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‘Are you going to tell me about him?’ Sarah asked, and Elspeth realised she had been looking out of the window for the past few minutes, Sarah’s toothbrush in her hand, completely forgotten about.
‘I’m not sure there’s much to tell. I haven’t known him long. I don’t even know if he’s going to want to be involved. I mean, we’ve done okay, haven’t we?’
Sarah gave her a look that wasn’t at all difficult to interpret.
‘I know, I know... I’ll tell him. I know that I have to. It’s just... Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t stick around, you know?’
Sarah rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t judge them all by Alex’s standards.’
‘He wasn’t—’ Elspeth started to defend her ex. It hadn’t been his fault that she hadn’t been able to commit to their relationship. She had been asking too much from him—way too much—and she hadn’t been surprised when he had taken the escape route she had offered him.
But Sarah interrupted her before she could explain. ‘Save it, Els. You know he wasn’t the one for you. I’ve got higher hopes for this new one.’
‘You don’t know a thing about him.’
‘Exactly. I don’t know a thing about him other than the look he’s put on your face and I already like him more than the last guy.’
CHAPTER THREE
FRASER STARED INTO his coffee and could tell without having to glance at the mirror opposite him that his eyebrows were pulling together in a way that was giving him a line between them.
He was pretty certain that this was a bad idea.
His usual practice when he had unexpected text messages from one-night stands he’d thought he’d never hear from again was to say a polite but firm no, and he should have stuck to that today.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like spending time with women—he liked to have fun. But he’d seen first-hand what happened when you let yourself be swept away by emotions. Lust and passion were all well and good for a night or two. But when you gave in to them for longer than that they clouded your judgement and led to the people around you getting hurt.
He got hurt.
That was what he had learned as a teenager, when he’d seen his father throw away twenty years of marriage and move in a woman who hadn’t lasted more than a couple of years. But when Fraser had given him an ultimatum—‘Either she goes or I do!’—in the early, heady days of that relationship, his father had chosen his new partner instead of his son.
So Fraser had packed up his things, helped his mother into the car—with her white face and her shocked silence—and left his home, the ancient seat of his ancestors and his title. The estate he had been preparing to inherit from the day he was born.
And he didn’t know if he would ever get them back. All because his dad hadn’t been able to say no to a pretty face and walk away. Seeing what that had done to his mother had made the decision for him. Nothing and no one, no relationship, could be worth the sort of pain that she had gone through.
Meeting with Elspeth now went against every rule he had made for himself and stuck to so rigidly for the past fifteen years. But she had found his phone number somehow and invited him for coffee.
She was clearly keen. Keener than most. And that meant he had to be even firmer than usual. He had to tell her, face to face and in no uncertain terms, that he wasn’t interested. He didn’t do relationships. He’d assumed that she’d known that when she’d taken him home halfway through a wedding and then barely woken him for a goodbye kiss the following morning. Had assumed that she wasn’t after anything serious.
So why had she tracked him down? The time for swapping numbers had come and gone without either of them suggesting it, and he had assumed that meant that she felt the same way he did.
Whatever. The whys of the situation didn’t matter. All that mattered was shutting this thing down. And it seemed more effective to do that in person than by text. He could show her that he really meant it.
And show himself.
Because he’d been thinking about Elspeth far more than was reasonable or desirable over the past few weeks. Perhaps it was the way that she had sneaked out in the half-light of dawn. The colours in the room faded in the early morning, the silhouette of her face the only clear thing.
But that was no excuse. He’d shared plenty of dawn kisses goodbye before and hadn’t had any problems forgetting them.
The door of the hotel lounge where he’d suggested they meet opened and he glanced up. Even though he was expecting her, he still felt his stomach dip at the sight of her.
He’d forgotten how petite she was. Her shoulders were half the width of his, and her head barely reached his collarbone. Her ankles and wrists were so tiny he could wrap them with his thumb and little finger. And so sensitive that she’d moaned every time he’d done so. And those freckles over her nose and her cheekbones...like a constellation of stars. He’d stared at them so intensely that night he had been able to see them even when he’d closed his eyes—like the negative image left by a bright light.
And wrapped up in that delicate exterior was a desire and a strength and a passion that had given his six feet and two hundred pounds a run for their money for a whole, blissful night.
But he wasn’t meant to be thinking ab
out that, he reminded himself as he schooled his face back into something neutral. He had to remember that this meeting was about breaking things off, not about picking up where she’d left him, naked in bed, wanting more.
