and went straight to his computer and switched it on. In his peripheral vision, he could tell that all her belongings had gone with her. There was no need for him to waste his energy hunting for evidence of her departure.
The screen opened up and he stared at it and realised that it really was possible to look at numbers and letters and symbols and see absolutely nothing whatsoever.
She would have caught a taxi to the station and would be heading back to her house by train. He was tempted to look up the possible departure times of the trains and resisted.
He’d done the right thing. That reaction was sufficient to harden his resolve. He had been weak once, had engineered a situation because he had still wanted her and had been unable to resist the demands of his body, but that weakness was something that had to be overcome.
He had seen where emotional weakness could lead. Those lessons had been learned when he had been too young but they were lessons he would never forget.
His indecision had been getting on his nerves and so he’d killed it fast. He hadn’t signed up to a querulous woman throwing a hissy fit because he refused to be subjected to a cross-examination.
So what if that phone call had had nothing to do with a woman?
He scowled, mood plummeting faster than the speed of light. Right about now she should be winding her arms around him, warm and naked and distracting.
Right about now he should be forgetting about work and climbing right back into bed with her because he couldn’t do anything but climb into bed with her whenever they were in this room.
Art envisaged what her reaction would be in a couple of months, when the full extent of that phone call became common knowledge.
He’d deceived her once but she had returned to him and he knew that it had been something she would not have undertaken lightly.
Sex was all well and good but she would have had to square it with her conscience and he’d never met any woman with a more lively conscience. Her conscience practically bounced off the walls.
To discover what she inevitably would, to find out without benefit of any explanation...
He abandoned all attempts to focus on work, sat back and wearily rubbed his eyes with the pads of his thumbs.
He’d never thought himself to have a particularly active or vivid imagination but he was imagining now, in a very vivid fashion indeed, the horror that would engulf her were she to discover, as she would in due course, that there would be more going on that vast acreage of land than a handful of tasteful houses.
It would be the ultimate deception for her because she would know that he would have had countless opportunities to raise the issue. To be deceived once was forgivable. To be deceived twice would be the ultimate sin in her eyes.
He should have broached the subject. That phone call would have provided the perfect opportunity to raise it. Instead, the shutters had slammed shut on her. Habit. He had never been a man to be nagged or cajoled into saying or doing anything he didn’t want to say or do. He had reacted with stunning predictability.
And it had been a mistake.
The truth was that she deserved honesty—and that was exactly what he was going to give her.
The slate would then be wiped clean.
Mind made up, Art didn’t bother consulting anything as pedestrian as train timetables. Why would he? He had two options. His private helicopter or his driver. Or he could take any one of his fast cars and drive himself.
Which was exactly what he chose to do.
He didn’t know whether he would reach her house before her but it didn’t matter. What mattered, and mattered with an urgency he couldn’t quite put into words, was that they talked.
He’d say what he had to say and then leave.
Traffic was light as he left London. A Ferrari was built to eat up the miles with silent efficiency and it did.
Under normal circumstances, he would have kicked back and enjoyed the dynamic horsepower of a car he rarely got to drive but his mind was too busy projecting the conversation that was going to take place.
He made it to her house in record time and knew, without even having to ring the doorbell, that she wasn’t yet there.
With any luck, she was going to show up soon and hadn’t decided to do a spot of sightseeing before catching the train back.
Art positioned the powerful car at the perfect angle to see her just as she entered her drive. He wasn’t going to let her run away this time.
* * *
Rose was spent by the time she made it to the local outpost where trains arrived in their own sweet time. The slow journey would have got on her nerves at any other time but on this occasion she relished the unhurried tempo of the trip. Her head felt as though it was bursting with thoughts, too many thoughts to be contained, just as her heart was bursting with too many feelings.
And at the very centre of all those thoughts and feelings was the dark, throbbing knowledge that she was not going to see Art again. The void that opened up inside her when she thought about that was so big that it threatened to swallow her up like a sinkhole.
At the station she hailed a taxi, which exited the small car park as though urgency was a concept that didn’t exist. She knew the taxi driver. She had done some pro bono work for his father two years previously, and she heard herself chatting to him but from a long way away.
She was so tired.
Lapsing into silence, she closed her eyes and wasn’t aware that she was approaching her house until the taxi began to slow, until it swerved slowly into the drive, and only then did she open her eyes and stir herself into wakefulness.
Only then did she see the red car in the drive, sleek and elegant and so, so sexy.
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