Lucas had failed to take the bait with the opening. Was he still of the opinion that his mother should have a honeymoon period before the cracks began showing?
When Milly thought of that bedroom, waiting for them to share it, she was of the opinion that the cracks should surface sooner rather than later.
She thought so even more when, over coffee in the sitting room, yet another room new to her, he draped his arm over her shoulders, sitting next to her with the indolent casualness of a man with his woman. His low, sexy voice was warm and teasing. He absently played with her hair. When she spoke, she could feel his breath warm on her cheek as he looked at her.
Antonia was taking in everything, eyes shrewd, and if he didn’t see that then Milly certainly did and it was the very first thing she said to him when Antonia excused herself for the night, leaving the two of them alone in the sitting room.
‘You could have helped me out when I began listing all the reasons why we didn’t make sense as a couple.’ She sprang to her feet and plonked herself down on a chair far away from him although, even though there was now distance between them, she could still feel the weight of his arm around her and the warmth of his thigh pressed against hers.
‘Did you see your mother? She thought it was cute that I was pointing out all our differences!’
Lucas shrugged and Milly gritted her pearly-white teeth in pure frustration.
He hadn’t seen his mother this happy in a while. How long had she been secretly harbouring hopes that he would meet the woman of his dreams and bring her home? She had dropped hints in the past but she had really only begun pressing him after her illness. But had she been fretting long before then?
‘The time isn’t right for a two-pronged attack.’
‘There’s no question of an attack.’ Why did he have to be so dramatic? she wondered. Why did he have to make her out as the bad guy in this when she was only here because of him and only gently laying the foundations for their break-up because that was what she had been primed to do?
‘And,’ she continued, ‘I’d rather you didn’t sit so close to me...’
‘Sit so close to you?’
‘I just think that your mother might find such public displays of affection a little embarrassing, that’s all.’
‘We’re sharing a bedroom. Somehow I don’t think she’s going to swoon because I stroke your thigh now and again. Did she look embarrassed?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘The point is, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m not going to retreat to the furthest corner of the room. That would be unnatural. Furthermore, I don’t see why it’s such a big deal.’
‘The big deal,’ Milly said with a ferocious whisper, because how could he be so cool when she was all over the place? ‘Is that I’m still in the process of getting over something pretty big and pretty horrible and maybe I need just a little more physical space than you’re giving me. Lord knows what your mother must secretly think of me.’ A sudden thought occurred to her. ‘What if she thinks I’m a gold-digger? After all, one minute I’m engaged to one guy and the next minute I’m going out with a billionaire.’ She wrung her hands in despair at the misconception.
‘What if she thinks I targeted you...? It makes horrible sense in a way, doesn’t it? What if she imagines that I’m just one of a long line of women who want you for what you can do for them...?’
Lucas raised his eyebrows and held up one imperious hand to stop her before she could begin exploring this new theme in exhaustive depth.
‘She doesn’t think that,’ he told her flatly. ‘Nor does she think that you’re somehow emotionally unstable and fickle because you’re going out with me hard on the heels of a broken engagement.’
‘You can’t say that.’
‘Oh, but I can and I have.’
‘What do you mean you have?’
‘I told my mother that this was not a case of you jumping from one man to another without pausing for breath. I’ve explained that I’m not a rebound love affair—which, as you can imagine, would not have sat well with her.’
‘When did all this explaining take place?’ Milly asked in frank bemusement.
‘When you were soaking in the bath for two hours,’ Lucas said drily. She thinks you’re impossibly brave. As I do...
‘And she believed you?’ Milly aimed for an incredulous laugh. ‘I know you could sell ice to Eskimos, Lucas, but women are very intuitive when it comes to stuff like that; when it comes to matters of the heart...’
‘Which is why she knows it’s the truth,’ Lucas told her with silky assurance. ‘She’s met you, talked to you and she knows—like we both do, Milly—that whatever you had with your ex-fiancé wasn’t love. You may be the jilted girlfriend, and that’s not a great place to be, but you’re not the heartbroken jilted girlfriend. So your little speech about feeling uncomfortable sitting too close to me because you’re nursing a broken heart is, frankly, a load of rubbish. Maybe you’re scared of being too close to me because you think I’m going to make a move on you...’
And hadn’t the thought crossed his head more than once? Good job he had iron self-discipline and was smart enough to spot danger before it spotted him.
‘Not going to happen. Or maybe,’ he mused thoughtfully, ‘you’re scared because you think you might make a move on me...’
Milly could feel herself burning up as he shoved his version of reality down her throat. There was nothing he said that had not occurred to her before, even if only in passing.
And that included the shameful fact that she found the man physically attractive, that she had flirted with silly fantasies...
‘In your dreams,’ she told him tartly. But she heard the faint wobble in her voice. She wasn’t accustomed to playing these sorts of games. She was straightforward; she had never found herself in this kind of situation. She was walking in unchartered territory and it was only her survivor’s instinct that told her that, whatever she did, she should not show him that he was right. That maybe, just maybe, that bed held unspoken terrors for her because she could picture, far too easily, what it might be like to have him in it next to her...
MILLY GAZED AT her reflection in the mirror but she wasn’t really focusing on the face staring back at her. She was thinking of the past week and a half.
Behind her, the king-size bed that had filled her with horror was just...a king-sized bed. Her fears had been unjustified. At least, unjustified except in the deepest, darkest corners of her mind where fantasies of Lucas still swirled around with dangerous strength, powerful riptides lying in wait for the appropriate moment to suck her under, or so it felt.
They barely shared this private space. Antonia always retired before ten, at which point Milly would head upstairs, leaving Lucas downstairs, where he would work until the early hours of the morning. She neither heard nor saw him when he finally made it to the bedroom because she was always sound asleep. The only evidence he left that he occupied the room at all was the barely discernible imprint on the sofa where he had slept, because he was always up and moving by eight in the morning.
The man hardly needed any sleep at all. She, on the other hand, had always been able to sleep for England.
The linen he used for the sofa was always shoved neatly in the wardrobe.
Twice she had woken needing the bathroom and her heart had been pounding as she