laughed.
The last time she’d seen this man he’d been totally in control and she very much hadn’t been. She still wasn’t, but he looked like a man thrown overboard without a lifeline.
She shoved herself up on her pillows … on his pillows, she reminded herself … and tried to look dignified.
Gladys had helped her shower and change into her nightgown. It was quite a respectable nightgown. It wasn’t respectable enough for greeting the man the whole hospital thought she’d slept with. Who’d held her paper bag.
‘Thank you for the bed,’ she said with as much dignity as she could muster. ‘I’ll get up now. I would have left sooner but Gladys was threatening strait-jackets.’
‘And you didn’t feel well enough?’
‘There was that. It’s a powerful little bug.’
‘It hit most people harder than you.’
‘Gee, that makes me feel better.’
‘Sorry.’ He wasn’t sure where to take it from here, she thought. Neither was she.
‘I will get up now,’ she said.
‘There’s no need.’
Really? The thought of wriggling further down on these gorgeous pillows was almost irresistible—but this wasn’t her bed. It was Luke Williams’s bed.
‘Gladys seems to think I’m your long-lost lover,’ she managed. ‘The sooner I’m out of here the better.’
‘The whole hospital thinks you’re my long-lost lover. It’s not such a bad idea.’
She thought about that. Or she tried to think about it. Her brain was ever so fuzzily … well, fuzzy.
What he’d said was a very fuzzy statement.
‘From whose point of view?’ she said at last.
He ventured further into the room, looking suddenly businesslike. Professional. Doctor approaching patient with an action plan. ‘From both of our points of view if you intend fulfilling your contract,’ he said briskly. ‘We were caught in a position that was less than dignified. If we were long-term lovers, the hospital grapevine would think it was funny and get over it. For a man and woman who met each other only hours before, it’s like a great big neon light’s appeared over your head saying “Condemn”.’
There was much in that to think about. Condemn. It was a heavy word. Condemnation was how she was thinking of herself, in the fragments of time the gastro had given her to contemplate the matter.
But her self-image wasn’t this man’s problem. She’d held him. She’d wanted him as much as he’d wanted her. It was up to her to handle the consequences. ‘I can handle a bit of condemnation,’ she said, wondering if she could.
She thought of all the insults thrown in her direction since her father had died. She was her mother’s daughter, therefore she was a Scarlet Woman by default. It had even ended her relationship with Charlie the Accountant, the man she’d dated for three years but who’d jibbed when expectations had turned to marriage.
‘Sorry, Lily, but I can’t handle your reputation.’
‘You mean my mother’s reputation? My mother’s behaviour makes me a whore, too?’ Her voice had risen … maybe more than she’d intended.
‘No but people look at you. I’m not sure I can handle that for the rest of our lives; people expecting you to turn out like your mother.’
She’d thrown something at him. Something large and unwieldy that had just happened to be full of water and half-dead Christmas lilies. It had been a satisfactory moment in a very unsatisfactory interview, one that had left her feeling sullied. Mostly because she’d thought she’d loved Charlie and he’d loved her, and how could she have loved someone who thought her mother’s reputation was more important than their relationship?
But her mother’s reputation was important. It made a difference. Like her reputation was important now, if she was to continue working at the Harbour.
She was only at the Harbour for four weeks. She could handle this.
‘I need a favour,’ Luke said and sat on her bed.
His bed. She inched back on the pillows.
She’d held this man, why?
She knew why she’d held him. It had been the culmination of an appalling time, an appalling emotion. She’d felt a matching need in him and their mutual need had exploded.
There was no longer mutual need. They were strangers. There wasn’t even attraction.
Um … yes, there was. He was rumpled after a long day at work. He’d hauled off his tie and his top shirt button was undone, revealing a hint of lean muscle underneath. His dark eyes were shadowed with weariness, and his five o’clock shadow was toe-curlingly sexy.
If he leaned forward and touched her …
She’d be out of here so fast he wouldn’t see her go. What she was feeling scared her witless.
She was not going to become her mother.
What had he said? I need a favour.
‘I don’t owe you,’ she said, cautiously. ‘Or not very much. I mean … it was lovely that you helped me this morning, and you gave me a gorgeous bed to sleep in for the day, but—’
‘I’d like you to sleep in it for a month.’
That was enough to take her breath away. A girl could be properly flummoxed with a statement like that.
‘No,’ she said.
‘No?’
‘It’s a very nice bed,’ she managed. ‘But despite all evidence to the contrary, I keep myself nice.’
‘I’m not propositioning you. I have a sofa bed in the living room. This apartment has two bathrooms. This bed can be yours for a month.’
‘I have a bed of my own.’
‘You’re not going back to that doss house.’
‘It might be a doss house,’ she said with as much dignity as she could muster, ‘but it’s a prepaid doss house. It’s okay. My bedroom’s almost clean.’
‘There are bedbugs.’
‘Nonsense. I would have been bitten by now.’
For answer he tugged her arm forward, slid her sleeve to her elbow and exposed a cluster of red welts. They both looked down at them. Irrefutable evidence. ‘I saw these this morning,’ he said. ‘I rest my case.’
She stared down at the welts, perplexed. Bedbugs. She had been itchy, she thought. She’d just
