if she thinks I targeted you...? It makes horrible sense in a way, doesn’t it? What if she imagines that I’m just one of a long line of women who want you for what you can do for them...?’
Lucas raised his eyebrows and held up one imperious hand to stop her before she could begin exploring this new theme in exhaustive depth.
‘She doesn’t think that,’ he told her flatly. ‘Nor does she think that you’re somehow emotionally unstable and fickle because you’re going out with me hard on the heels of a broken engagement.’
‘You can’t say that.’
‘Oh, but I can and I have.’
‘What do you mean you have?’
‘I told my mother that this was not a case of you jumping from one man to another without pausing for breath. I’ve explained that I’m not a rebound love affair—which, as you can imagine, would not have sat well with her.’
‘When did all this explaining take place?’ Milly asked in frank bemusement.
‘When you were soaking in the bath for two hours,’ Lucas said drily. She thinks you’re impossibly brave. As I do...
‘And she believed you?’ Milly aimed for an incredulous laugh. ‘I know you could sell ice to Eskimos, Lucas, but women are very intuitive when it comes to stuff like that; when it comes to matters of the heart...’
‘Which is why she knows it’s the truth,’ Lucas told her with silky assurance. ‘She’s met you, talked to you and she knows—like we both do, Milly—that whatever you had with your ex-fiancé wasn’t love. You may be the jilted girlfriend, and that’s not a great place to be, but you’re not the heartbroken jilted girlfriend. So your little speech about feeling uncomfortable sitting too close to me because you’re nursing a broken heart is, frankly, a load of rubbish. Maybe you’re scared of being too close to me because you think I’m going to make a move on you...’
And hadn’t the thought crossed his head more than once? Good job he had iron self-discipline and was smart enough to spot danger before it spotted him.
‘Not going to happen. Or maybe,’ he mused thoughtfully, ‘you’re scared because you think you might make a move on me...’
Milly could feel herself burning up as he shoved his version of reality down her throat. There was nothing he said that had not occurred to her before, even if only in passing.
And that included the shameful fact that she found the man physically attractive, that she had flirted with silly fantasies...
‘In your dreams,’ she told him tartly. But she heard the faint wobble in her voice. She wasn’t accustomed to playing these sorts of games. She was straightforward; she had never found herself in this kind of situation. She was walking in unchartered territory and it was only her survivor’s instinct that told her that, whatever she did, she should not show him that he was right. That maybe, just maybe, that bed held unspoken terrors for her because she could picture, far too easily, what it might be like to have him in it next to her...
MILLY GAZED AT her reflection in the mirror but she wasn’t really focusing on the face staring back at her. She was thinking of the past week and a half.
Behind her, the king-size bed that had filled her with horror was just...a king-sized bed. Her fears had been unjustified. At least, unjustified except in the deepest, darkest corners of her mind where fantasies of Lucas still swirled around with dangerous strength, powerful riptides lying in wait for the appropriate moment to suck her under, or so it felt.
They barely shared this private space. Antonia always retired before ten, at which point Milly would head upstairs, leaving Lucas downstairs, where he would work until the early hours of the morning. She neither heard nor saw him when he finally made it to the bedroom because she was always sound asleep. The only evidence he left that he occupied the room at all was the barely discernible imprint on the sofa where he had slept, because he was always up and moving by eight in the morning.
The man hardly needed any sleep at all. She, on the other hand, had always been able to sleep for England.
The linen he used for the sofa was always shoved neatly in the wardrobe.
Twice she had woken needing the bathroom and her heart had been pounding as she had tiptoed her way past where he had lain sprawled and asleep, half-naked, the thin duvet barely covering him.
That fleeting glimpse of him sadly had been yet more fodder for her very active imagination.
If only this stupid charade had done what it should have done and exposed his failings. At this point in time, shouldn’t he have morphed into an arrogant bore with too much money for his own good? Shouldn’t the impact of his good looks have done her a favour by diminishing?
She sighed and peered a little more closely at her reflection. The hair looked wilder than usual but she had given up trying to tame it. Was this the look she really wanted to go for? Wild hair and a strappy dress, and high-heeled sandals that were so not her thing?
She and Lucas, at his mother’s urging, were going to have a supposedly romantic dinner out tonight. She had given Milly a stern talk on buying something pretty for the occasion, because she had not been shopping, and had managed to use what she had brought with her: jeans; T-shirts; more jeans; jogging bottoms.
So, despite lots of protests, she and Antonia had spent much of the day out. There had been no need to venture further afield into Madrid because Salamanca boasted designer shops for every taste. These were just the sort of things that were undermining the ‘cracks in the relationship’ that should have been happening by now.
Every crack Milly tried to break was papered over by Antonia, who seemed to think that her outspokenness was a charming and refreshing change from all the limpets who had cluttered her son’s life before.
And in the meantime, while all this was going on, she was seeing sides to Lucas that chipped away at her defences.
He was ferociously intelligent and, whilst he was good at listening to other sides of an argument, he liked to win. Over dinner—which was usually when she saw most of him, because his days were spent working to make up for the fact that he wasn’t actually in his office or on a plane going to meetings somewhere or other across the globe—they talked about everything under the sun. Antonia might generate the topic, but they would all contribute. And the topics flowed from one to another, from what was happening in the news to what had happened in the news, sometimes years previously.
He was a loving son without being patronising. He was very good at teasing his mother, and Milly’s heart always constricted when she witnessed this interplay between them.
Of course, she and her grandmother were very close, as she had insisted on telling them a couple of nights ago, but it was still something to have grown up without a mother figure. Or a father figure, for that matter. She might have had a sip or two too many at this point, Milly recalled uncomfortably. She had held the floor for far too long and she might even have become a little tearful towards the end. She shuddered thinking about it.
He was also funny, witty and downright interesting. He had travelled the world. It helped when it came to recounting
