quietly placed the mug on the table and stood up, not looking at him, waiting for him to lead her up the stairs, acutely aware that she talked too much, asked too many questions, laughed too loudly. This man might be arrogant and standoffish, but she was in his territory and if he wanted her to shut up, then she would shut up.
Had James wanted her to shut up now and again as well? She had thought he was interested in her but had he been or had he really only been responding to her chattiness, rolling his eyes to the ceiling the minute her back had been turned?
‘Okay. Spit it out.’
Amy, staring down as she followed him to the bedroom, almost collided into his huge, immovable frame where he had stopped outside the bedroom door.
‘Spit what out?’
‘Whatever’s eating you up. We might as well forget about getting any sleep tonight.’
Rafael leaned against the doorframe and stared down at her. And this, he thought, was precisely why he didn’t go for the emotional types. They poured their hearts out, they sobbed, they lacked restraint.
Amy’s blue eyes tangled with his deep, deep, almost black ones and she felt momentarily giddy.
‘I need to sit down,’ she said shakily.
Rafael stood aside and made a sweeping gesture in the direction of his bed, which, to Amy, looked unbelievably tempting. To hell with prudish, maidenly qualms. She was suddenly exhausted.
His bed smelt of him, a clean, masculine smell that made her want to close her eyes and inhale deeply because it was a weirdly comforting smell. And why pretend? She had grown up bunking down and sharing beds. Her mother had sworn that it did the immune system a world of good. She slipped under the luxurious, silky soft quilt and yawned.
‘I just can’t believe it,’ Amy said, just as Rafael was about to leave the room and head back downstairs so that he could resume the conference call to Australia that had been so rudely interrupted. He turned around and narrowed his eyes on the small figure now propped up against the pillows. She looked ridiculously fragile, he thought, which seemed incongruous considering the size of her mouth.
‘Can’t believe what?’ Rafael was not a man who was accustomed to the emotional complexities of women. He had always listened to James’s tales of woe with a certain amount of amusement and privately congratulated himself on his wisdom in going for women who didn’t play games or have moods or weren’t, in short, a mess. He didn’t sleep around and his breakups had never been messy. At thirty-four, which didn’t exactly qualify him as The Old Man of the Sea, he nevertheless considered himself pretty much together emotionally. A man who knew what he wanted in life, and that included women.
‘Can’t believe how I could ever have been so stupid. I mean…’ Amy’s voice wobbled as she considered the depth of her stupidity ‘…just because he looked at me once or twice and chatted now and again…how could I have got it into my head? I mean…has that ever happened to you? Has it? You just completely misread someone else’s signals and then fabricate a whole fairy tale in your head that’s just way, way off target?’ ‘No.’
‘What…never?’ Amy asked, temporarily disconcerted.
‘Never.’
‘Oh. So I guess you wouldn’t really know what it’s like to be…to be…’ ‘No. I wouldn’t.’ He was fairly sure he was about to find out, unless, of course, he put a stop to this nonsense, shut the bedroom door firmly and only resurfaced when she was about to leave in the morning. ‘But I can tell you that he’s not worth it.’
Amy tried to focus on James, his charming, boyish face, his blond hair that always managed to look ever so slightly tousled, though out of the corner of her eye she couldn’t help but notice Rafael’s brooding presence by the door. He was probably sick to death of her, she couldn’t help thinking, but for some reason she didn’t want to be on her own. She felt too vulnerable.
‘You can’t say that. You don’t know him.’
‘I know that no one is worth shedding tears over.’
‘Oh!’ Reluctantly she abandoned the temptation to wallow and frowned at Rafael curiously. ‘I guess you’ve never been in love…’
Rafael was fast regretting his impulse to listen to the woman because he had momentarily felt sorry for her.
‘I’m not entirely sure I believe in the concept,’ he told her abruptly. ‘Romantics hang onto the idea for dear life because they think it makes sense of life, but for me…no. I think I’ll avoid it like the plague if the net result is what I’m looking at right now.’
Amy got up the energy to glare but it didn’t last long. ‘At least we Romantics have fun!’
‘If fun is lying on a stranger’s bed at one-thirty in the morning blubbing…’ Rafael said dryly and Amy was forced to concede defeat.
‘Okay. You win. I’m a fool. Maybe next time lucky.’ She gave him a watery grin and it was such a brave pretence of a smile that Rafael found himself reluctantly smiling back. ‘Maybe,’ she mused, ‘next time I won’t fall for the boss…’
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