‘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