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“I told you what would happen if you left,” Joaquin growled at her.
Which, she couldn’t help but notice, wasn’t the same thing as summoning security, having her thrown out, or having refused to allow her entry into his office in the first place.
She took that as an encouraging sign.
“London isanisland,” she said. “But it’s notyourisland. Not just yet.”
“Amalia,” he began, in that commanding way of his.
And she told herself that this was love, not addiction. That this was freedom, because she’d chosen it this time. Maybe, she could admit in retrospect, she’d secretly hoped that Joaquin would turn up on the island when she’d returned to it. This time, she’d sought him out directly. It wasn’t happenstance. It wasn’t luck or coincidence.
It was love, she told herself. And maybe that was the real freedom.
So she unwound her wrap from around her shoulders, then dropped it to the floor as she’d done before, secure in the tinted windows that kept his staff from seeing in. Then she knelt down, smiled at this man she was sure loved her back no matter what he might say to the contrary, and proved it.
CHAPTER NINE
HEHADWON.
The facts spoke for themselves. It was incontrovertible. Amalia had returned. And it was not lost on him that she had marched straight into his offices, given her name, and made no attempt to conceal her identity when she’d sought him out. That pleased him more than he chose to let on.
He’d won, damn it, and he lived to win.
Though for some reason, now that Amalia was back with him—if in London rather than Cap Morat, a pity only because it meant she wore more clothes—Joaquin could not access that sense of victory he knew he deserved to feel.
“What did you do today?” he asked her one night.
It was late. He had found himself impatient in the midst of closing a major deal, which was unusual for him. Those were the moments he lived for, normally. But nothing was normal these days. Not when he had Amalia living with him in his bright, modern Southwark penthouse, three floors overlooking the Thames that he rarely thought of at all while he was traveling, and now could hardly bear to leave.
He’d found her in the library he kept on the second level tonight and had joined her there, pouring himself a generous measure of Izarra before sitting on one of the notably uncomfortable midcentury armchairs near the gas fire that was made to look like an art installation, not a fire. Another decorator’s touch he hadn’t cared about enough to decline.
Something he hadn’t explained to Amalia when he’d first brought her here. She had looked around, clearly wondering how the same man who could fashion himself something cozy in half-submerged cells could also live here, in this flat of planes and angles and architectural flourishes designed to be looked at, not lived in. For a man who was always at the office, it was nice to come home to a place that was especially created to make it clear that whoever lived here had both wealth and other homes.
But he knew that if he explained all this to Amalia, she would read things into it. He didn’t want that.
Or he hadn’t wanted that at first. Now he was less sure.
“I went shopping,” she told him, looking offensively comfortable in the brutal chair she sat in. And she said it in tones of awe, as if she was confessing to taking up interstellar flight while he’d been pretending to pay attention in a contract negotiation. “It was the most astonishing thing. I simply...walked up and down Oxford Street. All on my own. I wore trainers like everybody else. No one recognized me. No even looked at me. I could have been anyone.”
He swirled the liqueur around in his glass. “And this is a good thing?”
“I understand that you spent a considerable amount of time and effort becoming singular.” Amalia’s overtly blue gaze touched his. She did not touch the glass of Izarra he had set down on the angular table beside her. She glanced at it now, but didn’t pick it up. She looked into the fire instead. “But I’m headed in the opposite direction. I was always singular. And now I must learn how to blend. And I managed it, all on my own.”
“Then, of course, you have my congratulations.”
Even he could hear how dark he sounded. How ill tempered. And he couldn’t have explained himself even if she’d asked—but then, that was the trouble, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t ask. She did not push him.
He could not complain. She was generous with her body, her time, her enthusiasm. She had come back to him and she had been like a ray of light. A beacon through the British gloom. As if she’d gone off to America only to return with the Spanish sun at her disposal.
Joaquin had basked in her.
But weeks had passed since she’d turned up in his office. Having never entertained a woman in his home before, Joaquin should have paused before moving this one straight in, but he hadn’t. He told himself it was because he wanted access to her at his convenience, that was all. Besides, he truly did wish to see if that all-consuming hunger for her that had left him feeling so unbalanced and off-kilter on Cap Morat would continue to affect him here, where it was usually necessary that he go into his office each day.
He’d wanted to see if he could handle it in the real world of London as opposed to the fantasy of Cap Morat. That was the truth of things.
At first Amalia gave herself to him the way she always did. The way she always had. Fully, easily, generously. With that wildfire passion to match his own and that same near-desperation that never seemed to leave either one of them.
He had told her that the only thing between them was sex, and the sex continued to be blisteringly hot, magnificent in every way. That didn’t seem to change no matter what country they were in.
