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But some truths would have to be shared. She was going to find out that his mother and father were not a couple who had been married for forty years, and he was planning on telling her when he was ready.
So, yes, he had been and would be straight with her. But Effie—
He let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding and felt his temper rise. This was her doing. She was the reason he couldn’t breathe. It was bad enough that her teasing scent seemed to mark every surface...then she had to go and start mixing her potions in his sitting room.
The memory of holding that vial up to his nose pulsed in his head, bright like a neon sign, hurting the insides of his eyes.
He’d had to leave. He hadn’t been able to stand there with that awful, raging thing scrabbling inside him and he still wasn’t sure what had happened. One minute he had been inhaling the scent of oranges in an oasis of calm, the next—
His stomach clenched. Maybe that was why he had reacted so strongly. It was rare for him to feel so at peace, so at one with himself. In fact, he couldn’t recall ever feeling like that.
Not even when he was a child.
Particularly not when he was a child.
Then again, while Effie might be the very definition of ordinary, with her brown hair and brown eyes and sensible clothes, this situation was exceptional. How could it not be? He was a man who didn’t believe in love or matrimony, pretending to be in love with a woman he had met a week ago. A woman he was planning to marry, all so that he could punish one man. The father who had walked out of his life before he was even born.
He was turning himself inside out. Turning into a stranger.
Surely that, not this woman or some random scent, was the reason he was so on edge. But now was not the time to analyse that.
‘Doesn’t sound too hard,’ he said, watching the sun’s slow burnished descent into the sea. ‘My free time is limited but it happens. I’m sure if we “get creative” we can come up with a solution.’
Her light brown eyes fixed on his face. ‘I think you and I have very different definitions of that word.’
‘Which one? Creative?’ Leaning forward, he nudged the coffee cup towards her. ‘Hard?’
Watching the pulse twitch at the base of her throat, he shifted back in his seat, conscious suddenly of the hammering of his heart.
She lifted her chin, held his gaze. ‘It’s complicated. You and I would never normally cross paths so it needs to be somewhere we could have met by chance, and yet it needs not to have been by chance at all, because it was a place we had in common all the time only without realising. Does that make sense?’
It did. He couldn’t have put it better himself. In fact, he hadn’t.
He held her gaze, torn between curiosity and admiration. ‘Where do you have in mind?’
She sat up a little straighter, tilting her face the better to look at him. He knew there was no logical reason for it, and yet he still couldn’t stop the tiny lick of flame as he caught sight of the pale underside of her throat.
‘I was thinking of a garden or a gallery, depending on what you like doing in your free time.’
As she leaned forward to pick up her coffee her scent whipped at his senses, so that he had to press his body back into the seat to stop himself from climbing over the small glass-topped table and pulling her against him as he had in the car.
Taking a shallow breath, he let his gaze cruise casually over her small, tense body. ‘I’m not sure either would be entirely suitable for what I like doing in my free time.’
She stared at him, the faintest flush of pink colouring her cheeks. ‘How about a funfair, then?’
His pulse stumbled. He had wanted to get under her skin as her scent was getting under his, but instead he felt the slight hoarseness in her voice in all the wrong places. ‘Why a funfair?’
‘We could have gone on the dodgems. Bumped into one another intentionally for once.’
He laughed. Because it was funny. She was funny. And he was surprised to find that his anger and resentment of moments earlier was, like the sun, fading fast.
‘We might just have done that,’ he said slowly.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had gone to a funfair. In fact, he couldn’t remember ‘fun’ ever being part of his vocabulary. When he was a child, he’d worked and eaten and slept. As an adult, that list had lengthened to include working out and hooking up with women for a different kind of workout. But somehow fun—easy, lazy, meandering fun—had never played a part in his life.
There was always something driving him forward, a restlessness that haunted him, snapped at his heels. Even now, when he didn’t need to work, when he could arguably just kick back and relax, he couldn’t stop.
Glancing over at Effie’s small, pale face, he felt his pulse slow. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed with a woman either. Perhaps he never had. Laughter meant having the kind of intimacy that slowed things down, and he had never wanted to take things slowly. If he did that he might have to stop and think about who he was. And, more importantly, who he wasn’t.
