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“We’ve only been seeing one another a few months,” she said.
“Seven months,” Santiago corrected, reaching for a pastry and moving it between his long fingers thoughtfully. “He told me about you, the day after you’d met.” He lifted the pastry to his lips, biting into it so that Addie had to wait for him to finish the sentence. Her heart felt like it was filling up with all the water of the ocean, ripe to burst from her chest.
“Did he?” It was breathless. “What did he say?”
Santiago’s eyes darkened, and he shook his head. “Only that he’d met you.” It was a lie. Santiago was withdrawing. She had enough experience of Guy doing exactly that to know what it looked like. Only she could hardly rail against Santiago as she did Guy. She couldn’t plead with him to listen to her, to be honest with her.
She sighed softly and reached for her pastry. If you couldn’t beat them, you might as well join them.
*
“You told me you wanted to marry her,” Santiago’s words were gruff. Guy paused, just inside the door of the mansion. He could see his parents across the room. It was hardly the time nor place to have a heart-to-heart with his grandfather about the woman he’d paid to pretend to be his lover.
“Disculpe?”
“The day after you met her. You called me and told me you understood. That what I have always told you I felt for your grandmother you had finally felt for yourself.” Santiago’s eyes were earnest, locked to Guy’s with an intensity that Guy had to work overtime to ignore.
“So?” Guy was careful. He kept his expression neutral, his manner casual, when he was laced with a bitter regret at the foolish impulse that had allowed him to get so caught up in the rush of ‘being in love’. What an el burro he’d been!
“You are not a man to wait, Guillem. If you truly loved this woman, I believe you would have already married her.”
Guy’s chest felt like it was being compressed by a bag of cement. Hell, his grandfather was right. No one on earth knew Guillem like Santiago; had Guy really expected to be able to fool the old man so easily? To convince him he was madly in love when it was little more than a ruse? When he couldn’t stand Ava in any way other than physically?
Shame at the fact he’d even brought her to the island filled his belly.
“It does not work like that,” Guy aimed for an almost teasing tone to his voice. “It is normal to take time with someone before committing to marriage. To get to know one another inside out, perhaps live together, before becoming engaged”
Santiago’s eyebrows flew higher. “You do not live with her?”
From bad to worse. Guy forced a laugh, though it was heavy with his desire to be rid of this conversation. “Why are you worried?” Guy turned their exchange back to the root of Santiago’s worry. “You don’t like Ava?”
“Ava?” Santiago put a hand out, resting it on Guy’s forearm. “Ava I like. Ava is a woman clearly very much in love. But I worry you are going to let her get away. That you are going to let your past, your desire to have a rotating door on your bed, your love of excitement and the thrill of the chase, turn you away from taking what she would give you in a heartbeat.”
It was as though a tsunami had risen from the sea and was crashing hard against Guy, swallowing him into the depths of the ocean, making breathing difficult. Panic at the very idea of marrying Ava had to be the cause of it.
“I have Ava right where I want her,” Guy said seriously.
Santiago sighed, and weighed his words carefully. “You only think you do, son. Take it from an old man who has seen a lot in his life: you will regret it if you let her go.”
CHAPTER E
LEVEN
GUY DIDN’T RETURN TO the yacht until dusk, and he found Ava swimming in the water, her beautiful body bare, but for another tiny bikini. How many of these scraps of fabric had she brought with her?
He contemplated diving in, wrapping his body around hers, pulling her to him, making sense of their situation in the only way he could, as they had in the caves.
But he didn’t. He grabbed a beer from the kitchen, squeezed a wedge of lime into its narrow neck, and moved back to the rail, watching her without being watched.
Her stroke was long and elegant, her legs just barely breaking the surface of the water with each neat little kick. She swum as a mermaid, staying submerged for long stretches of time, so that he found a sense of panic arresting him every few minutes, along with a question of whether she needed to be saved. But then she lifted out of the water, her hair a pelt against her back, her face tilted towards the sky, all wet and silky. Only once did she look towards the boat; he fought an instinct to step back into the shadows.
It was not for Guy to hide from Ava. When she’d come to his house and begged him to ‘help’ her, he’d taken an inordinate amount of pleasure from seeing her squirm. It had seemed like just retribution.
Now, at the sight of her face crumpled with something he could only describe as sadness, the jubilation was gone. He felt … he wasn’t sure.
He didn’t like her. But once upon a time, he had thought he loved her, and hurting her seemed beneath him. This plan had been foolish in every single way. In attempting to put Santiago’s mind to rest, he had stirred up a host of new questions – questions he didn’t want to answer.
And he had discovered that he wasn’t as good at cutting cords as he had suspected.
