“Facts?”
“Yes, facts,” she said in that clipped tone of voice. “They speak for themselves.”
“They do?”
She nodded earnestly. “It seems to me I’ve just dragged you along with my wanton behavior, kissing you, tearing off my clothes. You were correct. It is not professional. And it won’t be happening again.”
He knew that it not happening again was a good thing, so why did he feel such a sense of loss?
“Becky, I handled that badly.”
“There’s a good way to handle ‘keep your lips off me’?”
He had made her feel rejected. He had done to her what every other man in her life had done to her: given her the message that somehow she didn’t measure up, she wasn’t good enough.
He rushed to try to repair the damage.
“It’s not that I don’t want your lips on me,” he said. “I do. I mean I don’t. I mean we can’t. I mean I won’t.”
She cocked her head, and looked askance at him.
“Do I sound like an idiot?” he said.
“Yes,” she said, unforgivingly.
“What I’m trying to say, Becky, is I’m not used to women like you.”
“What kind of women are you used to?”
“Guess,” he said in a low voice.
She did not appear to want to guess.
He raked his hand through his hair, trying desperately to think of a way to make her get it that would somehow erase those tearstains from her cheeks.
“I’m scared I’ll hurt you,” he said, his voice gravelly in his own ears. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to move this fast. Let’s back up a step or two. Let’s just be friends. First.”
He had no idea where that first had come from. It implied there would be something following the friendship. But really, that was impossible. And he just had to get through what remained of two weeks without hurting her any more than he already had. He could play at being the better man for eleven damn days. He was almost sure of it.
“Do you ever answer a question?” she asked. “What kind of women are you used to?”
“Ones who are as shallow as me,” he said.
“You aren’t shallow!”
“You don’t know that about me.”
“I do,” she said firmly.
He sucked in his breath and tried again. Why was she insisting on seeing him as a better man when he did not deserve that? “Ones who don’t expect happily-ever-after.”
“Oh.”
“You see, Becky, my parents died when I was seventeen.” Shut up, he ordered himself. Stop it. “It broke something in me. The sense of loss was just as Tandu said this afternoon. It was too great to bear. When I’ve had relationships, and it’s true, I have, they have been deliberately superficial.”
Becky went very still. Her eyes looked wide and beautiful in the starlight that filtered through the thick leaves of the jungle. She took a step toward him. And she reached up and laid the palm of her hand on his cheek.
Her touch was extraordinary. He had to shut his eyes against his reaction to the tenderness in it. In some ways it was more intimate than the kisses they had shared.
“Because you cannot handle one more loss,” she guessed softly.
Drew opened his eyes and stared at Becky. It felt as if she could see his soul and was not the least frightened by what she saw there.
This was going sideways! He was not going to answer that. He could not. If he answered that, he would want to lay his head on her shoulder and feel her hand in his hair. He would want to suck up her tenderness like a dry sponge sucking up moisture. If he answered that he would become weak, instead of what he needed to be most.
He needed to be strong. Since he’d been seventeen years old, he had needed to be strong. And it wasn’t until just this minute he was seeing that as a burden he wanted to lay down.
“I agree,” she said softly, dropping her hand away from his cheek. “We just need to be friends.”
His relief was abject. She got it. He was too damaged to be any good for a girl like her.
Only then she went and spoiled his relief by standing on her tiptoes and kissing him on the cheek where her hand had lay with such tender healing. She whispered something in his ear.
And he was pretty sure it was the word first.
And then she turned and scampered across the moonlit lawn to the castle door and disappeared inside it.
And he had to struggle not to touch his cheek, where the tenderness of her kiss lingered like a promise.
You heal now.
But he couldn’t. He knew that. He could do his best to honor the man his mother had raised him to be, to not cause Becky any more harm, but he knew that his own salvation was beyond what he could hope for.
Because really in the end, for a man like him, wasn’t hope the most dangerous thing of all?
BECKY LISTENED TO the sound of hammers, the steady ratta-tat-tat riding the breeze through the open window of her office. When had that sound become like music to her?
She told herself, sternly, she could not give in to the temptation, but it was useless. It was as if a cord circled her waist and tugged her toward the window.
This morning, Drew’s crew had arrived, but not his brother. They had arrived ready to work, and in hours the wedding pavilion was taking shape on the emerald green expanse of the front lawn. They’d dug holes and poured the cement they had mixed by hand out of bags. Then they had set the posts—which had arrived by helicopter—into those holes.
She had heard helicopters delivering supplies all morning. It sounded like a MASH unit around here.
Now she peeped out the window. In all that activity, her eyes sought him. Her heart went to her throat. Drew, facing the ocean, was straddling a beam. He had to be fifteen feet off the ground, his legs hanging into nothingness. He had a baseball cap on backward and his shirt off.
His skin was sun-kissed and perfect, his back broad and powerful. He was a picture of male strength and confidence.
She could barely breathe he was so amazing to look at. It was also wonderful to be able to look at him without his being aware of it! She could study the sleek lines of his naked back at her leisure.
“You have work to do,” she told herself. Drew, as if he sensed someone watching, turned and glanced over his shoulder, directly at her window. She drew back into the shadows, embarrassed, and pleased, too. Was he looking to glimpse her? Did it fill him with this same sense of delight? Anticipation? Longing?
Reluctantly, she turned her back to the scene, but only long enough to try to drag her desk over to the window. She could multitask. The desk was very heavy. She grunted with exertion.
“Miss Becky?” Tandu was standing in the doorway with a tray. “Why you miss lunch?”
“Oh, I—” For some reason she had felt shy about lunch, knowing that Drew and his crew would be eating in the dining room. Despite their agreement last night to be friends, her heart raced out of control when she thought of his rescue of her, and eating dinner