heart picked up speed as another treacherous thought crept into her head like a thief in the night: she looked forward to his company. She spent her days in the grounds, sometimes by the swimming pool reading her book, often in the company of his mother. But, when five o’clock came, she always felt a stirring in her veins, as though her body was beginning to wake up and come alive.
And that wasn’t good.
In fact, it frightened her because, face it, Lucas was as distant as he had promised. Yes, when they were in each other’s company he was warmth and charm itself but, the second his mother wasn’t around, a shutter dropped and he became someone else. Someone cool, controlled and somehow absent.
Now, she noticed, he had stopped sitting quite so close to her on the sofa and the physical shows of affection...the little touches on her shoulder, her cheek, her arms...had dropped off.
She guessed that this was his subtle way of informing his mother that all was not quite right in the land of wonderful love and happy-ever-afters.
Had Antonia noticed? Milly didn’t know. She had thought of trying to open a discussion on the subject, maybe starting with a few vague generalities before working her way up to her and Lucas and what they had, and then ending by finding out what Antonia’s thoughts were. But she always chickened out because she wasn’t sure she would be able to hang on to her composure if the questions became too targeted.
Right now Lucas was downstairs. He usually stopped working around six so that he could spend some time with Antonia while Milly was upstairs having a bath, changing...analysing her thoughts and coming up empty handed.
And, while Milly relaxed downstairs, usually with a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade, he took the opportunity to get cleaned up. It was a clever game of avoidance that Antonia didn’t seem to notice, but Milly noticed it more and more because she was noticing everything more and more.
Tonight, Milly entered the sitting room to find Antonia there sipping a glass of juice, her book resting on her lap.
Like all the other rooms in the splendid house, this one was airy and light with pale walls and furnishings and adjustable wooden shutters to guard against the blistering sun during the hot summer months. And, as with all the rooms, the air was fragrant with the smell of flowers, which were cut from the garden several times a week and arranged by Antonia herself in an assortment of brightly coloured vases to be dispersed throughout the house.
‘I wanted to see how the dress looked.’ She beamed and beckoned Milly across and then ordered her to do a couple of turns so that she could appreciate it from every angle. ‘Beautiful.’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Milly said awkwardly. ‘I’m not accustomed to wearing dresses.’
‘You should. You have the perfect figure to carry them off. Not like those scrawny women my son has dated in the past. Like boys! Simpering and preening themselves and looking in every mirror they pass! Pah! I tell him, “Lucas, those are not real women, they are plastic dolls and you can do better than that”...’ She smiled smugly and waved Milly into a chair.
‘We have our differences,’ Milly said weakly, determined to head off an awkward situation at the pass. ‘You might think that those model types are no good for Lucas but in fact...in fact...they suit him far more than you might imagine. I mean...’ She leaned forward and stared earnestly at the handsome woman in front of her whose head was tilted to one side, all the better to grasp what was being said because, impeccable though her English was, she still became lost in certain expressions. ‘It’s okay to be outspoken but, in the end, it can get on a guy’s nerves.’
‘Is that what happened to your last boyfriend?’ Antonia asked gently. ‘Was that why it all fell apart, my dear?’
Milly blushed. She had breezily and vaguely skimmed over the details of the broken engagement that had supposedly encouraged her into the arms of her one true love, Lucas. Antonia had conveniently not dwelled on the subject. Now, she was waiting for some girlish confidence.
‘It fell apart,’ Milly said slowly, ‘Because he didn’t love me and, as it turns out, I didn’t love him either.’ This was the first time she was actually saying aloud what she had been privately thinking. ‘I was just an idiot,’ she confessed. ‘I’d had a crush on Robbie when I was a teenager...’ She smiled, remembering the gawky, sporty kid she had been, more at home with a hockey stick than a glass of vodka, which had been the in drink at the time with all the under-age drinkers: the alcohol could be camouflaged by whatever you happened to dilute it with and parents could never tell you were actually getting a little tipsy at parties.
‘Robbie was the cutest boy in the class. Floppy blond hair, gift of the gab. Plus, he would actually take time out to chat to me. It felt like love, so when he showed up in London and asked to meet up I guess I remembered what I used to feel and somehow transported it to the present day and decided that those feelings were still there, intact. He was still cute, after all. He brought back memories.’
And he had known how to manipulate her weaknesses to his own benefit but, in the end, it took two to tango. He had made inroads into her common sense because she had allowed him to.
‘But what was I saying...?’ She gulped back the temptation to cry just a little.
‘You were saying...’ Lucas’s voice from behind her made her temporarily freeze ‘...that you got suckered in to a dud relationship with some guy who was never suited to you in the first place.’
He had been standing by the door, unnoticed by both his mother and Milly, and he couldn’t quite understand just why it gave him such a kick to hear her finally admit what he had suspected all along.
She had not been occupying Heartbreak Hotel, as she had fondly and misguidedly imagined. Of course she had known that, he had seen it on her face when he had chosen to point it out to her, but it was still gratifying to hear her admit it.
Not, he hurriedly told himself, that it mattered in any way that was significant. It didn’t. She might be amusing, feisty, way too open for her own good...in short, all the things he never encountered in his relationships with women...but that didn’t make her available. She had been available to a simple ski instructor but to the man he was? No.
But, hell, it was getting more and more difficult by the second. He always made sure that temptation was safely out of the way by burning the midnight oil in front of his computer, although he knew that his mind was only partly on work. Too much of it, as far as he was concerned, was preoccupied with visions of her in that bed—and those visions were all the more graphic because he knew how she slept, sprawled in sexy abandon with the duvet tangled about her body.
He’d bet all his worldly possessions that that was not the way she started out. No. He imagined that she tucked herself tightly underneath those covers, swaddled herself in them, but somewhere along the line, when she was happily gambolling about in deep REM, her body had other ideas on how it was most comfortable. And that was not wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy.
Twice she had gone to the bathroom in the early hours of the morning, tiptoeing past the sofa in such slow motion that it had taken all he had not to burst out laughing.
Her sleepwear would be a passion-killer for most men, but the baggy T-shirt with the faded logo, reaching mid-thigh, did crazy things to his system, sent it soaring into the stratosphere. She might wear the least flattering outfits known to womankind, but her body was luscious and sexy, the jut of her full breasts promising more than a handful, the shapeliness of her legs tempting him to find out what lay
