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Thankfully Sara arrived at that moment, with coffee and some delicate lacy biscuits. After she’d left, closing the door softly, he leaned back in his chair.
Now what?
He felt stretched taut. There was no process for this. He had no idea how to start the conversation he wanted to have. Or even if he wanted to have it. It would mean reliving the moment of her rejection by proxy that had sent him spinning into the darkness...
‘Why did you choose to buy a house on Pico? Is there some family connection?’
Dove’s voice cut through his thoughts and he glanced over to where she was sitting. She was talking about his father. His adoptive father—Luis. But his biological father—the man who had spent a night with Fenella Ogilvy thirty years ago—was a man without a name or a face. Not that he could tell her that. He couldn’t tell anyone. But he especially couldn’t tell Dove.
‘No, not really.’ He shook his head. ‘My father’s family come from Porto. But when I first went out to the States I made friends with some surfers. They were taking a trip to São Jorge and they invited me along.’
He saw her ball her hands into fists. So they had got there in the end. It had been by means of a rather circuitous route, but they were there nonetheless.
‘Of course. You went surfing after we broke up.’ Her mouth twisted. ‘And there I was, worrying that your guilty conscience might be keeping you awake all night. Only how could it? You don’thavea conscience.’ She shook her head. ‘You know, I keep thinking about what you said earlier. Aboutmesettingyouup to fail. But it was you who set me up. You met me at that party and you thought,Here’s someone I can scam.’
Wrong, he thought silently, his gaze roaming over her flushed cheeks and that lush pink mouth. When he’d met her at that party, he had thought she was every man’s fantasy come to life. And he had wanted her. God, how he had wanted her. He still wanted her now, and he hated that...
‘And you didn’t think at all,’ he said. ‘You just took. Because you could.’ They were both on the edge of their seats, fists clenched, eyes narrowed. ‘Because you were rich and beautiful and bored.’
It was the way she had been brought up, he told himself, remembering Oscar Cavendish’s cool, reptilian smile and his arrogant assumption that the world had been set up to satisfy his wishes above all others.
He held her gaze. ‘That’s how you people operate.’
‘Which people?’ She was staring at him, her grey eyes wide with confusion and an exhaustion he refused to acknowledge.
‘You and yourfriends.’ He tossed the word at her as if it was a grenade, and they both jerked to their feet at the same time. ‘Those trust-fund babies who went to all those parties. The ones who used to get drunk and smash stuff up, and then just throw money on the table as if that made everything all right. You told me you were different.’
He had thought shewasdifferent. Gentle and sensitive. And the way she had looked at him then... There had almost been a purity to it.
‘I was. Iam,’ she protested shakily.
At some point they had edged closer to one another, drawn by the invisible gravitational pull of desire, and now he could see the faint tremor beneath her skin, the flush across her cheeks. He wanted to touch her so much, and that knowledge made him furious.
‘No, you’re exactly the same. The only difference is you don’t pay with cash,’ he snarled.
For a splinter of a second she stared at him in the jagged silence that followed his remark, and then she took an unsteady step backwards.
‘And that’s the sticking point for you, isn’t it? That’s why you agreed to this.’ A hard flare of anger crossed her face. ‘You hate me knowing that you took the money. It makes you feel small. But frankly—and this might come as a shock to you, Gabriel—I don’t care about your pride.’
Her face was pale and wide-eyed, but her voice had stopped shaking.
‘I care about mine. So I’m going to get my bags, and then I’m getting off this island on the next boat or plane. In fact, I’ll swim if I have to.’
She spun round and was gone, moving with a grace that his eyes tracked even in his feverish state, moving so swiftly she was already in her bedroom by the time he caught up with her. As he slammed the door shut behind them she stepped towards him, her eyes blazing.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
And now his anger was blazing too—rolling through him high and fast, like a bushfire.
‘You think I needed to bring you here to work out that you don’t care about my pride? You left me sitting in that hotel bar for nearly four hours,’ he said, and it cost him a lot to keep his voice calm, when the muted agony of it was still reverberating inside him. ‘Do you know how humiliating that was?’
There was a pulsing silence, broken only by the fractured sound of their breathing.
‘You want to talk about humiliation?’ She lifted her chin like a boxer entering the ring—a flyweight squaring up to a heavyweight. ‘Try coming in second place to a pile of money.’
Fire and fury swirled in her beautiful grey eyes along with something less sharp, something shadowy and frayed that almost undid him.
‘You turned our relationship into a financial transaction.’
