style="font-size:15px;"> Hope flickered in her chest. ‘Can I see it?’
‘I tore it into shreds,’ he said, his mouth tightening at the memory. ‘I got home from Moscow two days after you left. That is another thing I am not particularly proud of. I should have come straight to London as soon as I knew you were there. I was packing a bag when I got the call about the accident.’
‘What did I say in the note?’ Emelia asked.
He looked at her silently for several moments. ‘You said you were leaving me, that you no longer wanted to continue with our marriage. You wanted out.’
Emelia rubbed at her forehead, as if that would unlock the memories stored inside her head. OK, so she had been leaving him. That much was pretty certain. Was it because she had become tired of their shallow relationship, as Izabella had suggested? Emelia knew she must have been very unhappy to have come to that decision. Unhappy or desperate. ‘The rumours…’ she said. ‘You mentioned a few days ago there was some speculation about my relationship with Peter Marshall. Did you afford me the same level of trust you expected of me, in similar if not the same circumstances?’
He visibly tensed; all of his muscles seemed to contract as if sprayed with fast setting glue. ‘I am the first to admit that I was jealous of your relationship with him,’ he said, biting each word out from between his clenched teeth. ‘He seemed at great pains whenever I was around to show me just how close you were. He was always touching you, slinging an arm around your waist or shoulders. It made me want to lash out.’
Emelia frowned at his vehement confession. ‘Peter was a touchy-feely sort of person. It was just his way. I am sure I would have told you that right from the start.’
His eyes flashed with heat. ‘You did, but it still annoyed the hell out of me.’
He was jealous. He hated admitting it, Emelia was sure, but he was positively vibrating with it. She could see it in the way he held himself, his hands clenching and unclenching as if he wanted to hit something.
He paced the room a couple of times before he came back to stand in front of her. ‘If I was wrong about your relationship with Marshall then I am sorry,’ he said. ‘All the evidence pointed to you being guilty of an affair, but in hindsight there are probably numerous explanations for why you were in that car with him.’
Emelia felt a weight come off her shoulders. ‘You truly believe I wasn’t unfaithful?’
He held her look for endless seconds. ‘Let’s just let it go,’ he said on a long breath. ‘I don’t want to be reminded of the mistakes I have made in the past. We have to concentrate on the here and now. I want to see you get well again. I feel it is my fault you were almost killed. I cannot forgive myself for driving you away in such an emotionally charged state. I should have insisted we sit down and sort things out like two rational adults. Instead, I let business take precedence, hoping things would settle down by the time I got back.’
Emelia stood looking at him in silence. His gruff admission of guilt stirred her deep inside. She could tell it was unfamiliar territory for him. He didn’t seem the type to readily admit when he was in the wrong.
She breathed in the clean male scent of him as he stood so broodingly before her. He had showered and changed into a polo shirt and casual trousers. His hair was still damp, ink-black and curling at the ends where it needed a trim. She wanted to run her hands through it the way she used to do…She jolted as if he had struck her, staring up at him, her heart beating like a hyperactive hammer.
‘What’s wrong?’he asked, taking her by the shoulders.
She looked up into his face, frowning as she tried to focus on the sliver of memory that had made its way through. As if by their own volition, her hands went to his hair, her fingers playing with the silky strands in slow, measured strokes. She saw his throat move up and down and, glancing at his mouth, she felt another tiny flicker of recognition. Her right hand went to his lips, her fingers tracing over the tense line, again and again until it finally softened, the slight rasp of his evening shadow as she stroked the leanness of his jaw, the only sound, apart from their breathing, in the silence.
‘Emelia—’ his voice was low and deep and scratchy ‘—what have you remembered?’
She looked into his dark eyes. ‘Your hair…I remembered running my fingers through it…lots and lots of times…It’s longer now, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, I’ve been too busy to get it cut.’ His grip on her shoulders tightened and his eyes were intense as they held hers. ‘Can you remember anything else?’ he asked.
‘I’m not sure…’ Emelia tried to focus again. ‘It was just a fleeting thing. Like a flashback or something.’
His hands slipped down from her shoulders to encircle her wrists, his thumbs absently stroking her. ‘Don’t force it. It will come when it wants to. We have to be patient.’ He let out a rough sounding sigh and added ruefully, ‘I have to be patient.’
Emelia felt the drugging warmth of his touch on the undersides of her wrists. Her blood leapt in her veins and she wondered if he could feel the way he affected her. Her belly was turning into a warm pool of longing, her legs unsteady as his eyes came to hers, holding them for a pulsing moment.
Time seemed to slow and then stand impossibly still.
Without a word, he lifted one of his hands to the curve of her cheek, cupping her face gently, his thumb moving back and forth in a mesmerising touch that seemed to stroke away every single reason why she should ease back out of his embrace. Instead, she found herself stepping closer, her body touching his from chest to thigh, feeling the stirring of his body against her, the hot hard heat of him lighting a fire that she now realised had smouldered within her from the moment she had woken up in the hospital and encountered his dark unreadable gaze.
‘Emelia.’
The way he said her name was her undoing. Low and deep, an urgency in the uttering of the syllables, a need that she could feel resonating in her own body, like a tuning fork being struck too hard, humming, vibrating and quivering with want.
She lifted her mouth to the slow descent of his, her arms snaking around his middle, her breasts pressed up against his hard chest, a feeling, as his lips sealed hers and his hands cradled her head, that she had finally come home…
EMELIA sighed with pleasure as Javier’s mouth urged hers into a heated response. Desire was like a punch, hitting her hard as his tongue deftly searched for hers. He found it, toyed with it, stroking and stabbing, calling it into a dance that mimicked what was to come. Her body felt as if spot fires had been set all through it, the blood raced and thundered in her veins as his kiss grew all the more insistent, all the more hotly sensual. The delicate network of nerves in her core twanged with need, her breasts tightened and tingled where they were pressed against him, and her mouth was slippery and wet and hot with greedy want as it fed off his.
His hands moved from cupping her face to pressing against the small of her back, bringing her hard against him. Emelia felt the outline of his erection; it stirred something deep and primal in her. Her thighs trembled as she felt the slickness of need anointing her. She sent her hands on their own journey of discovery: the hard planes of his back and shoulders,
