In other words, behaving like a grown-up.
How naive she’d been. Sheltered from reality by the Balfour wealth, she hadn’t even known how much a pint of milk cost.
She had easily got auditions with three ballet companies, but it seemed that the months of grief and turmoil had taken their toll in ways she couldn’t have begun to anticipate. Each audition passed in an excruciating embarrassment of clumsy footwork, mechanical arm movements and missed timing. It was as if she had lead weights inside her, pulling her down. As if she was trying to dance with a heart full of cement.
She had failed to win a place with any company.
After that nothing seemed to matter much. She had lost everything she cared about, and it simply became a matter of survival, which meant finding somewhere to live and a means of income. The advertisement for the job at the Pink Flamingo had caught her eye because it contained the word dancing.
It was only as she’d stepped into the beer-and-nicotine-scented gloom when she’d gone to see about the job that she realised what kind of dancing it was. Horrified, she had told the oily man into whose seedy office she was shown that she had made a mistake, but after running his eyes shrewdly over her he had offered her a job behind the bar.
Realising she had no choice but to accept it had been one of the lowest points of her life.
But she wasn’t going to think about that now. She had survived the past two months by using the self-discipline she had acquired during her years at ballet school to block out the bad stuff and focus on small pleasures and triumphs: sharing a coffee with Kiki in Larchfield’s shabby kitchen, seeing the pride on the faces of the little girls in her ballet class when they learned a new position. And now this…relaxing in a warm, scented bath as the twilight deepened beyond the windows and the scent of gardenia filled her senses. This was bliss. Heaven. In fact the pleasure of the moment was so exquisite that it almost made the past two miserable months worth it, just to feel this good.
She breathed in again, lifting her feet out of the water and resting them on the edge of the bath, flexing her toes and feeling the taut muscles in her insteps soften. The only sound was the trickling of the water, and the soft sigh of her own breathing, and she suddenly realised how much she’d missed silence. At Balfour she had taken that—like so much else—completely for granted. She simply hadn’t realised what a luxury it was to lie in bed and not be kept awake by cars revving their engines in the street below, by people shouting and the noises of fights and drunken laughter.
She closed her eyes, steadying the rhythm of her breathing, emptying her mind and consciously relaxing her body. Her chin sank beneath the water as the tension ebbed from her neck. She should probably get out, she thought distantly, but it felt too good just to lie there. She inhaled, exhaled, slipping farther down in the water, losing herself in the swirling darkness behind her closed eyes as warmth and peace enveloped her, and she finally felt safe enough to let go…
She came to the second her nose touched the water. Instinctively sucking in a breath she was suddenly choking on water, gasping and spluttering as her lungs filled, flailing wildly as she struggled to raise herself upright.
Someone was holding her, lifting her high out of the water. Angels? She waited for the moment when she would look down and see herself lying there in the bath, but her body felt all too present as she felt the iron-hard chest she was being held against, and the tawny tiger’s eyes that were looking down into her face were a far cry from angelic.
She wasn’t dead, then.
It was much worse than that.
She was lying in Luis Cordoba’s arms, and she was stark naked.
She wasn’t dead.
Seeing her like that—so still, her hair floating around her face like seaweed, and not a breath or a ripple disturbing the mirror-flat surface of the water—he had felt a moment of panic, along with the painful stirring of memories long buried.
Dropping her slippery, glistening body unceremoniously onto the bed he turned to pick up the bathrobe she’d dropped on the floor beside the bath.
‘Here. Put this on,’ he drawled acidly. ‘There’s little point in bothering to save you from drowning if you then catch your death of cold.’
Still coughing, she sat up, bringing her long legs up to her chest and wrapping her arms tightly around them. Grabbing the bathrobe from him she clutched it against her. ‘Don’t look,’ she croaked, ‘Please…’
With elaborate courtesy Luis turned and walked over to the large windows, staring out into the blue dusk, his heart still beating sickeningly hard. ‘Considering you work in a lap-dancing club, isn’t the modesty a bit misplaced?’
‘I don’t dance there—I work behind the bar,’ she said through chattering teeth. And then she added almost in an undertone, ‘I don’t dance anywhere any more.’
‘Can I turn round now?’ Why did he feel relieved?
‘Yes.’
She was sitting huddled up against the bed’s plump, padded headboard. Her damp hair was pushed back from her face, emphasising the sharpness of her cheekbones and the shadows beneath her eyes. Eyes that were looking at him as if she were expecting him to tie her up and ravish her at knifepoint.
‘I’m sure I wouldn’t have drowned,’ she said miserably. ‘I would definitely have woken up when—’
Luis cut her off with a sharp, impatient sound. ‘Forgive me for not testing that theory. Next time I’ll wait until you’ve been under the water for a few minutes before I haul you out.’
And have one more life on his conscience.
‘There won’t be a next time.’ She drew the robe more tightly around her, pulled her knees more closely to her body, her eyes sapphire pools of anguish. ‘There shouldn’t have been a this time. What were you doing watching me in the bath?’
‘You didn’t answer when I knocked, so I came in,’ he said coldly. ‘I half expected to find you’d escaped through the French windows and bolted into the night, but I wasn’t prepared for a suicide bid.’
‘It was not—’ she retorted hotly, and was about to argue more when there was a knock on the door.
‘That’ll be dinner,’
‘Dinner? But—’
She sprang to her feet as two pretty room-service staff brought in cumbersome trolleys laden with silver-domed dishes and, with much blushing and fluttering of eyelashes, asked Luis where he’d like them. He ignored the obvious double entendre that would have sprung from his lips without a second thought in his old life. ‘Obrigado. Just leave them there,’ he said, with the briefest of smiles before turning back to Emily. ‘You seemed too tired to want to go down to the restaurant. I thought you’d prefer to eat up here. Is that OK?’
Emily tried not to let the shock that ricocheted through her show on her face. She waited until the door had closed behind the pretty waitresses before turning to him, unable to keep the outrage from her voice. ‘No, it’s not OK! It’s impossible. I bet they think that we’re…’ She could feel a tide of colour wash into her cheeks. ‘That we’ve…’
Utterly unmoved by her discomfort Luis was already uncovering dishes and pouring wine. ‘Just had sex?’ he suggested.
‘Exactly!’
‘Frankly, querida, I doubt it.’ Coming towards the bed with a plate of smoked-salmon sandwiches and two glasses of wine Luis smiled lazily, but his eyes were cold. ‘If we had you wouldn’t be so bad tempered. Now, come and eat.’
She watched in alarm as he swung his long legs onto the bed and leaned back against the pile of pillows. ‘B-but I’m not dressed,’ she stammered.
‘Believe