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Addie’s cheeks flushed pink. “He asked me that, too. I said we’d only been together a short while…”
Guy shrugged. “He knows me, as you say. He knows that if I ever met a woman I truly loved, I would ask to marry her within a day. I would never risk losing someone I cared for by dragging my heels. That is not the way I operate.”
She dipped her head forward, so he couldn’t see her face, but he knew that his words had stung. No satisfaction. Nothing. Just a strange sense that he was digging a deep hole he would find it difficult to climb out of.
“I love this place, though. I wish, sometimes, that I could come back more often.”
Addie tilted her head. “It’s beautiful.”
“It isn’t just an island, to me. It is …my childhood. So many of my memories live in this water, drift on this sand, fill these skies.” He shifted his shoulders. “I cannot walk the paths without some memory leaping out at me. I broke my wrist over there,” he nodded towards the shore. “I learned to swim here. I hid in those caves for a whole day, once. Santiago was furious when I eventually returned.” He winced.
Addie was thoughtful as she digested his words, and then, she spoke warily, as if feeling her way through the sentence. “That’s exactly how I feel about my home.” Her smile was tinged with sadness.
“I take it you don’t live in Holborn, as you claimed?”
“No,” she didn’t rise to the bait and defend herself, as he’d expected. “I live in a small village on the outskirts of London.” She was looking straight at him, but her eyes had assumed a faraway look. “It’s a big old, Tudor place and my brother and I used to play hide and seek in the garden all day long. No matter what the weather, we were always outside. Though the attic was for days when mum absolutely forbade us from venturing outdoors – which she did from time to time.” She cleared her throat, and Guy saw that her eyes were suspiciously moist.
Memories, nostalgia, these were funny things, capable of inspiring emotional eddies at the strangest times. “I feel just as you do. I see ghosts of our childhood everywhere. My brother and me. Our house is … it means everything to me.” She blinked again, and then, abruptly changed the subject. “Your turn.”
Her sentence surprised him, and it took him several moments to comprehend what she meant. “To ask a question,” she prompted, the words a little uneven.
“Have you been with anyone since me?”
He hadn’t expected to ask that; he hadn’t even known, until he heard the words come from his mouth, that he cared. But suddenly, his whole body was alert, his spine straight, his everything paused, waiting for her to speak. Would he believe her anyway?
“No.” She swallowed. “Have you?”
Guy’s chest was heavy, his eyes gave nothing away. “You need to ask?”
“No,” she swept her eyes shut. “I just wanted to show you how it feels to be asked something so invasive.”
“I see.” He frowned. “You don’t think I have a right to be curious?”
“Why? When you’ve made it abundantly clear you don’t want me?”
He leaned forward and beneath the table, he placed his hand on her knee, his eyes holding hers. “Does it seem like I don’t want you?”
She spun her head, her lips parted as breath pushed from her. “I… you’ve said it yourself,” she said eventually. “In two days this arrangement will be over and you’ll be glad for that.”
He regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. “I have another… proposition for you. A new arrangement; one that I think you will like.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
I have another… proposition for you. A new arrangement, one that I think you will like.
HIS WORDS, SO CALMLY delivered, had chased themselves around Addie’s head all night, stirring her to a fever pitch. She was both angry and dismayed, as their conversation ran around and around her memory, prodding her from new, more painful angles with each reflection.
Conversation?
Try ambush!
She had never been more offended in all her life.
Nor more tempted.
Become my mistress, and I will make sure you never have another worry in your life. Not just for the time we are together, but for all time.
It wasn’t the idea of financial security that had filled her up with little bubbles
