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For a split second she thought his hand moved, as though about to tuck the hair back into place. And then she realised he was merely lifting his arms to fold across his chest, even as he took a step back. Putting more space between them, leaving her inexplicably bereft.
Had she imagined that instinctive, smouldering gaze from Myles? She must have, because the look he was casting her right now was, at best, one of distaste. At worst...
God, she still wanted him.
Realisation crashed over her like an icy wave on a scorching day. Because if she still wanted him, after everything, then she was as much in danger of making a fool of herself in front of the man as she had ever been.
And that simply couldn’t happen.
Heat scorched her cheeks as Rae remembered the way she’d crept into Myles’ room practically naked that last night and offered herself to him in the most intimate way she possibly could. He’d responded so urgently, so demandingly, so loaded with intent, she’d been lost in the moment and totally unprepared when he’d wrenched himself away, bundled her up into the quilt from the end of his guest suite bed, and pushed her unceremoniously back out into the corridor, slamming his bedroom door in her face.
He’d rejected her. Without a word of explanation. And she’d felt as though her world had crashed around her. The fact that he and Rafe had left the next day for some army exercise had meant that there had been no chance for her to get answers, and so for months she’d shut herself away wondering what was wrong with her. If she wasn’t pretty enough, or sexy enough, or experienced enough.
Nonetheless, a bruised self-confidence didn’t excuse the fact that she’d been stupid enough to fall for lies from a piece of trash like Justin. How had she ever thought that he could make her feel like an attractive woman again?
‘You’re sorry for what, Rae?’ he repeated, his voice harsher than ever.
But if she couldn’t explain it to herself, how could she explain it to Myles?
In all these years she’d never once explained herself to the press. Never once tried to put forward her side of that story. Not least because she knew no one would listen. Or if they did, they would spin it so that somehow she ended up coming out even worse.
Stupid, as well as scandalous.
More than that, if she’d told the truth, said that she’d known nothing about the camera, then it would have been a criminal offence and there would have had to have been a legal case.
Inevitably there would have been a character assassination of her, and even back then Rae had known that if the police and press had delved into her, then they might have found out about Myles.
She would have ruined his friendship with her half-brother, dragged his reputation through the mud, and even harmed his army career. All because she hadn’t seen Justin for what he really was...a lying, scheming lowlife who just thought he could use her connection to Life in the Rawl to get his own fifteen minutes of fame.
Plus, she’d figured the less drama, the quicker it would all die down.
She’d been wrong. It had been too juicy for the press to let go of. It was only in the last few years of her becoming a fully-fledged doctor and OBGYN that they had finally begun to leave her alone and stop trying to connect her to any decent-looking male with a healthy pulse.
The silver lining, if she could call it that, was that she’d long since learned to own her mistakes. Own the woman those awful experiences had moulded her into. It had become her armour, her best emotional defence. And right now, with her head swirling wildly and thoughts jostling impatiently, she needed some way to buy herself time before she blurted everything out to him without first preparing the ground, and inevitably ruining her one opportunity to make him understand.
She needed something familiar. She needed some kind of anchor.
Even if a part of her knew that anchor was actually a tub of cement shoes ready to drown her at any moment.
She tipped her head almost coquettishly and pulled her shoulders back in the kind of deliberately provocative move her sisters executed to devastating effect on practically a daily basis, but which she hadn’t used in years.
‘Forget it.’ She even managed to force the beginnings of a wicked little smile, even if her cheeks did feel tight and unwilling. ‘I wasn’t really thinking.’
Myles locked his jaw and she could practically see the tiny pulse flickering away.
‘Of course not,’ he ground o
ut. ‘Because why change the habit of a lifetime?’
‘Why indeed?’
She didn’t care that he was staring at her as though she were a fleck of contemptible mud on the toe of one of his polished army boots. Really she didn’t.
Not, she imagined, that he would ever tolerate any form of dirt on his parade boots.
And it didn’t twist inside her to know that he, like pretty much the rest of the world, actually believed that she had ever had any part in that vile sex tape. There was no reason for this shameful heat that spread over her cheeks. She’d long since mastered the art of pretending that it didn’t get to her. If she could fool the press, the public, then she could certainly fool Myles.
Tilting her head that little bit higher, Rae forced herself—however many knives stabbed into the dark hollow where her soul had once been—to meet his glower.
