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He had bought three cases of the best champagne on offer to take with him. He didn’t think for a minute that his ex would think he was deceiving her and, if she did, then Mateo was confident that he could erase any such doubts from her head because, after all, truth was largely on his side.
‘Can I ask you something?’ Maude murmured, taking time out to have a private conversation with him before entering the fray.
‘How did your...er...ex-girlfriend take the news?’
‘About my new-found love interest?’
‘Well...’
‘No point skirting round with niceties.’ Mateo’s eyebrows shot up but his voice was thoughtful. ‘Varying degrees of incredulity, fury and teary-eyed sorrow.’
‘Poor girl.’
‘Come again?’
‘She was obviously in love with you.’
‘Do I detect a hint of disapproval in your voice?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Is that diplomacy talking by any chance? Because, now that we’re this week’s hottest item, then it’s fair to say we can dispense with the usual employer-employee, duty-bound responses...’
‘It’s none of my business.’ Maude shrugged. ‘As we agreed, this arrangement...well...it suited us both. I suppose I feel sorry for her. Getting in too deep and then having to go through the trauma of being side-lined because you’re no longer wanted.’
Maude thought of her own moment of disillusionmentonce upon a time.
She’d spent all her adolescent years with her head firmly screwed on. She’d come to terms with the fact that she was taller and bigger than all her friends...that she just wasn’t the sort of girl to bring out the much-vaunted protective instinct in boys.
For a long time, she’d actually been taller than every single boy she knew and even after, when their growth spurts had kicked in, only some of them had caught up.
No, she’d dealt with her own gnawing insecurities under a glossy façade of indifference. She had listened to the ins and outs of her friends’ teenage relationships and had never let slip any of the hurt that she was excluded from those youthful, heady first steps into love. Then she had hit university and within three months had fallen hopelessly in love with a guy on her course.
He’d been tall dark and handsome. He’d been someone who hadn’t seemed daunted by her towering height and the fact that she wasn’t model-thin. Maude had thrown herself headlong into a relationship that had lasted a handful of months, as unprotected as a tortoise shorn of its shell. With no teenage flirtations, no youthful broken heart, there’d been nothing to prepare her for the sudden storm of emotions or the crushing feeling of loss afterwards.
Small and blonde had won the day. The Perfect Guy had apologised profusely and dumped her for someone she could have popped in her pocket.
Since then?
She had been single minded. But she could still remember the hurt when that first tentative relationship had fallen apart around her ears, with all her deeply embedded insecurities about her looks crawling out of their hiding places, mocking her for being an idiot to have thought the cute guy could actually fall for her. Something inside her had broken and she’d known then that putting it back together would never happen. Her happy-ever-after would never involve all that starry-eyed nonsense about giving your emotions over to someone else’s safekeeping, lock stock and smoking barrel.
Thank God the guy in question hadn’t had to lie to her just to get rid of her! Maude cringed when she thought of what Mateo’s ex had gone through, and some part of her wondered why the woman couldn’t have read the writing on the wall from day one.
Mateo Moreno was a player.
Even if someone was buried under a mountain of books, and only surfaced now and again to take a breath of fresh air, they couldn’t have missed the pictures in the tabloid press of the most eligible bachelor on the planet with some ridiculously beautiful blonde draped on his arm, gazing adoringly up at him.
Who in their right mind would ever get involved with a guy like that?
‘You haven’t met my ex. She’s no shrinking violet,’ Mateo murmured with wry amusement, and Maude looked at him, prepared to defend the female race from womanising men without a care for diplomacy. But he continued thoughtfully, ‘I may have a reputation that precedes me, but believe me when I tell you that I never give any woman I date any promises I know aren’t going to be fulfilled—and Cassie was no exception to that rule. Permanence? No. Not going to happen. Not in a month of Sundays. I lay my cards on the table from the start.’
‘I’ll bet that’s a popular move with the ladies.’
‘Where have you been hiding that sense of humour, Miss Thornton? I’m very happy you’ve decided to bring it out for some fresh air. Just for the record, I spoil the women I date—whatever they want, they get. Cassie, however...’
‘Your ex?’
‘Cassie wanted a whole lot more than that. She wanted the real deal, and my fault, but I should have backed off the minute I got a whiff of just how dependent she was going to be.’
