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CHAPTER TEN
WHENTIMONEYWOKE, she knew exactly where she was.
She had dreamed that she was back here so many times in the past two months, curled up happily just like this. The heft of his pillows. The astounding softness of his sheets. The lightweight clasp and warmth of the duvet. The scent of him surrounding her, sinking into her, making her feel soft and molten and ready before she was even fully awake.
At first she didn’t open her eyes. She simply let herself drift in the particular embrace of this bed she knew so well.
When she did open her eyes, it was to find that she wasn’t dreaming, this time. She really was in Crete’s wide platform bed, the way she had been so many times before. The way she’d been so certain she never would be again. It made her shake a little to find herself here. It made her feel a bit too raw.
She pulled in a steadying breath as she sat up, shoving her hair back. On the other side of the three walls of glass around her, it was still dark. Timoney pulled one of the almost scandalously luxurious blankets with her as she went, more so she could keep feeling it against her bare skin than any particular sense of modesty.
The room itself was as she remembered it. Profoundly stark, featuring only the imposing, masculine bed in deep gray linens against the single gray interior wall. There was concrete everywhere with steel beams above and London on three sides, right there on the other side of the private terrace.
When she had lived here, she had liked to tell herself that it was a kind of urban tree house, that was all. Made of concrete and steel instead of wood, but the same, really. It had helped her feel less dizzy, perched so high above the Thames and the streets below.
But that had only helped so much. It was still too far off the ground, too cold and impersonal, for her liking. She’d made the best of things, because what else was there to do? This was where Crete lived, so she had made her home here, too, however uneasily. She would have camped out in an actual tree house in a field if it had meant that she got to live with him, sleep with him, make love with him at will. She would have put up with any indignity.
Timoney told herself she ought to be embarrassed by how easily she’d surrendered herself to this dour concrete world of his. But even as she thought it, she was shaking her head. Because she hadn’t really surrendered, had she? She had lived here, but she hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to his rules, stated and unstated alike.
Because she had been so sure that she would win him over. That she would introduce a little color into his life, not by actually coloring over his dark grays and steels and concretes, but by virtue of becoming that color herself. Timoney had danced naked on his excruciatingly hard sofas until he smiled, however unwillingly. She had painted the wall in his study and him, too, when he’d glared, affronted, at her makeshift mural. She had cooked elaborate, messy meals in his pristine kitchen, using up every pot and getting the ingredients everywhere. She had laughed when he’d scowled. She had imagined that she was the antidote to the rest of his hard, busy life.
In truth, she had taken pride in that role.
It had never occurred to her that it could ever end between them. That he would end it.
The overconfidence of virgins, he had said once. In a manner that had made it clear that it was not a compliment,
But Timoney had only laughed at him, then had crawled onto his lap in the back of the car they’d been in.Entirely too overconfident,she had agreed.Shall I show you?
She swung her legs over the side of the bed now, still too raw. And remembering everything too keenly. Even the height of the platform the wide bed sat on seemed to poke at her, casting her back into far too many memories.
It’s like a throne for sleep, she had said once.
A throne for something, Crete had replied.But not sleep, I think.
And then he had demonstrated what it was for. Repeatedly.
Even thinking about the kinds of demonstrations he liked best made her shiver a little. She saw the strips of fabric he’d used earlier in a heap on the floor beside the bed and smiled. That was the thing about Crete. Whatever he dedicated himself to, he gave it his all.
Always.
She padded around the bare, imposing wall that served as a headboard, but Crete was nowhere to be found in the rest of the expansive suite. Something in her shifted uneasily as she looked into one room, then the next, but didn’t find him.
Though she stood a moment in his study, staring at the mural she’d made him that she’d been sure he would have had repainted within twenty-four hours of her departure. It shocked her that it was still there, all the bright and garish colors she’d slapped all over the wall opposite his steel-and-glass desk.
Timoney didn’t know how to feel about the fact the mural was still there. But it was nothing short of alarming that he wasn’t at his desk. As far as she knew, the study was the only place he went in this sprawling flat of his when he wasn’t making use of his bed.
And she found that she was...apprehensive as she went out into the rest of the penthouse. Had it already happened? Had he already changed his mind?
Just because she’d known he would, that didn’t make her prepared for it now that it had happened. And so soon.
Was he even now readying his vehicle to whisk her back to Oxfordshire and hand her off to Julian?
Funny, wasn’t it, that she found that prospect nothing short of unbearable now.
Crete was nowhere to be found in the flat. But as she stood naked in the center of the great room, Timoney discovered that the relief she felt had only intensified after a very few hours of sleep. And it brought with it some clarity.
She did not want to marry Julian.
