expression was distracted as he brushed a stray curl from her cheek with his knuckles. ‘Your skin is so soft!’ Silky soft … soft all over.
He sucked in air through his flared nostrils as his body reacted strongly to the jolt of lust the stray thought produced.
‘I simply meant that you look …’ he angled his dark head and allowed his narrowed gaze to travel over the sweet curves of her face ‘… tired,’ he decided, tracing the dark crescents beneath her eyes with the side of his thumb.
Dervla, her thoughts totally occupied with coping with the ache of longing—he was so damned close—had no energy in reserve for prevarication. ‘I’ve not been sleeping.’
Sleeping had become inseparably connected in her mind with the heat of his body, the warm, clean, masculine scent of his silky-textured skin. A sofa and a sleeping bag were just no substitute.
‘Neither have I.’
So Alberto had not been wrong about the pacing. ‘You haven’t?’ That was something. ‘Why?’
‘I was angry with you.’
‘Angry? I thought you might have missed me …?’
Dervla heard the pleading note in her voice and experienced a stab of self revulsion—where were her pride and self-respect? She was virtually begging.
‘Oh, God, this is my fault!’ She shook her head, her expression self-recriminatory as she admitted, ‘If I’d agreed to be your mistress things wouldn’t have got so complicated! I mean, all you ever actually wanted was sex and that’s not complicated.’
‘It wasn’t before I met you,’ he intoned grimly. Nothing in his life had been simple since he’d met Dervla.
‘Maybe you wish we hadn’t got married at all?’ A silence followed her words. It stretched and she wanted a hole to open up at her feet and swallow her.
‘When you left that way, I was angry, I was concerned, I was …’ He stopped, his smouldering dark eyes meshing with Dervla’s wide wary gaze.
He vented a frustrated-sounding expletive in his native tongue and pushed both hands into his dark hair before burying his face in his hands.
For what felt like a long time to Dervla he stayed that way. Then his hands fell away and he dragged a hand across his unshaven jaw as his head came up.
The action was so intensely weary that her tender heart took a direct hit. She had been so dazed to find him standing there she had missed the fact that he looked totally exhausted.
More than that, she realised, her troubled stare taking in the telling tension in the skin pulled taut across his chiselled cheekbones and the strain etched into the lines radiating from his deepset eyes, he looked like a man who had been to hell and made the return journey.
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