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Slowing his stroke, he lifted his head from the water. He was more than halfway across the lake and his muscles were warm now, and aching. Using the glow from last night’s asado as a beacon, he headed back towards the deck, his arms working in time with the arguments and counter-arguments firing back and forth.
Logically, he knew that he and Mimi had no future, and that the only reason it felt as if they did was the fact that they had been cooped up together with a barrel-load of heightened and complicated emotions and a shared history for company.
A shared history that was still mired in scandal...a scandal that definitely hadn’t yet reached its sell-by date. And he couldn’t risk exposing his family, or Mimi, to any more unwanted media attention.
His fingers grazed the wooden underside of the deck and, reaching up, he pulled himself out of the water, smoothing his wet hair back, feeling his skin burning in the cool air.
This time tomorrow his life would be back on track, he told himself. Okay it was going to feel a little odd, her not being there, but with the benefit of time and distance it would soon seem like nothing more than a fantasy frozen in time.
Only, having steeled himself to face a future without her, now he was floored by the reality of what that would mean.
He couldn’t picture a bed without Mimi in it—and it wasn’t just sex. He loved to lie and watch her brush her hair. Loved to hold her in his arms while they read to one another out loud from their books.
How could he walk away when every thought, every action came back to her?
Breathing out unevenly, he made his way back into the quiet of the house and to her room. She was still sleeping, and for a moment he stared down at her, his body loosening with desire, his heart pounding out of time, as he watched the steady rise and fall of her shoulders.
Then, as though sensing his presence, her eyes opened and she looked up at him drowsily. ‘Basa...’
‘I’m here.’
She shivered when he reached out and touched her bare collarbone, her eyes more grey than blue in the hazy morning light that was inching into the room. ‘You’re cold.’
‘Sorry. I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a swim in the lake. I’ll go take a shower...warm up.’
‘I’ve got a better idea.’
Her fingers slid up his thigh and his muscles bunched as she pressed her hand flat against the erection that was pushing against the damp fabric of his shorts.
‘Come back to bed,’ she whispered. ‘Body-to-body heat is the best way to get warm.’
It wasn’t heat he wanted—it was her. And not just to warm up his body. But what he wanted was complicated, fraught with risk.
He watched her slide his shorts down over his hips, and as he slipped beneath the sheets he let his hunger blot out everything else.
* * *
‘Forgive me.’ Switching off his phone, Basa ran his hand over his face, grimacing apologetically at Mimi. ‘That was my head of HR in New York. She’s been sitting on something for a few days now and I really needed to sign it off.’
They were on the plane now—somewhere over the North Atlantic. Both of them had slept on the overnight part of the flight, but since breakfast he had been trying to resolve this issue with his North American office.
Mimi looked up from her book and smiled. ‘It’s fine. It gave me an opportunity to get stuck into this.’ Her blue eyes rested on his face and then dropped to the book in her lap. ‘I’m nearly finished, so I should be able to give it back to you before we land. Or I can just give it to Alicia,’ she added.
Her remark was innocuous enough, the kind of polite comment anyone might make about a book they had borrowed, but he felt his body still, saw her still too, and knew that she had picked up on the unspoken implication of her words: when they stepped off the plane in London they would be going their separate ways.
‘Keep it.’ He managed to smile, his body tensing in ever-tightening anticipation of a moment he was dreading. ‘Please, I’d like you to keep it.’
‘Okay, well...thank you.’ Looking up at him, she bit down on the corner of her lip. ‘Was it a big problem? Your call?’
He shook his head. ‘No, not really. It’s a bit of a headache, but it’s nothing major, and certainly nothing that can’t be sorted. It’s just that I have to be the one to sort it, and I don’t normally drop off the grid so comprehensively.’
She frowned. ‘But doesn’t that happen every time you go to Patagonia?’
He held her gaze. ‘No, actually, it doesn’t. Usually, I crack and end up calling in.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You told me there was no Wi-Fi.’
‘There isn’t,’ he said quickly. ‘But I do have a satellite phone.’
