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He puzzled over this growing obsession.
It wasn’t even as if she were as beautiful as Angelina. The resemblance was startling, but she was not, as he had first thought, a duplicate copy. Her face was heart-shaped and her nose, though delicate, was tip-tilted, her mouth was…
His thoughts slowed as his eyes drifted to that full, generous curve.
Her mouth, he admitted, was a problem.
He wanted to kiss her. The weakness angered him.
‘Sad?’
Maggie shook her head. ‘Just a private joke.’ It was joke when she realised that she had allowed Simon to systematically undermine her confidence and make her feel that her wants and needs were always secondary to his.
It took a total stranger noticing her and being kind to bring home the extent to which she was hungry for attention and how invisible she had felt.
For Simon she had come just above…maybe above…his appointment with his hair stylist, because whether he liked it or not, as he was fond of telling her, the sad fact was that appearances counted in politics…The first time he had said this he had felt compelled to advise her that the amount of cleavage she was showing in her favourite red dress might give the wrong idea.
Her blue dress, he had added, made her look wholesome.
And she had been so eager to be the woman he wanted her to be that she had gone and changed, the same way she had stopped wearing her hair loose and had abandoned her killer heels.
Part of the problem was that she had been so young and impressionable when she met Simon, a first-year student on her first ward allocation, and the handsome son of a rather demanding patient had seemed very sophisticated.
And, yes, she had been flattered that he noticed her. For years boys had not noticed her, not really until the last year at school when she had finally said goodbye to the ubiquitous braces. The event had coincided with her skin clearing up, and, once revealed as smooth and flawless, her golden-toned complexion made her stand out among her fair-skinned class-mates.
Her excess inches had also melted away almost overnight. She had needed a belt to keep her school skirt from falling down—she had a waist.
The boys at school had noticed her then, but their admiration had taken the form of crude comments and clumsy passes and Maggie, to hide her shyness, had responded to them with an icy disdain that had earned the not very inventive nickname of Ice Queen.
To Maggie at eighteen—and in her head still the dumpy teenager—Simon, a nearly-thirty-year-old lawyer with political ambitions, had seemed very sophisticated, and he had been interested in her!
He hadn’t been clumsy, he’d been charming, and he had never made her feel awkward or uncomfortable. He had even been sympathetic when she confided how self-conscious her overgenerous breasts and curvy hips made her feel, patting her hand and assuring her comfortingly that nobody was perfect. With very limited experience of men and dating, Maggie had been relieved when he had put no pressure on her to go farther than kissing. Though the circumstances of her childhood had made her mature in many ways in other ways, she had led quite a sheltered life.
When he had asked her to marry him a dazzled Maggie had really believed herself in love and fully expected the relationship to move on to another level; her feelings about this had been mixed.
When Simon had said he respected her and he wanted to wait until they were married she was pretty sure that relief should not have figured even fleetingly in her reaction, but it had.
Her fists curled as she reflected angrily on how submissive she had been, how she had let Simon mould her into the person he wanted her to be.
‘You wish to share this joke?’
Maggie shook her head. The last thing she wanted was to tell this man above all others that she was not used to male attention. She tried to frame a suitable excuse to make good her escape.
She could always just open her mouth and say, ‘Go away,’ but, having had good manners instilled in her from the cradle, it was hard for Maggie to tell anyone to get lost, especially when that someone had just sort of saved her life.
‘Allow me to walk you back.’
Maggie shook her head and smiled to rob her refusal of offence. ‘I couldn’t possibly put you to the trouble.’
She thought of cliff edges and pretty views and sighed. No, she would definitely opt for the safe route even if the view was not so thrilling, although for a split second she had been tempted.
The same way you opted for the, oh, so safe Simon and that worked out so well.
Ignoring the contribution of the critic in her head, she folded her phone and held out her hand.
‘Thank you very much for saving me, but I won’t impose on you any longer.’
The stilted dismissal made Rafael veer between amusement and astonishment, then as his attention was captured by the rapid rise and fall of her rather magnificent breasts both were swallowed up by a blast of raw lust so strong he actually took a stiff half step backwards as his body hardened.
It took him unawares. It was a long time since he had wanted a woman this much, let alone a woman that was out of bounds…Maybe, he mused, that was the attraction…the forbidden fruit?
The fingers that tightened on her arm made her wince. He murmured an apology.
She couldn’t see his expression; his heavy eyelids were lowered, leaving only a glittering slit of silver.
For a second she thought he wasn’t going to take her hand, then he did, holding it a moment too long, giving time for the electrical tingle under her skin to morph into a shameful throb of awareness that clutched low like a fist in her belly.
Then his brown fingers tightened slightly before falling away.
She stayed motionless her eyes meshed with his compelling silver eyes. His gaze was strangely emotionless considering the electrical charge that shimmered in the air between them—or did it?
She brought her lashes down in an ebony protective screen and sucked in a shaky breath. She clearly needed to get her overactive imagination in line. It made no sense that the brush of a stranger’s fingers could…She rubbed her hand against her thigh and dismissed the moment from her mind.
The sexual charge in the air did not diminish even though they were no longer touching.
‘You are not well enough to walk.’ It was not a lie; she looked pale and shaken.
‘I’m fine. I just missed lunch and if I don’t hurry I shall miss the paella evening.’ Authentic, she reminded herself as she tried to work up enthusiasm for the prospect—the authentic flamenco evening had involved dancers who hailed from Manchester, though in their defence they had been very good.
‘I know where they do the best paella.’
‘How nice.’
He watched the appearance of the polite smile that was starting to aggravate him and thought about doing something that would wipe it off her face.
‘It would be nicer if I had company…would you come share some paella with me?’
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