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‘And in frustration you decided to climb a tree…’
Amy remembered just how obnoxious the man was. She glared at him and told him, sounding to even her own ears like a broken record, to point her in the right direction. At this rate, the infernal man would start thinking that she was stalking him.
‘The house is a stiff walk away, at least if you take the direct route, and I certainly won’t be sending you back through the deep, dark woods. God knows where you might end up.’
He turned on his heel and started walking away and, with a mixture of frustration and resentment, Amy half ran behind him, struggling to keep up with his long strides.
‘I think I can manage!’
Was it possible to read someone’s expression from the inclination of their fast-disappearing back? She thought so!
‘Please wait!’ she yelled. ‘These sandals weren’t designed for sprinting!’
Rafael stopped and turned around, waiting for her to catch up with him. The woman was truly off her rocker. How many sane human beings climbed trees at midnight in an attempt to deal with a broken heart? In fact, how many sane adults climbed trees? He hadn’t climbed a tree since he was a kid!
‘You should have thought of that before you decided to hike your way across the estate,’ Rafael pointed out in the sort of calm voice that someone might use when dealing with the village idiot.
‘I wasn’t “hiking” my way across the estate,’ Amy said icily, ‘I was…’
‘I’m all ears.’ He carried on walking, thankfully at a less ridiculous pace, and she reluctantly fell into step with him.
‘Taking a bit of time out to get a breath of fresh air.’
‘You seem to do quite a bit of that, don’t you? Breathing in the fresh air and covering great distances in the process?’
‘Yes, I like walking!’
They had reached his house. Actually just a few more minutes of running would have seen her safely to his front door instead of up a tree, not that that option was particularly appealing either, but at least her expensive skirt would still have been intact. Now it was fit only to join the beaded silver shoes in that great wardrobe in the sky.
‘You’ll have to get out of those things. You’re filthy.’
‘I want to go back to the house. I have to go back there. My clothes are all there.’
‘I’m not taking you. You’ve put me out already.’
‘I know it’s quite a walk, but you can drive me there, can’t you? I mean, you must have a car tucked away somewhere.’ Amy suddenly felt close to breaking-point. She wrapped her arms tightly around her body and kept herself very still so that she didn’t burst into tears.
‘I’ll run you a bath.’
‘Please take me back to the house. Please.’
‘You’re in no fit state,’ Rafael told her without preamble. ‘Never mind the state of your clothes, you look as though you’re about to collapse. You need to get yourself together. Now sit down. I’ll run you a bath and, while it’s running, I’ll make you something hot to drink.’
The woman was a nuisance but Rafael felt a twinge of concern if only because the same tiring feistiness that got on his nerves was so obviously missing in action.
Before she could launch into another round of pleading to be taken back to the house, he was heading up the stairs so that he could run her a bath. Then he fetched a clean towel from the cupboard and one of his shirts, which she would have to wear whether she liked it or not. He would stick her clothes in the wash and they would be clean in time for her in the morning. After that, he would send her on her way so that she could, presumably, continue to ruin her life by falling in love with inappropriate men.
He returned to find her slumped on the ground in the sitting room.
‘I didn’t want to get your nice clean furniture dirty,’ she said, meeting his questioning eyes. ‘I’m disgusting.’ She stood up. ‘I give you yet another pair of ruined shoes. Two in one day. A record even for me,’ she told him gloomily, dangling her sorry sandals in one hand.
‘What happened to pair one?’ Rafael found himself asking.
‘Waterlogged in a kayaking incident this morning.’
‘Right. What else? The bathroom is upstairs. Leave your clothes outside the door and I’ll stick them in the wash. They’ll be ready by morning.’
‘I can’t spend the night here.’ She hovered, tapping one bare foot behind her.
‘Have a bath. We’ll discuss it when you come out. I’ve left one of my shirts for you to put on.’
Well, there was nothing to discuss. Amy emerged twenty minutes later, feeling refreshed and wearing only her underwear and his white shirt, which reached a respectable mid-thigh level. It might seem odd to whoever happened to still be up that she was returning to the house in a man’s shirt and not much else, but with any luck the place would be dead. Probably aside from James, who would still be gambolling somewhere in the woods with his lady friend. She felt another attack of self-pity threaten and willed it away.
Rafael, looking disgustingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, was waiting for her in the sitting room with a cup of hot chocolate on the table, which he pointed at as soon as he saw her.
His shirt drowned her and she was slight enough to begin with. She had scrubbed off all the warpaint and her skin was satin-smooth with a faint golden tan that must have accumulated over the summer. Her eyebrows, in contrast to the vanilla-coloured, unruly hair, were dark. He wondered whether it was this unlikely contrast that lent her face such animation, even when she wasn’t speaking. Such as now.
‘Feel better?’
‘Not much. Thanks for asking.’ Amy curled her legs under her and reached forward for the mug, enjoying the creaminess of the drink. She hadn’t had hot chocolate for ages. It reminded her of her childhood.
Rafael frowned, a little disconcerted by the bluntness of the reply to a perfectly polite question.
‘Your clothes are in the wash,’ he informed her, skirting around his reluctant curiosity. ‘So, I suppose I could drive you back but the car is parked a walk away.’
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why is your car parked a walk away? Don’t your employers think that you might want to go out now and again? You might be a very diligent gardener, but don’t they think that you might want a bit of time out now occasionally?’
‘Easier to park it behind the copse on the lane out of the grounds. The alternative would be to drive over the lawns or, of course, through the trees. The grounds were designed with aesthetics in mind and, believe it or not, a strip of tarmac winding across the manicured gardens wasn’t considered particularly fetching.’
‘Do you ever stop being sarcastic?’ She sniffed, aware that her composure was very fragile and the gardener was not the sort to make a sympathetic listener.
Amy looked at him. He was leaning forwards, elbows on knees, his hands dangling lightly between his legs. For someone who had been unexpectedly dragged out of a deep sleep, he seemed very well dressed, in a pair of khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt, with some worn tan loafers.
‘You weren’t sleeping, were you?’ she asked, to distract herself from thinking about her reasons for being in his house. ‘I didn’t drag you out of bed with my yelling, did I? You don’t look like someone who’s been interrupted in the middle of a deep sleep.’
‘I was…working, as a matter of fact…’
‘You were working?’ She grinned, forgetting the trauma of her evening for a few minutes. She noticed the sprinkling of dark hair visible just where his collar was open and hurriedly averted her eyes. She wasn’t sure why exactly she was aware of the man, but she was. She put it down to his barefaced arrogance, which would get under anyone’s skin. ‘Working on what?’ she asked, still grinning. ‘No, don’t tell me…that plot of yours to get rid of the bugs in the rose bushes! Why did you tell me that I’d woken you up? Did you want to make me feel even more guilty than I already felt?’
‘There are two bedrooms but one’s not made up. I’ll take that one and you can have my bed.’
‘No way. I’m not sleeping in your bed!’
‘Why not?’ Rafael asked wearily. ‘Come on. Drink that up and go upstairs.’
Amy flushed. He had used that tone of voice with her before. In fact, he seemed to have made a habit of using it since she had made his unfortunate acquaintance. It was the tone of voice of an adult addressing a child. Was that, she wondered, what he thought of her? A kid who got into scrapes?
More to the point, was that, she wondered miserably, what James had thought of her? No more than a kid he could have a joke with?
She quietly placed the mug on the table and stood up, not looking at him, waiting for him to lead her up the stairs, acutely aware that she talked too much, asked too many questions, laughed too loudly. This man might be arrogant and standoffish, but she was in his territory and if he wanted her to shut up, then she would shut up.
Had James wanted her to shut up now and again as well? She had thought he was interested in her but had he been or had he really only been responding to her chattiness, rolling his eyes to the ceiling the minute her back had been turned?
‘Okay. Spit it out.’
Amy, staring down as she followed him to the bedroom, almost collided into his huge, immovable frame where he had stopped outside the bedroom door.
‘Spit what out?’
‘Whatever’s eating you up. We might as well forget about getting any sleep tonight.’
Rafael leaned against the doorframe and stared down at her. And this, he thought, was precisely why he didn’t go for the emotional types. They poured their hearts out, they sobbed, they lacked restraint.
Amy’s blue eyes tangled with his deep, deep, almost black ones and she felt momentarily giddy.
‘I need to sit down,’ she said shakily.
Rafael stood aside and made a sweeping gesture in the direction of his bed, which, to Amy, looked unbelievably tempting. To hell with prudish, maidenly qualms. She was suddenly exhausted.
His bed smelt of him, a clean, masculine smell that made her want to close her eyes and inhale deeply because it was a weirdly comforting smell. And why pretend? She had grown up bunking down and sharing beds. Her mother had sworn that it did the immune system a world of good. She slipped under the luxurious, silky soft quilt and yawned.
‘I just can’t believe it,’ Amy said, just as Rafael was about to leave the room and head back downstairs so that he could resume the conference call to Australia that had been so rudely interrupted. He turned around and narrowed his eyes on the small figure now propped up against the pillows. She looked ridiculously fragile, he thought, which seemed incongruous considering the size of her mouth.
‘Can’t believe what?’ Rafael was not a man who was accustomed to the emotional complexities of women. He had always listened to James’s tales of woe with a certain amount of amusement and privately congratulated himself on his wisdom in going for women who didn’t play games or have moods or weren’t, in short, a mess. He didn’t sleep around and his breakups had never been messy. At thirty-four, which didn’t exactly qualify him as The Old Man of the Sea, he nevertheless considered himself pretty much together emotionally. A man who knew what he wanted in life, and that included women.
‘Can’t believe how I could ever have been so stupid. I mean…’ Amy’s voice wobbled as she considered the depth of her stupidity ‘…just because he looked at me once or twice and chatted now and again…how could I have got it into my head? I mean…has that ever happened to you? Has it? You just completely misread someone else’s signals and then fabricate a whole fairy tale in your head that’s just way, way off target?’ ‘No.’
‘What…never?’ Amy asked, temporarily disconcerted.
‘Never.’
‘Oh. So I guess you wouldn’t really know what it’s like to be…to be…’ ‘No. I wouldn’t.’ He was fairly sure he was about to find out, unless, of course, he put a stop to this nonsense, shut the bedroom door firmly and only resurfaced when she was about to leave in the morning. ‘But I can tell you that he’s not worth it.’
Amy tried to focus on James, his charming, boyish face, his blond hair that always managed to look ever so slightly tousled, though out of the corner of her eye she couldn’t help but notice Rafael’s brooding presence by the door. He was probably sick to death of her, she couldn’t help thinking, but for some reason she didn’t want to be on her own. She felt too vulnerable.
‘You can’t say that. You don’t know him.’
‘I know that no one is worth shedding tears over.’
‘Oh!’ Reluctantly she abandoned the temptation to wallow and frowned at Rafael curiously. ‘I guess you’ve never been in love…’
Rafael was fast regretting his impulse to listen to the woman because he had momentarily felt sorry for her.
‘I’m not entirely sure I believe in the concept,’ he told her abruptly. ‘Romantics hang onto the idea for dear life because they think it makes sense of life, but for me…no. I think I’ll avoid it like the plague if the net result is what I’m looking at right now.’
Amy got up the energy to glare but it didn’t last long. ‘At least we Romantics have fun!’
‘If fun is lying on a stranger’s bed at one-thirty in the morning blubbing…’ Rafael said dryly and Amy was forced to concede defeat.
‘Okay. You win. I’m a fool. Maybe next time lucky.’ She gave him a watery grin and it was such a brave pretence of a smile that Rafael found himself reluctantly smiling back. ‘Maybe,’ she mused, ‘next time I won’t fall for the boss…’
CHAPTER THREE
OKAY. Rafael was man enough to admit it to himself the following morning. He was curious. He could only assume that that was what enforced solitude did to a person, because his contact with the outside world, for the past three days, had been limited to telephone conversations or, more often than not, communication via e-mail.
At the time, he had not envisaged this as a problem. Work could be done as easily via computers and fax machines as it could be done face to face and he had made damned sure that he had total access to the outside world thanks to the telephone people who had installed everything he could possibly need for speedy connection to the Internet. At the click of a button he had been able to give his secretary all the instructions she needed to ensure that the numerous tentacles of his highly profitable companies were operating perfectly.
He had even, in the deepest corners of his mind, used the uninvited situation to his own advantage.
He paused for a few seconds, frowning into the distance as he thought about Elizabeth, the eminently suitable Elizabeth, and their very civilised parting. One that he had instigated although, when he thought about it logically, he couldn’t quite understand what had prompted his decision because she was everything he wanted, at least on paper.
He had met her when she had been heading the team of lawyers they had used eight months previously to sort out some complex legal problems on a takeover he had been finalising. He had been impressed, first, by her immense competence and her cool, self-assured manner. Later, by the many things they had in common, ranging from opera to theatre, from jazz music to fine wines.
And to complete the perfect picture, she was just the sort of leggy brunette he favoured, with short, tailored hair and an elegant appreciation of everything cultured.
It had been a little unnerving that his mother had taken an instant dislike to the woman, but Rafael had not allowed that to trouble the very real ideas he had been nurturing about taking the inevitable plunge into matrimony. As arrangements went, it would have been perfect simply because they were so alike in so many ways.
He wasn’t quite sure when doubts had set in, but eventually the very perfect nature of their relationship had started to feel just a little dull. Three weeks ago he had been visited by an unsettling vision of Elizabeth and himself twenty years down the road, an elegant but essentially boring middle-aged couple still frequenting the opera, having raised their very perfect but essentially boring children to do exactly the same.
He had withdrawn from the relationship and finally broken it off knowing that ten days in the Hamptons, away from any company dos that they might mutually attend, would be beneficial for both of them.
Which brought him back to his curiosity about the creature still lying upstairs in his bed, having fallen asleep on him just when she had revealed the object of her unrequited passion.
He filled a mug with steaming fresh coffee and headed up the stairs, pausing in the doorway to his bedroom so that he could look, dispassionately, at the woman lying on his bed.
Everything about her was in a state of disarray. Her blonde hair was all over the place, the covers had obviously been tossed aside then yanked back on several times during the course of the past few hours and were now half off the bed. One very slim foot hung over one side, affording him the sight of toenails painted a very unconservative shade of purple. Her hands were flung out over her head. A trusting person, he thought absent-mindedly, hence the way she was sleeping on her back. No wonder James had been able to hook her without trying.
‘Time to get up, Sleeping Beauty.’ He strolled over to the curtains and yanked them open so that Amy sat up with an indignant cry, shielding her eyes from the sudden, horrible, intrusive glare.
‘I’ve brought you up some coffee.’ No, he was not going to get into any heart-to-heart conversations about what had happened the night before. He didn’t want to invite any confidences. Never mind the curiosity. ‘And your clothes are all laundered.’
‘There was no need for you to pull open the curtains like that!’ Amy groaned, subsiding back onto the bed and stuffing a pillow over her face.
Rafael calmly walked towards her and jerked the pillow away, holding it out of reach while she tried to scrabble uselessly for it, finally giving up and propping herself up on the palms of her hands, all the better to deliver her best glare.
‘What time is it?’ she asked, shoving herself further up the bed and helping herself to the extremely welcome mug of coffee that he had placed on the table next to her. She groaned louder when he told her and reached for her mobile phone. Naturally it wasn’t there as she had left the party the night before and headed to shores unknown without thinking that she might finish up the evening up a tree. She would have to say that the Girl Guide organisation did not prepare you for every eventuality despite what they might like to promise!
‘Oh, God.’ She looked at him despairingly. ‘What’s Claire going to be thinking?’
‘Who’s Claire?’
‘Not to mention everyone else! I was supposed to be on the beach, picnic, barbecue thing with them today…I even brought a special outfit…’ She gritted her teeth in frustration and looked at Rafael accusingly. It was all right for him to stand there, all fresh as a daisy, with only lawnmowers and gardens on his mind, while she was in a state of emotional agony!
‘No need to worry. I phoned the house.’
‘You did what?’
‘Phoned the house.’ Rafael raised his eyebrows in a question. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘What’s the problem?’ Amy digested the image of her best friend chortling at her high jinks with all their friends. ‘What did you say?’ she asked, with less panic in her voice, hoping that he had not seen fit to share each and every detail of the sorry situation that had landed her sleeping in his bed.
‘I said you went out to get some air, lost your way and by the time you showed up at my front door it was too late to send you back and you were exhausted. So I very kindly allowed you to stay the night and would be sending you back to base first thing. Does that meet with your approval?’
‘I can see it doesn’t meet with yours, judging from that tone of voice.’
‘Are you forgetting that you should be grateful to me for getting you out of that tree…?’ He watched as her face blanched.
‘Who did you speak to?’
‘Oh, your boss, of course.’
Horrible man, he turned his back on her and was now staring through the window at what promised to be a dream of a day as far as the weather went.
‘You spoke to James…’
‘Who else?’
‘What did you tell him?’ Amy asked in a small voice.
‘Oh, just that you spent the night roaming the woods with lovelorn heart only to find your beloved in a clinch with another woman, at which point you decided to climb a tree, from whence I was forced to rescue you…’
‘You didn’t!’
‘Of course I didn’t!’ Rafael turned around just in time to catch the pillow that was winging its way in the direction of his head. He patted it back into shape and tossed it on the chair by the window, where it joined all the other assorted bits of paraphernalia that were slowly building up to a veritable mountain of odds and ends.
‘Who do you think she was?’ Amy mused aloud, resting her face thoughtfully in the palm of her hand and gently tapping her front tooth with one absent-minded finger. ‘I mean, she wasn’t one of us…’
‘Your clothes are downstairs. As is breakfast if you want anything to eat. Then you can be on your way.’ Rafael was disconcerted to find his eyes straying to the pointed tips of her breasts nudging the thin fabric of his cotton shirt. He frowned, irritated with himself, and looked at her face. ‘So come on. Up.’
‘Yes, all right. I won’t be in your hair for any longer than is necessary!’
‘I’ll leave your clothes outside the bedroom door. You can have a shower if you want.’ It was already ten in the morning. The woman had wreaked havoc with his working day. He had no intention of prolonging the unwelcome situation. Mind made up, Rafael left her to her own devices, making sure that the clothes were outside the door as promised, just in case she decided to lounge around in his house all day in an attempt to recover from her broken heart, wearing only his shirt. What ever happened to female modesty? He was no prude but he did expect a certain amount of decorum from women. His mind drifted away from the report flickering on the screen in front of him. He imagined her stripping off that shirt in one easy, fluid movement, letting it drop to the floor while she casually walked over it en route to the bathroom.
He frowned and pushed the intrusive thoughts out of his mind, focusing one hundred per cent on his work and only looking up when she padded into the room, fully dressed although barefoot.
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