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She pulled away from his grasp, rubbing at her wrist as if he’d burned her.
‘Well, if you hadn’t left me waiting forfourhours I might not have had to resort tothis,’ she said, her hand gesturing around the room as if it explained everything.
‘Thisbeing breaking and entering, theft, and aggravated assault?’ he demanded, astounded at the woman’s audacity to sound indignant, given the circumstances.
‘I did not break a single thing, and as for assault, that was self-defence.’
He rubbed his jaw, her gaze snapping to the place where her palm had connected with it. Yes, he’d definitely deserved that, but he didn’t deserve this, he thought, his grip tightening on the notebook she’d tried to steal.
‘Was this what you wanted to see me about?’ he asked, holding it up. The silly woman could barely contain her desperation. As if connected to the object, her whole body shifted towards it, and he was unaccountably irritated by the motion, his male pride smarting that her only interest in this room was his father’s scribbles. It had been all about the notebook from the very beginning. He was such a fool.
‘There are many ways you could have gone about this, Evelyn.Thiswas not the right one.’
He turned on his heel and walked past her to put the notebook back on the shelf where it had been.
‘Wait.’ The word punctured the thick, heavy air in the room.
‘I...am sorry,’ she said, the words ground out between clenched teeth, betraying the fact that she clearly wasn’t sorry at all.
He cast a glance back at her, his raised brows showing the truth of his thoughts.
She sighed and tried again. ‘Iamsorry. But it really is a matter of some urgency. You hadn’t replied to any of my emails or phone calls—’
‘How do you have my number?’ he asked, surprised that a woman he barely knew five minutes ago had become a lot more tangled with his life than he could have imagined.
‘Your father gave it to me, in case of emergency.’
He felt as if he’d been slapped a second time that evening by her easy, familiar reference to his father. With a follow-up sucker punch that he had been his father’s emergency contact, despite the fact that they hadn’t spoken in the three years before his passing.
He wasn’t sure how to process that information. His relationship with his father had been more than strained at the best of times. It was as if they’d spoken different languages—something about their interaction always rubbed the wrong way, painfully, abrasively and inevitably. Something that seemed to be repeating itself with Evelyn Edwards.
‘I didn’t come here to stir up old wounds,’ she offered apologetically, as if he could even believe that.
‘No? Then why is my father’s assistant here?’ he demanded, just stopping short of addingin my bedroomandmessing with my head.
‘Your father’sassistant,’ she replied with not an inconsiderable amount of bite to her tone, ‘is now Professor Edwards.’
Mateo was impressed, piecing together what little he remembered hearing of her. Child genius, high IQ. And yet, she’d clearly been naïve enough to follow his father down the rabbit hole of what amassed to little more than pirate stories and treasure hunts.
‘Good for you,’ he replied as he looked away in disappointment.
‘Do you think you might be able to...?’
He looked up to find a pretty blush on her cheeks again.
‘What?’
‘Do something about that,’ she said, her hand sweeping a circle in the air around his chest, and belatedly he realised he’d held the entire conversation with her whilst shirtless.
Cristo, this woman short-circuited his brain.
‘Don’t move,’ he said, glaring at her for good measure, before he turned and pulled open the door to his walk-in wardrobe, leaving it ajar so that he could hear her if she tried to leave. He grabbed a pale grey shirt from the hanger and thrust his arms into the sleeves with angry, awkward movements. The kiss, his father, the notebook—they all bled together as he pulled at the shirt cuffs and started doing up the buttons slowly enough to buy himself some time to get his head on straight.
Citrus was what she’d tasted like. Sweet citrus and sunrise.
And since when had he become a poet?
Since the first second of that kiss. It had been as if a switch had been flipped and he’d been utterly overwhelmed. It was probably a good thing she’d stopped it when she had because he wasn’t completely sure he’d have been able to end it. And she’d been in just as deep as he had, he’dfeltit, known it as sure as his own name. She was right, it had been utterly wrong of him to kiss her. But the heat and want from her...it had been there beneath the simmering confusion in her gaze, it had been in the little gasp he wasn’t sure she even knew she’d made, the opening of her lips beneath his and the tentative tongue—at first—and then...
