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He would not say he wasdisconcerted, per se. But only because he did not get disconcerted. His scowl deepened. “I was in the neighborhood.”
“Crete Asgar himself? Roaming about England’s greenest hills? Surely not.” He was sure he had to be mistaken, but she sounded...mocking. Sharply amused, when he could see no call for amusement. “You were always at pains to tell me that the countryside held no allure for you. What could a man who owns his own Mediterranean islands want with rainy hedgerows and stodgy Georgian facades?”
“And yet here I am. In the neighborhood. As you see.”
Crete had the strangest sensation then, when all she did was gaze back at him. And not as if she was transported by his glory as in simpler times. He could not even name the sensation, it was so foreign. And then, as she made no move toward him, he belatedly understood. He had never seen her look at him like this before.
As if she did not want him.
As if she did not want him, which was impossible.
It was unthinkable.
“You must know that I’m getting married in the morning,” was what she said. Eventually. In a tone he did not like. “Have you come to wish me well? Perhaps you needed my registry details?”
Crete took that in, aware that a different kind of heat was humming in him. His months with Timoney had been lush. Sweet. From their explosive first moments in that ridiculous club straight through to the inevitable finish. He sometimes thought that had she not so foolishly fallen in love with him, they might still be together—though he very rarely kept a mistress for more than a few months. She had been that delectable.
What she had never been was sardonic.
He couldn’t deny that it surprised him. But it also made him hard, so there was that.
Crete had deeply appreciated her sweetness. Yet deep down, he was a man who appreciated a fight. It was hard not to appreciate the only thing he had ever known.
“Did you grow a backbone, little one?” he asked quietly, letting the hunger and the need wash over him. Through him, like a baptism, out in the dark and cold with the mist and the moon and no more stories to explain the truth away. He wanted her. “I think perhaps it suits you.”
“Maybe it’s a backbone.” But she sniffed. “Or maybe it’s that I’m wearing another man’s ring. Either way, there’s nothing here for you, Crete. You made that clear.”
She had not fought with him that night. That was what he had found himself brooding over in the days, the weeks, the two long months since. She had cried out her love. He had shared his philosophy with her and then, to prevent any misunderstandings, he had ordered her to go.
Standard practice, really.
Normally, the kind of women who dared tell him that they loved him were outraged at that point. They would scream at him, berate him, prove to him beyond any shadow of a doubt that their love was more squarely focused on his bank details than anything else.
But Timoney had only stared at him, tears rolling down her perfect cheeks, her soft lips parted as if she found it hard to breathe.
He hated to admit how many times that image had distracted him as he went about his business.
And now she was sitting there on the little bench before him, staring up at him like he was a stranger. He couldn’t bear it. So he reached out to fit his palm to her cheek as he had a thousand times before—
But unlike before, she knocked his hand away.
And then surged to her feet. “You don’t get to show up here in the middle of the night and just...touch me whenever you feel like it.”
“Do you not wish for me to touch you?” He let his hand fall back to his side. “I think you are a liar, Timoney.”
“If you wished to touch me, you shouldn’t have tossed me aside like so much trash,” she threw back at him. “Should you?”
“It wasn’t the touching I had an issue with.”
He thought she might shout at him, and he couldn’t decide if he would find that exciting—or if it would once again make her seem like a stranger to him.
But she didn’t.
Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, the cloak spilling out all around her, a deep red. She put him in mind of some kind of fairy tale, out here in the misty moonlight, when he had as little use for children’s stories as he did for Christmas Eve.
Crete was not one for holidays in general, but especially not this holiday. It seemed a part and parcel of that kind of home and hearth, overtly familial notion he had never really experienced. But Timoney in a red cloak had him feeling the closest to festive he’d felt in a long time.
Maybe ever.
