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‘The night my mother died...’
; He watched her throat contract sharply as she swallowed.
‘I lied when I said I don’t remember her. But what I do remember isn’t much. I was only four. And she was ill for a long time. My nanny used to take me in to see her. I used to love lying on the bed beside her, just listening to her voice. It was so calm. So full of love, I suppose. But as she got sicker her smell changed, and she couldn’t speak any more. I hated that smell—chemicals and sickness and a too-sweet scent which I realised years later was morphine. That last night...’ She hesitated. ‘The night she died... The room was shadowy and dark and scary. I didn’t want to sit with her. She wasn’t my mummy any more. I cried. I don’t think she knew what was happening...’
She coughed, and he could hear the sandpaper in her throat.
‘Gosh, I hope she didn’t know. But my father was very angry with me. He called me weak. Pathetic.’
‘You were just a little kid—what the heck did he expect?’ Luke said, his anger for that small child blindsiding him.
She looked up, her gaze dazed and unfocussed, lost in memory. ‘He was grieving. I don’t blame him. After that night...after she was gone... I couldn’t sleep unless I had a light on in my room. I knew how much he disapproved.’
Her father was clearly almost as much of a bastard as Gino Leprince. But Luke forced himself not to make the comparison. He’d already let too much slip. Anyhow, his father’s crimes, his own past, weren’t relevant to her trauma. And they sure as heck weren’t going to make this thing between them—whatever it was—any less disturbing.
She pressed a hand to her hair, pushing the damp strands behind her ear, drawing his gaze to her clear skin. The lack of make-up made her look so young and vulnerable.
He clenched his fingers until the knuckles whitened, trying to resist the urge to capture her chin in the palm of his hand and kiss the lips he had feasted on the night before.
Things had got way too serious, way too fast. It was time for some damage limitation. He didn’t know what he’d expected to happen when he’d quizzed her about her phobia. But it hadn’t been the terrifying feeling of connection that was now all but choking him.
She’d been open with him; it was time he was open with her in return.
‘Listen, Cassandra... The Wi-Fi signal returned this morning. I’m staying here for another five days on vacation and flying back to the city on Saturday. But if you need to leave I can call you a water taxi back to the mainland today.’
* * *
‘If you need to leave...’
Luke’s offer was such a shock it took Cassie several pregnant moments to process it...and her knee-jerk reaction. But I don’t want to go. I want to stay here, with you.
Which was totally insane. Of course she should leave. He was offering her a way out of the predicament which had caused her so much anxiety since Saturday morning.
If she left now she would be able to do a much more comprehensive report for Temple—after all that was the only reason she was even in the US. But she couldn’t seem to concentrate on her responsibilities to Temple Corp. All she could focus on was the deep yearning that had nothing whatsoever to do with her career and everything to do with the unreadable expression on Luke’s face as he waited for her answer.
And that was the weirdest thing of all...
Her career had always been such a huge part of who she was. It was the one thing—the only thing, really—that had ever made her feel entirely whole. She’d devoted so much of her life to it. Not just to prove to her father she had value, but to prove it to herself. And she’d sacrificed so much to get where she was now, in a trusted executive position at Temple Corp which had the potential to be so much more.
She’d risked it all four nights ago for one night of pleasure. And she’d berated herself for that catastrophic mistake every night since. She never compromised her career; she always did the best possible job she could. And this assignment was important. To Temple and to her.
But as she sat on the stool in Luke’s kitchen, her stomach weighed down by the pancakes he’d made her, his face an unreadable mask, just one thing he’d said to her—unbidden and unexpected—as he’d asked about her phobia reeled through her head.
‘You’re tough.’
And what that meant.
You have value.
It was the one thing no other man had ever said to her. Not even her father. Because no man had ever known her as well as this man had come to know her after only a few days.
And with that realisation came the knowledge that all her hard work—all the late nights, the missed weekends, the lost friendships, the dedication to her job above everything else which had minimised her personal life—didn’t seem worth as much any more as it always had, because of one crucial reality that had only become clear in the last three days.
While trying to impress her father and make him realise something Luke had acknowledged without even being asked, she was in danger of becoming him. A ruthless workaholic who had nothing in his life outside his job. Maybe she wasn’t there yet, because Ash’s expansive friendship—the only social connection she’d managed to maintain in the last four years—had added joy and warmth and humour and an adorable flakiness to her life. But she couldn’t rely on Ash for ever to stand between her and the threat of turning into the kind of sterile, soulless, embittered person her father had eventually become after her mother’s death.
She had to find her own path, her own personal joy. And, while she knew what she had discovered in Luke Broussard’s arms last night, and then in his bed, was not going to last, for the first time in as long as she could remember she felt fully alive. Fully engaged. Fully seen.
