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She had the grace to look uncomfortable at that. He watched with some satisfaction as two flags of colour unfurled across her cheekbones.
‘Fine. I was snooping,’ she admitted. ‘Happy now?’ She glared at him. ‘I was just curious.’
‘About...?’ he prompted.
She looked up at him; her cheeks were still pink, but her eyes met his.
‘About you, of course. You’re Archie’s half-brother. I was trying to work you out.’
‘And you thought looking at my bedlinen would shed some light on that?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘Would you like to take a look at my bathroom too? Perhaps my choice of toothpaste might be illuminating.’
Her eyes—those glorious grey eyes—flashed with indignation like a tropical storm rolling in from the South China Sea.
‘You are such a hypocrite. You had no qualms whatsoever about poking around in my life. Oh, sorry,’ she said, without a hint of apology. ‘It wasn’t you in person, was it? Well, just because you paid someone else to do it, doesn’t give you the right to be all holier than thou.’
He stared at her, his muscles tightening beneath his skin.
Was she really trying to equate the two things?
‘If you want to know something about me, you could just ask,’ he said softly. ‘I have nothing to hide.’
Her mouth twisted. ‘Only because you’ve probably got teams of people following you around, making sure your secrets are safe.’
He studied her face in silence. She was way off the mark. Nobody knew his secrets. How could they? Sharing a secret required trust, and he didn’t trust anyone. Didn’t know how to trust.
As Lao Dan’s son he was privileged and pampered. He’d grown up surrounded by opulence and excess. Nothing was too expensive or too rare. His father had taught him that everything had a price.
Particularly trust.
His father’s trust had had to be earned, and re-earned, again and again. He’d had expectations, and any failure to meet those expectations had had consequences. Failure had not been tolerated, and in some cases not forgiven.
As a child, it had been a hard lesson to learn, but it had taught him early on to rely on no one but himself, and that self-reliance and discipline had ended up being more useful than the three years he’d spent at business school.
‘I have no secrets, Ms Thorn,’ he said calmly.
‘And no soul either.’
Her eyes snapped to his, flaring with fury, and for the space of a heartbeat he wanted to take that fire and turn it into a different kind of heat, make her body quiver as it had done when she’d stumbled into his arms.
‘Sixteen hours,’ she said slowly. ‘Sixteen hours on a plane and another two hours in a car. That’s how long it took us to get here. And we came all that way because you—’ she jabbed her finger at his chest ‘—told me you wanted to spend time with Archie. Only you haven’t so much as asked where or how he is. What kind of man does that? Drags a baby to the other side of the world and then doesn’t even bother to see him.’
There was a faint shake to her voice.
‘But then why should I be surprised? You’ve probably been raised from birth to think you’re better than everyone else. Well, you’re not. You’re just a selfish, spoilt—’
‘If you’d just let me—’ he began, but she shook her head violently.
‘Oh, please, spare me your explanations.’
Her face was pale and set, and he could hear that she was still angry. But beneath the anger there was a note in her voice, a mix of fear and defiance, that pulled at something inside him.
‘Dora.’
He took a step closer, moving without thinking, and she breathed in sharply, recoiling away from him as if he was a cobra.
‘Don’t touch me.’
He didn’t know if it was the hoarse panic in her voice or the fact that he’d let down his guard and almost allowed himself to feel sorry for her, but suddenly he’d had enough of this petulant, self-righteous child acting as if he was some monster from the mountains.
