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‘I think I’ve swallowed my tongue,’ she croaked, her heart now embedded in her diaphragm.
How could he remember that so clearly, so vividly? She didn’t want to remember the girl she’d been, or the idiotic things she’d said—and done. But she especially didn’t want to know he’d remembered them, too.
He swore softly, lifting a bottle of water out of the cupholder. ‘Here.’ He unscrewed the cap and offered it to her.
She took a hasty gulp. The cool liquid hit her raw throat and she coughed.
‘Sorry, I braked too hard. You OK?’ His hand settled between her shoulder blades and rubbed. The coughing subsided and she shifted back. His hand fell away, but the tingles radiating up her spine didn’t. Annoyingly.
She studied his face, the harsh expression, the day-old stubble, the lines that creased the skin around those brilliant blue eyes and the dark smudge of fatigue beneath.
‘You look exhausted,’ she managed at last. That had to explain the uncharacteristic burst of emotion. One thing Luke had never been was volatile. If anything, he’d always been too laid-back. She’d originally found that reckless devil-may-care charm unbearably sexy, until it became apparent it was merely a symptom of Luke’s complete inability to give a shit about anything that mattered.
From the frown on his face now, though, it seemed he might actually give a shit about this. The low murmur of someone singing about their achy-breaky heart on the radio became deafening.
But then the line of his lips quirked and her heart rate eased back out of the danger zone. This Luke she recognised. The one who had tempted her to do inappropriate things, in inappropriate places, while pretending to care, when he never had.
Shut up and breathe. Breathing is good. It might even stop you making an even bigger tit of yourself.
The heady flow of oxygen cleared the fog of exhaustion that had settled into Luke’s brain when they’d crossed the state line about fifty miles back.
‘I guess I didn’t sleep much on the plane.’ Or at all. Because he’d been busy reading through all the research he’d downloaded about Monroe before the trip. And ignoring Halle, curled up in her pod two feet away, her hands tucked under her head in the foetal position she’d favoured when they’d shared a bed.
‘Sounds like all that money you spent on your lie-flat bed was wasted,’ she said. ‘Bummer.’
The air released from Luke’s lungs at the snarky comment. Snark was good, too.
Because it was the opposite of sentiment. And sentiment was bad, because it had a bad habit of dredging up all those damn what-ifs. The what-ifs that had hounded him—and hampered his recovery—in the early years, after he’d run away.
He scrubbed his hands down his face to erase the old guilt.
Insane outbursts about that epic shag against the back wall of the Clapham Grand were out. As was rehashing the long-forgotten mistakes he’d once made with Lizzie’s mother.
‘I can drive,’ she said, clearly just as keen to avoid talking about his major loss of cool. ‘I actually slept on the plane. And I would rather not end up in a heap of charred metal at the bottom of a ravine.’
‘It’s not too far now. I can sleep when we get there.’ Like the dead. He needed the full ten hours a night if he was going to cope with being this close to Halle without shoving his foot down his throat again.
No doubt about it, she got to him, still.
Those light brown eyes, the colour of aged sherry with the tempting flecks of gold. The ripple of sensation in his crotch when the clasp of her bra had dug into his palm through her silk blouse. For a moment, as she’d coughed her lungs up, she’d seemed like sof
t, sweet, adoring and permanently optimistic Halle again. The girl who had mesmerised him once.
But that was an illusion. An illusion he wasn’t about to get caught out by again.
He shifted in his seat to ease the pressure on his fly before she noticed. Not to worry, he’d be able to control his sex drive when he wasn’t so exhausted his bones had melted into the upholstery.
He shifted the transmission into drive and pulled out onto the empty road while conceding that the decision to remain celibate for the past four months might not have been such a stellar plan. Nothing like adding the pressure cooker of a sex-starved libido to an already charged situation.
‘You never answered my question,’ Halle said. ‘What is there to do at this resort for the next two weeks? I hope there’s a pool.’
He eased his foot off the gas to take the next bend in the road, determined not to let the whiney tone rankle. ‘I sent your PA my brief for the article with all those details a week ago. Didn’t she pass it on?’
‘Of course she did, but I have a full-on career, not to mention a commitment to running a household with two children in it on my own. Arranging my schedule to accommodate this trip took up enough of my time.’
Meaning she hadn’t bothered to read it. He pressed his foot back on the gas pedal, dragging up his last reserves of patience.
Getting her here had been his priority. Her hostility had been expected. He was an expert at dealing with hostile subjects. When he wasn’t on the verge of going into a coma or in the middle of a four-month dry spell.
