‘Good.’ Juliette’s tone was so clipped it could have snipped through tin. ‘But of course, that leaves the tricky problem of what to say to Lucy and Damon when they realise we’re sharing a suite.’ She walked over to the bar fridge and took out a bottle of water, unscrewing the cap and pouring it into a glass. She picked up the glass and turned to face him. ‘Any brilliant suggestions?’
Joe’s expression was still inscrutable but she could sense an inner guardedness. His posture was almost too casual, too relaxed, too calm and collected. ‘We could say we’re trying for a reconciliation.’
Juliette took a sip of water before she gave in to the temptation to throw it in his face. She put the glass down on the counter with a clunk. ‘A reconciliation? For a marriage that shouldn’t have come about in the first place?’
A knot of tension appeared beside his mouth, his eyes locked on hers in an unblinking hold. ‘I wasn’t the one who left our marriage.’
Juliette stalked over to the windows overlooking the white crescent of the sand and the turquoise water of the beach below. She took a shuddering breath. ‘No, because you weren’t fully in it in the first place.’
The silence was so long it was as if time had come to a standstill.
She heard the rustle of his clothes as he rose from the sofa. Counted his footsteps as he approached her but she didn’t turn around. He came to stand beside her, his gaze focused like hers on the beach below.
After a long moment, he turned his head to look at her, the line of his mouth bitter. ‘If you were to be truthful, Juliette, you weren’t fully in it either. You were still getting over your ex. That’s why we hooked up in the first place, because you couldn’t bear to spend the night he got married to one of your so-called friends, on your own.’
Juliette wished she could deny it but every word he said was true. She had been shattered by Harvey’s betrayal. They had been dating since their teens. His affair with Clara had been going on for months and Juliette hadn’t had a clue. The night she’d thought Harvey was going to propose to her, he’d told her he was leaving her. Harvey Atkinson-Lloyd, her parents’ choice of the perfect son-in-law for their only daughter. The daughter who, unlike their high-achieving sons Mark and Jonathon, had failed to do anything much else to win their approval.
Juliette ground down on her molars, torn between anger at Joe for pointing out her stupidity and anger at herself for making a bad situation worse by falling into bed with him that night.
She turned to face him, chin high, eyes blazing. ‘So, what’s your excuse for hooking up with me that night? Or do you regularly sleep with perfect strangers when you’re working in London?’
An emotion flickered across his face like an interruption in a transmission. A pause. A regroup. A reset. ‘It was the anniversary of my mother’s death.’ His tone was flat, almost toneless, but there was a stray note of sadness under the surface.
Juliette looked at him blankly. ‘But I don’t understand... I thought you told me your mother had emigrated to Australia. Wasn’t that the reason she wasn’t able to come to our wedding?’
‘She’s my stepmother. Both of my parents are dead.’
Had she misheard him back when they were together? She tried to think back to the conversation but couldn’t recall it in any detail. She knew his father had died a few years back but he had barely mentioned his mother. She’d got the sense it was a no-go area for him, so she hadn’t delved any further.
They hadn’t done much talking about each other’s family backgrounds, mostly because he was away such a lot. Their brief passionate reunions when he came home between trips were physical catch-ups, not emotional ones. She had wanted more than physical intimacy but hadn’t known how to reach him. Every attempt to get closer to him had failed, with him leaving for yet another work commitment. It was as if he sensed her need for emotional connection and found it deeply threatening. But, to be fair, she too had been pretty sketchy with her own issues to do with her background, not wanting him to know how out of place she felt in her academically brilliant family.
‘I’m sorry...’ she said, frowning. ‘I mustn’t have heard you correctly when you told me that when we were living together.’
His lips moved in a grimace-like smile that didn’t involve his eyes. ‘My father remarried when I was a child. But when he died ten years ago, my stepmother and two half-siblings emigrated to Melbourne, where she has relatives.’
‘Do you have much contact with them? Phone? Email? Birthdays—that sort of thing?’
‘I do what is required.’
Juliette was starting to realise she didn’t know very much about the man she had married in such haste. Why hadn’t she tried a little harder to get him to open up? Her shock pregnancy had thrown her into a tailspin. And when she’d finally worked up the courage to call him and tell him, he had flown straight to her flat in London with a wedding proposal. A proposal she had felt compelled to accept in order to mitigate some of the shame she had caused her parents in getting herself ‘knocked up’ after a one-night stand.
She looked at him again, wondering how she could have been so physically close to someone without knowing anything about him. ‘How old were you when your mother died?’
Joe glanced at his watch and muttered a soft curse. ‘Isn’t there a drinks thing soon?’
‘Shoot.’ Juliette gave a much milder version of his curse. ‘I’m not dressed and I haven’t done my hair.’
He picked up a tendril of her mid-brown hair, trailing it gently through his fingers. ‘It looks beautiful the way it is.’ The pitch of his voice lowered and his eyes were a bottomless black.
Juliette swallowed and tried hard not to look at his mouth. ‘Ahem. You’re touching me. Remember the rules?’
He released her hair and stepped back from her with a mercurial smile. ‘How could I forget?’
JOE DROVE A hand through his own hair once Juliette had retreated to the bathroom. No touching. No kissing. Sure, he could abide by the rules. But he hadn’t realised it would be as difficult as this. It had been hard enough trying to erase the memory of her touch when he was living thousands of kilometres away. But sharing a suite with her this weekend was going to test his resolve in ways he wasn’t prepared for.
He hadn’t expected the chemistry to still be there. He hadn’t expected the hot, tight ache of desire to grip him so brutally. He hadn’t expected to feel anything other than guilt about how things had panned out between them. The guilt was still there, spreading cruel tentacles around his intestines like a poisonous strangling vine. Tentacles that crawled up into his chest and wrapped around his heart and squeezed, squeezed, squeezed like a savage fist.
Truth was, he’d been almost relieved when she hadn’t answered his texts and emails. It meant he didn’t have to face the train wreck he’d caused. The further along her pregnancy went, the longer he’d stayed away on business. Business others under his employ could have easily seen to. But no, he had wanted—needed—to throw himself into the distraction of work, because watching Juliette growing with his child
