‘Enough, Jacques!’ Lucas forced a smile but he could feel curiosity emanating from her in waves. ‘Naturally your bill will be paid.’ He turned to Milly. ‘Did you have anything else? No? In that case, put it on my tab, Jacques.’
‘Tab? What tab?’
She trailed out of the café behind him. The cable car was still in operation but for how long? Another hour and she might have been stranded downhill, unable to make her way back up to the lodge. ‘I apologise if you felt you had to rush down to find me,’ she offered grudgingly as they began the trip back up the hill. ‘Like I said, conditions were a lot better when I started out.’
‘And when they worsened, you intended to stay put, drinking hot chocolate and waiting for things to blow over?’ Lucas turned to her, jaw clenched. ‘I don’t do rescue missions, so if you want to risk life and limb do me a favour and wait until I’ve vacated the lodge. Then you’re more than welcome to take your life in your hands.’ Not a very fair remark, but damn if he was going to retract it. When you went out to ski, you had to have your wits about you. One false move and you could end up endangering not just your own life but someone else’s life, as well.
‘I’m not responsible for you while you’re out here,’ he continued coldly.
‘And I never asked you to be!’ Her eyes flashed but he was right. She should have known better. That said, she had apologised, and he hadn’t been big enough to accept it.
She turned away and stared off into the distance. What was it about her that was so poor when it came to reading men? Lucas had shown her a funny, charming side to him and she had been instantly captivated and disarmed. She’d have thought that experience, very recent experience, might have toughened her up a bit, made her just a little more jaundiced when it came to believing people and their motivations, but not so.
Apparently, he was fine when it came to her cooking for him and tidying up behind him like a skivvy. And if she wanted to chatter on inanely about herself, then he was happy enough to listen, because really, what choice did he have when he happened to be in the same room as her? But woe betide if she was stupid enough to think that any of those things amounted to him actually liking her.
She took people at face value. She always had. Growing up in a small town in remote Scotland where everyone knew everyone else had not prepared her for a world where it paid to be on guard. How many learning curves did one person need before they realised that having a trusting nature was a sure-fire guarantee of being let down? Especially when it came to the opposite sex?
Once back in the lodge, Milly stalked off to have a shower and get changed. The relaxed atmosphere between them had changed just like that after a silent trip back. She took her time having a very long bath and then changing into a pair of jeans and a comfortable cotton jumper. Her hair had gone wild in the snow and she did her best to tame it with the blow drier in the bathroom but in the end she resorted to tying it back in a loose braid down her back. Wisps and curly tendrils escaped around her face, but too bad.
For a few seconds, she looked at the reflection staring back at her in the mirror.
She couldn’t remember ever having been envious of any of her friends when she had been growing up. They had been interested in cultivating their feminine wiles and getting with boys, and she hadn’t. Not really. She hadn’t been interested in make-up or skimpy clothes and she had been amused at how much time and effort some of her friends had devoted to their looks and to attracting boys. It had all seemed a bit of a waste of time, because they had all been in and out of relationships, spending half their time hanging around waiting for a text to come or else putting everything on hold because they were ‘going steady’ with a boy and somehow that left no time for anything else.
She was pretty sure that those girls would have matured into women who would be savvy enough to spot someone like Robbie for the fraud that he was—and would certainly have spotted Lucas for the arrogant kind of guy who thought he could say what he wanted and do as he pleased with the opposite sex.
He didn’t do jealousy and he didn’t do rescue missions and there were probably a million other things he didn’t do. What it came down to was that he was someone who just did whatever he wanted to do and he didn’t really care if he trampled on someone’s feelings in the process.
It was not yet lunch time and the snow had already picked up a pace. Lucas was in the kitchen when she finally went downstairs, sitting at the table with a pot of coffee in front of him. Cut off from the outside world thanks to the snow storm, he had given up on trying to sift through paperwork he had brought with him.
She had sat in stony silence on their trip back, head averted, back rigid as a plank of wood as the cable car had carried them back up the slopes. There had been no pleading for him to listen to her and no trying to tempt him out of his foul mood. He had been spoiled by women who tiptoed around him. Despite her open, chatty nature, she was as stubborn as a mule.
‘Perhaps I should have been a little less...insistent,’ Lucas drawled, pushing aside the file he had given up on and watching the way she was deliberately avoiding eye contact with him. ‘But you don’t know this area and you don’t know how fast and how severe these snow storms can be.’ This was the closest he was going to get to an apology and it was a damn sight more than he would have offered anyone else.
‘Is that your idea of an apology?’ Milly asked, finally turning to look at him.
He must have showered during the time she had been upstairs, taking as long as she could in the bath without shrivelling to the size of a prune. His dark hair was slicked back and still damp, curling at the nape of his neck, and he was in loose grey jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt that managed to achieve the impossible—it was baggy and yet announced the hard muscularity of the body beneath it. He hadn’t shaved and his jaw was shadowed with stubble.
He looked insanely gorgeous, which made her feel even more of a fool for having been sucked into thinking that he was Mr Nice. Since when were insanely gorgeous guys ever nice?
‘Because if it is,’ she continued, folding her arms, ‘Then it’s pretty pathetic. I told you that I was sorry for not having paid sufficient attention to the weather, but I left very early this morning so that I could do a little skiing before I went into town and, yes, it was snowing, but nothing like it’s snowing now...’
Had she just told him that his apology was pathetic?
‘I’m not going to waste time discussing whether you should or shouldn’t have been on the slopes in bad weather.’
‘And...’ she carried on, because she wasn’t ready to pack in the conversation just yet. They were going to be spending at least another night under the same roof and she might as well clear the air or else they would be circling one another like opponents in a boxing ring, waiting to see who landed the first blow.
‘There’s more?’
‘You had no right to storm into that café and start laying down laws as though you’re my lord and master. You’re not.’
‘I never said I was.’
‘I’ve been taken for a mug by my ex and I haven’t come over here for a complete stranger to pick up where he left off!’ Okay, so some exaggeration here but, the more Milly thought about her idiocy in actually thinking that Lucas was a nice guy, the angrier she became. She thought of the high-handed, autocratic way he had delivered his command for her to follow him or else find herself stuck trying to get into a hotel—because she wouldn’t be able to make it back to the lodge, presumably because he would have had no qualms about leaving her to her own devices, having made sure grudgingly that she hadn’t died on the slopes...
Lucas was outraged at that suggestion. She had somehow managed to swat aside the small technicality of her rashly having ventured out without due care and attention because she had wanted to have a little ‘early-morning ski’ before ‘dashing