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“Have you been crying?” he demanded.
The notion was unacceptable. It made the edginess in him scrape, hard.
“Why would you ask me that?” She lifted her fingers to her face and pressed, there above her cheekbones. “It must be the chlorine.”
“Must it?”
Amalia looked at him for far too long, standing there in the water like some kind of selkie, his favorite myth. Yet this was not a moment for fantasy. Something about the blue of her gaze connected too hard to that ache inside him.
Like a blow.
For a moment Joaquin thought he might have swayed where he stood, but that was impossible. He did notsway.
She swam to the ladder nearest him, ducked her head back into the water, and smoothed back her hair. Then she rose and as she did, he realized that she was naked.
And he ceased noticing or caring if he swayed on his feet.
“What could I possibly have to cry about?” Amalia asked, her voice soft, but inarguably sultry.
And he thought,She’s using sex as a weapon.
Just as he liked to do.
He wasn’t sure he cared for it—but it was a weapon that worked.
On him as well as her.
And they had been back in London for some while when he remembered that night in Singapore again. The pool. Her eyes red from some emotion she chose not to share with him, when once she would have fought to keep her composure, only to tell him anyway. In one way or another.
Joaquin was astounded to find that he wanted her to tell him everything.
He had instituted nightly dinners and often found himself attempting to make conversation like he was...someone else.Like you are as she was, a voice in him liked to point out.So desperate. So needy.
But he refused to accept those things were true, so he dismissed them.
Tonight she had been waiting for him in the foyer when he’d come in from the office, dressed in what he knew she’d once considered her armor. All princess, no peasant.
Joaquin understood at once that she had decided to have a conversation with him. At last.
But he had no desire to talk, suddenly. Not if she felt she needed to wear armor to do it.
“I’m famished,” he told her shortly.
And when she only smiled that damned smile at him, he’d stomped up the stairs, finding his way to the dining alcove he always preferred. Because it was a narrow stretch of bright wood on one side and glass on the other, and he could pretend that all of not-so-giddy London on the other side of that glass—from Blackfriars into the City—was just another ocean.
As indifferent, as inexhaustible.
But even a full belly could not make him feel easy about the way she looked at him, no hint of summer in her blue eyes.
“You clearly have something you wish to tell me,” he bit out at the end of the meal, sitting back in his chair and trying not to look as if he was bracing himself. When he was. “That will make a change, I imagine, from all these weeks of silence.”
Amalia frowned. “What silence do you mean? We speak all the time.”
“Indeed we do. Of nothing consequential.”
“Joaquin. You’ve made it very clear that intimacy of any kind is unacceptable to you. Or did I misunderstand?”
He could feel his jaw tighten. “You did not.”
