable.
It was all Malachi could do to keep himself in the water. To turn his back on the woman who affected him in such a primal way. To spin his body in the pool and cut through the water for another hundred lengths.
Because if he hadn’t he feared he would have hauled his body out and gone to find her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘WHAT IS THE matter with you, bratik?’ Malachi glared balefully across his office to where Sol was helping himself to Malachi’s freshly ground coffee and pastries, as he did every time he ventured across town to MIG International’s offices.
Malachi told himself he’d returned to the UK because he was needed at work. He knew the truth wasn’t anything like that. Still, he comforted himself with the assurance that he’d left Saskia in good hands, with the team of medical experts in Italy.
It wasn’t helping him to concentrate.
‘What?’ Sol cocked an eyebrow, before striding over to flop in a comfortable chair.
‘You’re full of the joys of spring,’ he grumbled.
‘And you’re grouchy and on edge.’ Sol eyed him shrewdly. ‘More so than usual, that is. Though I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.’
‘Funny.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Idiot.’ Sol shrugged, inhaling a couple of pastries, whole.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy to see his brother, Malachi decided, it was more that right now he would have preferred to be alone, to throw himself into the work he’d missed whilst he’d been in Italy with Saskia.
Or alone to stew, a cynical voice needled.
The past week had been hell. Like some kind of torture he hadn’t known existed. He saw Saskia everywhere he went. He c
ould hear her voice, gently teasing him about all the things he did. Like some kind of haunting such as he had never believed in.
But then, he hadn’t believed in a lot of things before Saskia had come along.
This intense, yearning sensation which barrelled around his chest, for one thing. Guilt, probably. Remorse. What else would have been mushrooming inside him for so long now?
He didn’t know and he didn’t care.
He was so lost in his own thoughts that he answered his brother’s next question on autopilot, not really paying attention to what was said until Sol’s next statement jarred him.
