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Stricken, she shook her head. ‘What? You can’t be serious?’
He looked at her as though she’d taken leave of her senses. ‘As hard as I find it to resist you,’ he said with a hint of droll amusement, ‘you look like you are about to faint. Go and sleep. I will make you tea.’
‘Tea,’ she repeated, confusion making her eyes crinkle.
‘Go. Lie down.’
‘No. Rio, I’m... I do need to...to rest. But please,’ she said with a quiet stoicism that came from the heart, ‘don’t make me tea.’
She lifted a hand, because she couldn’t not touch him, and pressed her fingers into his chest. Electricity arced between them, but this time it burned her. It wasn’t just an arc of desire; it was an explosion.
She dropped her hand away quickly and swallowed. ‘I don’t know why you’re here, but I want you to go away again.’
The words rang with palpable grief.
‘Go to sleep,’ he said with a small nod.
She sighed, reaching for the wall for support. He was going to go. Whatever had brought him to her home, it wasn’t important enough for him to fight for it.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, and it was only as she reached her bedroom that she realised he had said nothing back.
* * *
It was early in the morning when she woke. Not yet dawn, the sky was just yielding its black finality to the hint of daylight, negotiating the terms of their treaty with leaden grey and pale pink.
She sat up without sneezing or grabbing her head for the first time in over a week. She lifted a hand to her hair, pulling it over her shoulder in one big tangle of red. She ran her fingers over its length. It was a tangled bird’s nest, and for the first time since getting sick she found the idea of washing it didn’t leave her feeling exhausted.
She coughed. It didn’t feel as though her throat had been slashed with razor blades.
But it wasn’t until she’d started the shower running and stripped her three-day-old outfit from her body that she remembered Rio’s visit the evening before. Had it been a dream? What reason could he have had for coming to see her in real life? Their business was over. More than over.
It was broken beyond repair.
Had she dreamed his visit? Lord knew she’d had enough dreams of Rio Mastrangelo for that theory to be utterly plausible. She looked down at her fingertips, trying to remember the sensation of touching him. She’d pressed her hand against his chest.
And she frowned.
He’d been clean-shaven. It was easier to imagine him as the formidable tycoon when he looked like that, instead of the island version of himself.
She lathered her hair and rinsed it, then conditioned it and soaped her whole body, propping her back against the tiles when a wave of tiredness returned.
This cold had been dogging her steps for well over a week. At first she’d thought it was just exhaustion, but then her ears had begun to ache, her throat to sting, her eyes to scratch, and finally she’d succumbed to the sickness. In some ways it had been a relief. A physical justification for her pervasive sense of misery.
It had allowed to her to climb wearily into bed.
To stay there.
To hide under her duvet and let the world roll past, carrying on without her contribution.
Strength was in her now, though. She’d slept solidly, as though seeing Rio had given her some kind of closure.
Closure? As if.
Her heart twisted with a pain she was becoming used to.
She flicked the water off and grabbed a towel, wrapping it around her body and then aggressively drying her hair. She felt much better, but there was still an exhaustion within her that came from having not eaten properly in days.
She didn’t bother to dress. Instead she cinched her silk robe around her waist and pulled the door inwards, padding down the hall. The scent of decaying flowers assailed her and, as she’d suspected, it was disgusting. She curled her fingers around the vase, lifting it and carrying it with her to the kitchen.
