Guy’s mouth curved in an ironic smile. He liked Marc Corbett and respected him, but darling wasn’t a word he’d have used to describe the man.
Once again she lifted limpid eyes to his. Her voice rang true, she was looking him straight in the face, but instincts honed in the cutthroat world he’d made his own told him she was lying. Or at the very least, only revealing part of the truth.
Coldly, clinically, he decided that if her story was a front for an affair, it had the advantage of originality. Even if it was true, she could still be Marc Corbett’s lover.
As for her obvious affection for Paige Corbett, it wouldn’t be the first—or the last—time a woman had an ongoing relationship with the husband of a friend.
Lauren wondered uneasily what was going on behind those fabulous features, gilded by sunlight. Did he believe her? And had it been enough to satisfy him?
She found herself wishing she could trust him with the whole truth. If it had just been herself she might have, but in the end it wasn’t her secret.
She said brightly, ‘It’s an old story, and not one I’d like to get around. Some people say that if you save someone’s life you’re responsible for them forever afterwards; I’d hate people to believe Marc gave me a job because of some quirk of genetic good fortune.’
‘I can understand that,’ Guy said with a smile that blended irony with a hint of self-derision.
Sunlight conjured a shimmer of mahogany fire from his black hair. He dragged out a wallet from his pocket, scribbled something on a page of a small diary, and tore it out to hand to her. ‘In case you need me,’ he said.
Their fingers touched, and Lauren’s heart jumped.
‘And just to remind you how it was with us—’ he said through his teeth, and covered the three paces that separated them, drawing her into his arms.
Every nerve speared by forbidden delight, Lauren froze. He looked down into her face, his own angrily intent. ‘No, you haven’t forgotten,’ he said in a raw voice.
And then he kissed her eyelids closed, his breath warm on her skin.
Pierced by erotic poignancy, Lauren’s defences crumbled into sand. This was what she’d been waiting for—this sense of rightness, of completeness…
His lips crushed hers in a kiss that obliterated all sense of time and space. Helplessly she melted into his arms and gave him everything he asked for, responding with feverish passion to his sensuous onslaught.
But although she wanted nothing more than to let this go on to its inevitable conclusion, she finally fought free of the consuming hunger to shake her head and drag her mouth from his, gasping hoarsely, ‘No!’
A fierce, possessive gleam fired his eyes. ‘But you were saying yes a moment ago.’
Even then she hovered on the brink of surrender until hard common sense forced its way through the mists of desire.
‘No,’ she repeated quietly, uncompromisingly, because she knew that she’d never be safe, that the only way to stop herself from falling headlong into infatuation was to end it now.
But oh, it was hard to say, with his strength and his heat seducing her, with the sexy, evocative aroma of his skin scrambling her brain, and his taste on her lips, in her mouth—when every cell in her body screamed for the release only he could give her.
His mouth hardened. ‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t want this.’ The lie hurt, and it hurt more that he knew it was a lie. ‘I find you very attractive,’ she hurried on, surprised at the clarity of each word, ‘but the idea of being married to you—if that’s what I am—is ridiculous. And I certainly don’t want an affair with you.’
She invested the final word with a flick of scorn, and saw it register on his face. He smiled, and as she shivered he freed her and stepped back.
‘Really?’ he said politely. ‘I can think of plenty of words to describe such a marriage, but ridiculous doesn’t come to mind. As for the affair— I thought we’d already had it.’
‘We spent a few days together,’ she corrected, gripped by intolerable anguish. Yet she had to send him out of her life. ‘I’m sorry, but a tropical fling is not expected to last beyond the tropics. I’ll always be grateful to you for saving my life, because I suspect that’s what you did.’
‘Stop right there,’ he advised with an inflection so deadly it chilled her into temporary paralysis. ‘If you’re telling me that you slept with me out of gratitude, I’ll just have to show you that you’re wrong. We made love because we wanted each other.’
‘Of course I did—we did!’ She struggled to clear her mind. ‘You know very well that I—that we—that it was mutual.’ She stopped and dragged in a jerky breath before finishing defiantly, ‘But it’s over.’
For a charged moment he surveyed her, his beautiful mouth hard against the chiselled angles of his face. Finally he drawled, ‘Then there’s nothing more to say,’ and turned away. ‘Goodbye, Lauren.’
Aching with a bleak sense of loss and pain, she watched him stride towards the thick row of trees that hid the helicopter pad. Fate and war had shackled them together until they could get free of this marriage.
Whatever she felt for Guy Bagaton couldn’t possibly be love; that involved much more than gratitude and great sex.
Only a loser would love a man who thought she was another man’s mistress, and she wasn’t a loser. She didn’t even know him.
Not really.
The sound of the helicopter’s rotor blades drove her to shelter beneath the overhanging branches of one of the great trees bordering the champagne curve of the beach. As she listened to the machine carry Guy away from her, she found herself thinking of all the ways she did know him…
Perhaps when people had forgotten about the war in Sant’Rosa, it might be safe to see him again. Without all this other baggage cluttering up their relationship, they could perhaps meet as ordinary people.
No. She’d sent him away.
And she’d do it again. When she’d asked her mother why, of all the people in the world, Marc’s bone marrow matched hers, Isabel’s admission of adultery had been shattering enough, but what had appalled her was her mother’s response when Lauren began to ask if her father knew.
After the first two tentative words her mother had interrupted fiercely, ‘He does now. Don’t ever speak to him about it. The stress could kill him.’
Lauren didn’t know how her parents had worked through this rough patch, but their love had held them together through the trauma.
When the steady thump-thump-thump of the rotors had died away, she went back inside and rang London.
‘How’s Dad?’
‘He’s fine,’ her mother said reassuringly. ‘How are you, darling?’
‘Fine too, but I’ve had an unsettling visit from the man who got me out of Sant’Rosa.’
Censoring heavily, she told her mother why Guy had come, ending with, ‘I think I’ll come home as soon as I can.’
‘No,’ Isabel said firmly. ‘You need that holiday, Lauren—your health isn’t anything to take lightly.’
‘I feel perfectly normal again,’ Lauren assured her. Well, apart from worrying about journalists, the marriage, and obsessing about