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‘You’re right,’ he said coolly. ‘I’d be miserable instead. But I have to ask. Were you in love with that artist you ran off to Ibiza with when you should have been sitting your A-levels?’
He could see the question had shocked her but he needed a reminder of the kind of woman she really was, not the one she was intent on presenting to him.
‘I know the papers said I went there with the artist, but I didn’t. I went there for an artist.’
He shook his head as if that distinction was hardly worth noting. ‘I hope he was worth it.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ she said, a dull flush of colour highlighting her magnificent cheekbones. ‘I didn’t know him personally. I went to Ibiza to see his work because he was truly inspirational and he was dying. That exhibition was his last one and at the time I thought it was more important than a maths exam.’
Seriously unsettled by his lack of control over his libido Aidan didn’t want to hear her excuses. ‘Well, now you know better.’
‘Yes. Now I know that no matter what you do in life, if you make a mistake it will hang around like a bad smell and no one will forgive you for it.’ She placed her cup carefully on the bench. ‘I know you live your life completely mistake free, but the rest of us aren’t so lucky. We do things wrong occasionally. But the other thing that I know is that if everyone in the world forgave others for their inadequacies and their mistakes instead of trying to mould them into something they find acceptable, the world would be a happier place. It’s people who let pain turn into resentment and anger who do the most damage.’
She looked slightly embarrassed by her outburst and her lower lip quivered and made him feel like a heel. ‘Just go to bed, Cara.’
Outrage shone out of her eyes and for a minute he thought she might put him in his place for being such a judgmental fool but she didn’t. Instead she bid him a stiff good-night before walking off with her nose in the air.
Aidan released a long breath. It had been a long time since he had sported a boner from just looking at a woman.
And now he realised that as well as trying to stop her tears and help her out earlier in the day by bringing her to Fiji, he’d also had an ulterior motive. He’d brought her here with the possibility of finishing what he had started at the casino the other night.
Her diehard belief in love and happy-ever-afters meant that his conscience was unlikely to let him follow through on that because he had nothing to offer her.
Which left him stuck on an island with a hard-on and a true romantic.
Great.
These next few days were likely to be a lesson in restraint. Something he should excel at.
The only bright spot he could see in having her around was that she took his mind off Martin Ellery. In fact, he hadn’t thought about the old man and how he had failed to carry out the revenge he’d harboured for so long since he’d dragged her out of the Mahogany Room and that was the way he wanted to keep it.
CHAPTER NINE
‘GREAT KEYNOTE SPEECH,’ Ben James, Aidan’s second-in-command and long-time friend enthused. ‘You were right to bring him in to do it. I had no idea Smithy was so insightful.’
‘Glad you enjoyed it.’
Aidan, himself, hadn’t heard anything past the opening joke. And now they were walking towards the next session and he had no idea which one it was.
Ordinarily he would sit in on one or two but this morning he couldn’t seem to concentrate.
Cara’s outburst the night before had both surprised and disturbed him. He’d known immediately that she hadn’t been just talking about the social fabric of the world they lived in but something far deeper. It was in the flash of vulnerability when she’d believed he was judging her. He hadn’t been. Not initially. He’d been honest when he said that her bad-girl reputation didn’t bother him. What did bother him was the stab of jealousy he had felt when he’d imagined her blissfully happy while she was coiled around some dodgy artist on a sun-soaked futon. The image had rocked him and then he’d taken the double hit of being faced with her trembling lower lip. That sure-fire sign that she was hurt twisted his insides into huge knots.
Which was why the less time he spent with her the better because not only was his emotional and physical reaction to her a shocking thing to witness, but her talk about forgiveness had sliced something open inside of him. Like a scythe through the very heart of his memories.
Forgiveness was not a concept he’d spent a great deal of time dwelling on before. His father, now that he thought about it, hadn’t been a forgiving man. He’d harboured a justified hatred of Martin Ellery right up until he had died and often bitterly pronounced that he just hadn’t seen it coming.
