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Of course she was shaking. He was standing too close, crowding her, engulfing her in that subtly sexy scent. Even though he wasn’t touching her she could feel him everywhere—in her tender breasts, her ragged breathing and in the hotspot between her thighs which was about to spontaneously combust. Basically, her body had reverted to its default position whenever Dane Redmond was within a ten-mile radius.
‘Unless you’ve got a chopper handy, you’ve already missed your flight,’ he observed, doing that sounding reasonable thing again, which made her sound hysterical. ‘Midtown traffic is a bitch at this time of day. No way are you going to make it to JFK in under an hour.’
‘Then I’ll wait at the airport for another flight.’
‘Why not hang out here and catch a flight out tomorrow like Epstein suggested?’
With him? In his apartment? Alone? Was he bonkers?
‘No, thank you.’
She tried to shift round him again. A restraining hand cupped her elbow and electricity zapped up her arm.
She yanked free, the banked heat in his cool blue gaze almost as disturbing as what he said next.
‘How about I apologise?’
‘What for?’
Was he serious? Dane had been the original never-give-in-never-surrender guy back in the day. She’d never seen him back down or apologise for anything.
‘For yelling at you in my office. About stuff that doesn’t matter any more.’
It was the last thing she had expected. But as she searched his expression she could see he meant it.
It was an olive branch. She wanted to snatch it and run straight for the moral high ground. But the tug of regret in the pit of her stomach chose that precise moment to give a sharp yank.
‘You don’t have to apologise for speaking your mind. But, if you insist, I should apologise, too,’ she continued. ‘You’re right. I should have consulted you about...about the abortion.’
The lie tasted sour—a betrayal of the tiny life she’d once yearned to hold in her arms. But this was the only way to finally release them both from all those foolish dreams.
‘Hell, Red. You don’t have to apologise for that.’
He scrubbed his hands over his scalp, the frustrated gesture bringing an old memory to the surface of running her hands over the soft bristles while they lay together on the deck of the pocket cruiser, her body pleasantly numb with afterglow from the first time they’d made love.
She pressed tingling palms against the fabric of her skirt, trying to erase the picture in her head, but the unguarded memory continued to play out—one agonising sensation at a time. Goosebumps pebbling her arms from the warm breeze off the ocean...the base of her thumb stinging from the affectionate nip as he bit into the tender flesh.
‘You sure you’re okay? I didn’t hurt you? You’re so small and delicate...’
‘I get why you did it,’ Dane continued, as the erotic memory played havoc with her senses. ‘You weren’t ready to be a mom, and I would have been a disaster as a dad.’
He was telling her he agreed with her. Case comprehensively closed. But what should have been a victory only made the sour taste in her mouth turn to mud.
She had been ready to be a mother. How could he have doubted that? Didn’t he kno
w how much she had wanted their baby? And why would he think he’d make a terrible father? Was this something to do with all his scars, the childhood and the family he had never been willing to talk about?
Good grief, get real. You are not still invested in that fairytale.
The idiotic notion that she could rescue him by helping him to overcome stuff he refused to talk about had been the domain of that romantic teenage girl. That fairytale was part of her past. A past she’d just lied through her teeth to put behind her. This had to be the jet lag talking again, because it was not like her to lose her grip on reality twice in one day.
‘I’d really like to settle this amicably,’ she said at last, determined to accept his olive branch.
‘We can do that—but you need to stay put tonight. You took a couple of years off my life downstairs, and you still look as if a strong breeze could blow you over.’
That searing gaze drifted to the top of her hair, which probably looked as if a chinchilla had been nesting in it. Awareness shimmered, the sharp tug in her abdomen ever more insistent.
‘I feel responsible for that,’ he said, the gentle tone at odds with the bunched muscle jumping in his jaw.
