have given a damn about the protesters or their placards.’
‘You could have done the decent thing and been honest from the start!’
‘You would have had the sheriff run me out of town before I got the first sentence out.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘Isn’t it?’
Rose flushed. She could breathe him in and it was doing all sorts of crazy and unacceptable things to her nervous system.
‘I thought,’ Art said heavily, ‘that this would be fairly straightforward. How hard could it be to talk sense into a group of people who were never going to win the war? I never banked on really engaging with anyone here and I certainly never entertained the idea that...’
Rose tilted her chin and stared at him in hostile defiance. ‘That what? That you’d break that code of yours and start sharing space in a kitchen with a woman?’
To think that she had actually entertained the idea that having him do all that domesticated stuff might be an indication of feelings that ran deeper and truer than they had both originally predicted.
‘Something like that,’ Art muttered, glancing away for a few taut seconds before returning his dark gaze to her face. ‘You’re hurt and I get that,’ he continued in a low, driven voice.
Rose raised her eyebrows. She was keeping it together by a thread, determined not to let him see just how devastated she was, but it was so, so very hard, especially when he was standing so, so very close to her, when, with barely any effort, she could just reach out and touch that body she had come to feel so much for. Too much.
‘Thanks. I feel so much better for that,’ she said with thick sarcasm.
‘I’m no good for you.’ He gave her a crooked smile and pushed himself away, although he remained standing in front of her.
‘No, you’re not,’ Rose said shortly.
‘You deserve a far better man.’
‘I do.’ She tossed her hair and for a few seconds her expression changed from anger to on-the-edge-of-tears disappointment. ‘I always knew that guys with money were unscrupulous and I proved myself right.’
‘I refuse to get into a debate about this. I don’t think your fellow locals will agree when they find themselves the recipients of some spanking-new additions to the village. I don’t think they’ll be gnashing their teeth and shaking their fists and cursing my generosity.’
‘You can wave money around but that doesn’t make you an honourable man. It doesn’t mean that you’ve got any sense of...of spirituality.’
‘I didn’t think you were paying too much attention to my fascinating lack of a spiritual side when we were in bed together.’
‘How dare you bring that up?’ The silence that greeted this was electric. Her nostrils flared and her pupils dilated and every pore in her body burned with humiliation because the warmth between her legs wouldn’t let her forget the shameful truth that she still found him unbearably sexy even though she absolutely loathed him for how he had played her.
She breathed deep and closed her eyes and wasn’t aware that he was reaching out until he was. Reaching out to lightly stroke the side of her face.
‘You still want me,’ he murmured and Rose glared at him furiously. ‘You still want me and you can’t deny it.’
Rose opened her mouth to utter an instant denial of any such thing. How dared he? Her skin burnt from where he had touched her. How dared he?
‘Are you going to lie?’ Art asked in a low, sexy undertone. ‘You can’t possibly stand there and accuse me of being a monster of deceit only to lie about something that’s so obvious.’
‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ she said on a sharply indrawn breath. ‘So what if I’m attracted to you? You’re an attractive man. But I will never be tempted to act on that attraction again, not that the situation is ever likely to arise.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I can’t fault you for being honest and telling me from the start that you weren’t going to be sticking around. Fair enough. But you hurt me with your deceit, whether that deceit was intended or not. I’ll never, ever forgive you for that.’
Art’s lips thinned.
‘Forgiveness has never been high on the list I’ve striven for.’
‘Can I ask you something before you disappear back to that jet-set life of yours?’ Rose folded her arms, proud of the fact that her voice continued to betray nothing of what was going on inside her, the roil of tumultuous emotions tearing her up.
‘I’m guessing that’s a question you will ask whatever my response.’
‘If we’d stood firm, would you have steamrolled us all away? So that you could have your acres and acres of land for the sake of a handful of flash houses?’
‘Yes.’
Rose frowned because she had sensed something behind that flat monosyllabic reply. A curious shadow had crossed his face but then she wondered whether she’d imagined it because when he fixed his deep, dark eyes on her they were as remote as hers were. Two people who had shared intimacies she had never dreamed of and now here they were, standing opposite one another with a huge unsurmountable wall between them.
Rose looked away quickly because she could feel the treacherous onset of tears.
She put distance between them and gathered herself.
‘I’ll get my things,’ Art said abruptly. ‘I’ll be fifteen minutes, tops.’
‘I expect you won’t need to borrow my battered car to get you to the station? Maybe you could call your personal chauffeur to swing by for you. Or, if that’s not efficient enough, I’m sure you could find a corner of your field to land a private jet.’
‘My driver is on his way.’
‘Of course he is,’ Rose said acidly. ‘I’ll leave you to get on with your packing. You know where the front door is.’
She didn’t look back. She headed straight to her office and she made sure to close and lock the door behind her. But she didn’t cry. She knew how to contain the tears. She’d learned that trick at a very young age.
SITTING AT THE head of the conference table, around which twenty people were all looking to him, Art could feel nothing but a certain amount of apathy even though a deal that would harvest several million was on the verge of completion.
With some surprise, he realised that he had doodled Rose’s company logo onto his legal pad, a detail he wasn’t even aware he had stored in his memory bank.
He’d last seen her three weeks ago and the memory of that final encounter was one that he rehashed on a daily basis.
It
